From watching The Real Housewives, to hundreds of hours I’ve spent with clients, to being an active participant in the laboratory of my own life, I have always been intensely intrigued by why we do the things we do.

After decades of watching, listening, questioning and turning the lens on myself, I’ve come to believe the presenting problem is rarely the real problem. What we think is happening and what is actually happening are often two different things.

The more willing we are to look beneath our reactions, behaviors and stories, the more we discover about what we actually feel, want and need, what we’ve overridden or dismissed, and what we may have known all along but haven’t wanted to know. And the less our unspoken agendas get to make our choices for us without us even realizing it.

What we can’t see from the inside

The difficulty is, almost everything about the way we live encourages us to do the exact opposite. We are immersed in a culture that promotes speed. The faster you go, the more you achieve, the more successful you appear — both to yourself and to everyone watching. But speed leaves very little room to notice what’s actually going on inside you.

Got a pain? Pop a pill. Feeling shit? Take a supplement. Getting older? Inject a peptide. Can't concentrate? There's something for that too. Buy this gadget, follow this protocol, download this app, track your sleep, optimize your morning and for God's sake never sit and become curious about what’s going on underneath the surface.

Everything is designed to smooth over the cracks, minimize our discomfort and keep human beings moving like an army of extremely well-accessorized ants, frantically maintaining the worlds we've created.

And when you're intelligent and successful, there is another layer to this.

You can become extraordinarily good at hiding from yourself.

You may have done years of therapy, read the books, questioned yourself, understood your childhood and be able to give me a beautifully articulated explanation for why you do what you do. But being able to explain yourself isn't necessarily the same as being able to see yourself. You can construct a perfectly reasonable explanation for almost anything you do — and you're living in a culture that will happily agree with you.

I have to be this involved; nobody cares about the business as much as I do.

I said yes because it was too good an opportunity to turn down.

I'm not controlling; I just have very high standards.

I’ll slow down when I hit the next revenue target.

My marriage is fine. We just have incredibly hectic schedules.

Except somewhere underneath all that intelligence, you often know when something doesn't quite add up.

My clients usually come to me at exactly this point. They’ve already thought about it, questioned it and tried to make sense of it themselves. What they can’t necessarily see is what’s happening underneath the surface.

I’m listening for what they’re not saying. The words they choose. The things they gloss over. The contradictions. The shift in their energy when we touch something they weren't expecting.

And perhaps the easiest way to show you what I mean is to show you where this enquiry can lead.

So what happens when we look underneath?

What if being defensive isn’t the problem?

I have always been obsessed with The Real Housewives. The drama, the chaos, the strange dynamics, the cat fights, the gossiping. It’s fertile ground for my deep exploration of human behaviour.

As The Real Housewives of Orange County entered its twentieth season, my interest peaked as Vicki Gunvalson returned as a full-time Housewife after leaving the show in 2020. Vicki is a masterclass in what it can look like when what’s happening underneath starts running the show.

I will preface this by saying I don’t know how much of what we see is for entertainment, how much is editing, or how much Vicki is like this in real life. I don’t know her. So this is simply my exploration of what I believe might be happening beyond what we see on screen.

Vicki has encountered a lot of loss and betrayal in her life. And when I watch her, I wonder whether the way she manages her discomfort is to go faster, work harder and distance herself from the points of pain. Her identity appears to be deeply connected to her ability to work, earn money and be an elite businesswoman. It makes me curious about what work gives her beyond money and success, and what might become uncomfortable if she could no longer do it.

Then there is how she relates to her co-stars. She can be mean, vindictive, run her mouth and speak without thinking about the consequences. Yet when she is confronted about her behavior, something else happens. Her defenses rise and you can visibly watch her body shut down as she becomes overwhelmed. She starts shouting and she often walks away.

I am curious as to what would happen if she allowed herself to really listen to what other people were saying. If she noticed how quickly she experiences their criticism as a personal attack on who she is and followed that thread underneath.

Why do I do that?

What is going on here for me?

Perhaps underneath it are fears. Fear of insecurity. Fear of being disliked, ostracized, of not belonging. Yet I believe underneath all of Vicki’s defences is a longing. A yearning to be liked, to be accepted and to be loved for who she is. And this is where it gets interesting. Her top-line behaviors and defenses appear to be creating self-fulfilling prophecies that uphold the very unspoken agendas operating underneath them.

No one likes me. I can’t trust anyone.

She behaves in ways that push people away, then their distance reinforces the belief that people don’t like her. She struggles to trust people, then finds herself inside relationships and friendships that give her more evidence that people cannot be trusted. And the loop continues through her friendships, her relationship with work and her relationships with men. I don’t know whether my hypothesis about Vicki is right. I’m watching an edited television programe, not sitting opposite her.

But this is where my curiosity takes me.

What if her defenses aren’t the problem?

What if they’re the doorway into what she longs for most?

What if your need to be seen by men isn’t the problem?

Back in 2023, I found myself dating men I didn’t respect and, quite frankly, they didn’t respect me either. At the time, I’d made up a perfectly reasonable story about why I was doing it: I was having fun. Except every encounter left me feeling a little emptier and a little lonelier. Something wasn’t adding up.

One day I was on the treadmill at my gym when I caught myself wondering whether a random man behind me was looking at me. It was such a tiny, automatic thought I could easily have missed it. But this time I didn’t. I stopped the treadmill, looked at myself in the mirror and said, “You have to see yourself.” That moment gave me a thread to pull.

Why did it matter whether this man noticed me? What was I getting from being looked at, wanted or chosen by men? And how long had I been asking male attention to give me something I wasn’t giving myself?

As I followed that thread back through my life, I could see it everywhere. The absent father. The teenage girl confusing sex with love. My years as a showgirl, flaunting my body for attention and applause. The forty-year-old who could still measure her worth by how many heads she turned. I had unconsciously spent much of my life outsourcing my sense of worth, love and belonging to men. But what if my need to be seen by men wasn’t the problem either?

I became curious about that need rather than demonizing it. There were parts of me that had been trained — through my childhood, my experiences and the culture I had grown up in — to look to men for evidence that I was worthy, acceptable and seen. Understanding the pattern was a good start, yet nothing changes until we make different choices.

So I deleted the dating apps and eventually made the decision to become consciously single. I began paying attention to the moments when I wanted to reach outside myself for what I had spent a lifetime asking men to give me. I learned to sit with my loneliness. To sit with the emptiness without immediately bolting from it. To notice myself. To see myself. Over time, I started to change.

I stopped organizing my life around whether I was being noticed, wanted or chosen by a man. And perhaps the most surprising part is that today, there is no longer a need in me to be in a relationship with one. That has changed the way I experience men completely.

For most of my life, there was an unconscious question running through almost every interaction: Does he like me? Now I’m far more interested in whether I like him. Do I respect him? Do I enjoy being around him? Do I like the way he moves through the world? Does his presence add anything of value to my life?

Men are no longer sitting on a pedestal from which they get to decide my value. I can enjoy their company without needing anything from them. I’m more comfortable around them because I’m no longer preoccupied with being chosen. And without that need clouding what I see, I can see them more clearly too — their behavior, their agendas, who they actually are. Following that thread changed far more than whether or not I wanted a relationship. It changed my relationship with men.

What if your daughter is not the problem?

Ms S, a client of mine, was navigating a challenging period in her relationship with her adult daughter. Her daughter wasn’t returning her phone calls. It might have seemed like something small, but I noticed there was an unspoken energy around it.

Ms S was upset, and her immediate reaction was to push for connection, sending messages to check in, asking how her daughter was and trying to close the distance that seemed to be opening between them. As we stayed with what was arising and began pulling the thread, another layer revealed itself: she was angry that her daughter didn’t seem to want to talk to her, and with that anger came all the stories she had begun creating about what her daughter’s behavior meant: she doesn’t care about me, she doesn’t need me, I’m losing my daughter.

Anger is often a bodyguard, one of our frontline protectors that rises when something hurts, threatens us or feels as though a boundary has been crossed. So what happens if, instead of immediately acting upon that anger, pushing it down or ignoring it, you allow yourself to feel it?

That’s what we did.

Anger rises. It peaks. And if you don't immediately discharge it into an argument, a passive-aggressive text or another story about your ungrateful daughter, eventually something else may become available.

Firstly, Ms S was building her capacity to be with a big emotion without allowing it to immediately dictate what she did. But secondly, she was creating enough space to discover what was underneath it.

Underneath the anger was sadness. She was sad because she and her daughter weren’t as connected as they once were, and their relationship was changing. For Ms S, being needed by her daughter had become evidence that she was loved. So as her daughter began to need her less, she experienced that change as distance and rejection.

If Ms S had stayed with the anger and made her daughter the problem, she could have continued reacting from that hurt — blaming her, demanding more from her and potentially pushing her further away. But now she could see what was hers. She recognized the unspoken agenda underneath her reaction and, instead of asking her daughter to unknowingly resolve something inside her, she could choose how she wanted to respond to her from there.

Over time, their relationship became easier, there was less tension between them and the connection between Ms S and her daughter deepened.

Awareness changes how we participate

In each of these examples, something became visible that wasn’t visible before. But seeing something doesn’t mean you will immediately change it. Insight alone doesn't necessarily change behavior.

What awareness gives us is something incredibly valuable: the ability to notice what is happening in us before we automatically act on it.

And in that moment — and it will often be a very small moment — there is space. You are no longer completely consumed by the reaction because there is now a part of you that can witness it. You can feel the anger without becoming the anger. You can notice the old pattern without automatically following it. You can sit in the discomfort of not immediately knowing what to do next.

We are the observer of the pattern, not the pattern.

This doesn’t mean you suddenly become some perfectly evolved human who never loses her shit. It means you begin to participate in your life differently. Instead of every feeling, habit or unspoken agenda immediately deciding what happens next, you have the possibility of choosing your response.

I believe this is where awareness becomes much more than simply understanding ourselves. Because every time we are willing to stay with what we find rather than immediately fix it, judge it, numb it or run from it, we discover more about what we actually feel, want and need — and what has been quietly influencing us without us realizing it.

Everything we experience has the potential to tell us something about ourselves if we're willing to become curious about it.

Not every question needs an immediate answer. In fact, I believe our obsession with finding answers can become another way of avoiding the enquiry. Sometimes the value is in being willing to stay with the question long enough for something you didn't already know to emerge.

This is what I mean when I talk about becoming an active participant in the laboratory of your own life. Your reactions become information. Your relationships become information. Your body becomes information. What you judge, envy, avoid, desire, tolerate and cannot stop thinking about becomes information.

It doesn't all need to become another thing about yourself you need to fix. It can become another doorway into understanding who you are and discovering what has been there all along.

The wildness you've contained because somewhere along the way you learned it was safer to be palatable. The quirks you've edited because other people found them weird. The parts of your personality you've toned down because they were too loud, too much, too unconventional. The desires you've dismissed because they made absolutely no fucking sense on paper. Your taste. Your edge. Your way of expressing yourself. The things that light you up and give you energy. The things you've known about yourself for years but haven't quite given yourself permission to fully live.

None of it disappeared. You just got extraordinarily good at overriding it.

And perhaps this is where knowing yourself more deeply starts to change the way you live.

You stop moving quite so fast. You become more discerning about what receives your time, energy and attention. You become less interested in accumulating for the sake of accumulating, achieving for the sake of achieving, or automatically chasing whatever the world tells you should come next. You create enough space to hear yourself. You trust yourself more. You become more comfortable saying no. You make choices that are increasingly your own.

And somewhere in that space, more of what truly matters becomes available.

Deeper connection. Intimacy. Community. Presence. Trust. Grace. Patience. The ability to sit with yourself without needing to fill every moment. To listen to your body. To reflect. To wait. To change something small inside yourself instead of constantly rearranging everything outside you.

Perhaps a deeply lived life is not necessarily about having more, doing more or becoming more. Perhaps it is about being able to experience more deeply what is already here.

Knowing yourself is one of the most valuable things you can pursue in a lifetime.

The deeper you know yourself, the less anything in your life gets to run you without you knowing why. And the more able you are to decide what actually deserves a place in your life.

Very few people ever know themselves at this level.

It's a rare kind of mastery.