When Explanation Stops Helping

Transcript

Psychology has done a lot of explaining.

And I mean that sincerely. Over the last few decades, psychology has given us language for experiences that used to feel confusing, isolating, or even unspeakable. We now have names for patterns, frameworks for behavior, models for emotion, and narratives that help people understand themselves in ways that simply weren’t available before.

This podcast has done the same thing.

Over the last year and more than a hundred episodes, The Psychology of Us has largely lived in that explanatory space. I’ve spent a lot of time unpacking concepts, naming dynamics, clarifying misconceptions, and offering psychological lenses that help make sense of what people feel, how they behave, and why certain patterns repeat.

And that work matters. I don’t regret it. In many ways, it was necessary.

But over time, something has become increasingly clear to me, both in my own thinking and in the conversations I have with people who listen.

Explanation has a half-life.

For a while, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It reduces confusion. It brings relief. It helps people feel less alone in their experience. It turns vague distress into something intelligible. And that’s no small thing.

But past a certain point, explanation stops producing movement.

People don’t get worse. They just don’t get different.

They become fluent in the language of psychology without actually relating to their experience in a new way. They can describe their patterns accurately. They can name their history in detail. They can even predict their reactions ahead of time.

And yet, when the moment arrives, the body does what it has always done. The same tightening. The same reactivity. The same withdrawal. The same collapse into familiar emotional postures.

This isn’t a failure of intelligence or effort. It’s not resistance. It’s not denial.

It’s a structural limit.

Psychological understanding and psychological capacity are not the same thing.

Understanding answers questions. Capacity changes posture.

Understanding lives largely at the level of narrative. It organizes experience into meaning. Capacity lives at the level of contact. It alters how experience is held as it arises.

Knowing why something happens does not automatically change how it happens in you.

And this is where explanation, if we’re not careful, can quietly become a substitute for something harder. It can give the sense of progress without requiring transformation. It can create coherence in thought without creating coherence in lived experience.

I’ve watched this happen over and over. People who know their attachment style. People who understand their family dynamics. People who can map their trauma history with precision. People who have done all the reading, listened to all the podcasts, learned all the language.

They are not uninformed. They are often deeply insightful.

And still, in the moments that matter, the same patterns appear.

Again, this isn’t because explanation failed. It’s because explanation was never meant to finish the job.

At some point, the central psychological question stops being “Why am I like this?” and starts becoming something else entirely.

Not a better explanation. A different orientation.

A different way of meeting experience without immediately translating it into story, diagnosis, or justification.

That shift is subtle, and it’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t come with the same sense of mastery. There’s less relief in it. Less closure. Less certainty.

But there is also something more honest.

I’ve realized that I’m at that threshold in my own work.

This podcast, and much of my public writing, has been oriented toward explanation. Toward making sense. Toward naming and clarifying. And that orientation has served a purpose.

But increasingly, I’m less interested in explaining experience and more interested in what changes when explanation stops being the goal.

What changes when meaning is no longer something we chase, but something that reorganizes itself as our relationship to experience shifts.

What changes when the work becomes less about understanding ourselves and more about developing the capacity to stay present to what is actually happening, without immediately needing to resolve it.

This isn’t a move away from rigor. If anything, it requires more rigor. It demands a different kind of precision. One that can tolerate ambiguity without rushing to fill it. One that can remain steady in the presence of emotional friction without narrating its way out.

Integration is not about having better answers. It’s about inhabiting a different stance.

Coherence is not about everything making sense. It’s about experience no longer pulling us apart internally.

And that’s where I find myself wanting to spend more time.

Not abandoning explanation. Not dismissing it. But recognizing where it has done its work, and where something else is now being asked of us.

If you’ve ever felt like you understand yourself very well and yet still feel governed by the same reactions, the same emotional gravity, the same inner movements, there’s nothing wrong with you.

It may simply be that you’ve reached the edge of what explanation can offer.

And the next step isn’t another concept. It’s a shift in posture.

Not toward answers, but toward contact.

That’s the direction I’m moving in. And if you’re listening and feel a quiet resonance with that, you’re already closer to it than you might think.