For the Woman Who Knows Exactly What She's Doing and Can't Stop Doing It
I’ve been reading intake forms for 6 years.
Hundreds of women telling me what they want to change before we ever sit down together. And there's something I've noticed in the way they talk about their lives.
A lot of the time, they already know.
They know the relationship isn't working. They know they've been shrinking at work. They know the boundary they keep not holding. They know they're exhausted because they're taking care of everyone else before themselves. They can tell me the pattern. They can often tell me where it came from.
And then they'll tell me they're still doing it.
Knowing was never the problem. If you're not sure whether that's you, these five signs are a good place to start.
Why do I keep repeating the same patterns even though I know better?
This is the question I hear most often, in different words, from the women who come into my work.
One woman who joined Elixir was in full caretaker mode. Her partner had been injured for months. She was managing the household, her career, everyone else's needs. She wrote on her intake form: "The desire to expand, but the exhaustion that's making it hard to move."
She could see it clearly. She just couldn't get there from where she was standing.
Another woman wrote that she could see her negative self-talk was a habit. That she knew worrying about everyone else was stopping her from doing what she already knew she should do. Then she wrote: "Fear is stopping me from taking action."
She knew. Fear was stopping the action. Those are two completely different problems and most approaches only address the first one.
This is what I find so frustrating on behalf of the women I work with. How annoying must it be to see exactly what you're doing, understand exactly why you're doing it, trace it all the way back to where it started — and still find yourself doing it again on a random Thursday?
“The gap between knowing and doing doesn’t live in your mind. It lives somewhere underneath the insight — in the patterns that run faster than thought, faster than intention, faster than everything you’ve learned about yourself.”
Why doesn't self-awareness change anything?
Because understanding a pattern and interrupting a pattern are two completely different skills.
You can know something is irrational and still feel it every time. You can trace a behavior back to its origin and still repeat it. You can have language for exactly what you're doing and still not be able to stop. That's because the pattern isn't living in the part of you that understands things. It's living in the part that responds automatically — faster than thought, faster than intention, faster than all the insight you've accumulated.
Self-awareness is a starting point. It tells you what's happening. It does not, by itself, change what happens next.
This is also why knowing which pattern you're in — whether you're silencing yourself, drifting, circling a decision you already know the answer to, or holding everyone else together — can only take you so far. The quiz tells you what you're doing. What to do about it is a different question entirely.
At some point you have to work with the level where the pattern actually runs.
What actually works when self-awareness isn't enough?
This is why I built Elixir around three specific modalities. Not because they're trending, but because they work at the level where the gap actually lives.
EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) works by pairing conscious awareness of a pattern with physical stimulation of acupressure points — which research by Dawson Church has associated with measurable reductions in cortisol and stress markers. The idea is that you can know something is irrational and still feel it every time because there's an emotional charge attached to it. EFT works with that charge directly, not just the story around it.
Hypnosis works at the subconscious level — the place where your automatic responses actually live. The loop that pulls you back toward what's familiar even when you consciously want something different. Hypnosis helps retrain that loop not by talking about it but by working directly with the part of your mind that runs it.
Intuitive healing works with the emotional residue that cognitive understanding alone can't reach. The patterns that have been there long enough they feel like who you are rather than something you learned.
Sometimes the work gives you an insight you didn't have before. Sometimes you walk in already knowing exactly what's happening. Either way, we don't stop when you understand it.
Then you go live your life. Because eventually all of this has to make it into the conversation. The boundary. The decision. The thing you finally let somebody help you with. The afternoon you leave empty for no reason that needs justifying.
If you're specifically working with a decision you keep reopening, Signals is a 90-minute recorded session built exactly for that moment.
What does it look like when the gap actually closes?
After six years of intake forms and eight-week programs, I've watched women make the decisions they'd been circling for years.
A woman who was miserable in a construction career she could practically do with her eyes closed went back to school to become a therapist. Another got laid off and realized she didn't want another version of the job she'd just lost. She's now building work around coaching and helping people in business.
Women have ended relationships they'd understood weren't working for years before they could act on it. Set boundaries they'd known they needed to set for a decade. Changed careers, started businesses, made decisions that had been sitting unanswered in their bodies long before they had words for them.
Some of them came in knowing exactly what needed to change. Others only knew they couldn't keep living the way they were living. What mattered was that we didn't treat understanding the problem as the finish line.
The thing self-awareness doesn't tell you
Everything above is true for any woman who's found herself caught in the gap between knowing and doing. What it doesn't tell you is what's specifically keeping your pattern in place — what's running underneath your particular version of this, in your particular life, with your particular history.
That's the difference between understanding the concept and actually changing the behavior. And that's the work we do inside Elixir.
Eight weeks. We look at what's actually happening in your life and work with what we find.
Maybe you come in knowing exactly what you need to do and wanting help finally doing it.
Maybe you come in saying, I have no fucking idea. I just know I don't want to keep doing this.
We can start there too.
Elixir begins October 21.
