It is an old therapy adage that many patients go for treatment because they want change – but they don’t necessarily want to change. It is a crucial distinction: wanting our children to change, wanting our relationships to change, wanting our workplace to change, wanting society to change – this is all, to a large degree, placing the onus of change outside ourselves.
It is a very human reaction to wish to hold on to our selves and shut the change out; to dig our feet in and cling desperately to the wallpaper of our minds we have always known, the psychological furniture and bolted doors we unconsciously believe can protect us from the terror of the new.
But if we want to build a better life, for ourselves and others, we have to allow change to begin with us. It won’t be as simple as getting up earlier, or changing our exercise routine, or reading this essay. To have any hope of experiencing a deeper, lasting shift, we must recognize that as much as we want change, a part of us is terrified of it, and will fight against it, because we also want things to stay the same. Part of us is choosing a safer life over a better life.
I once had a dream about this: I was trying to cross a busy street on foot, but speeding cars were preventing me from getting to the other side. I’d made it halfway across, but I was stuck on – wait for it – the central reservation. With this dream, my unconscious came up with a beautiful visual pun to communicate my ambivalence about change: my own central reservation, where change feels dangerous, risky, but staying safe means staying stuck where you are, unable to move forward.
In order to change, we have to fess up to the parts of ourselves we pretend not to know about, that we do not like, and understand our own responsibility for our part in our circumstances. It is much more painful than situating all our problems in the people around us. I can tell you, as someone trying to make sense of his life and near-death it doesn’t feel good. It really hurts. If I didn’t have to pay the royalties, I would quote you all manner of songs on the subject. Instead, I will defer to a famous psychoanalyst for free: “Of all the hateful possibilities, growth and maturation are feared and detested most frequently.”
Changing means recognizing that we have all been supposing erroneously – acknowledging that our lives are not perfect (despite whatever images our egos would have us portray), but ordinary, human, fallible existences.
To some, this can feel like victim-blaming. So let me be clear: I am in no way minimizing the terrible impact that society and its evils, from poverty to racism and misogyny and the rest, as well as abusive institutions and families and individuals, can have on a person’s life. I am acquainted with some of those all too well.
What I am saying is that those evils “out there”, over which we as individuals have little agency, make it even more important for us to make use of the control we do have in our own lives. To do that, we need to recognize and understand our own contribution to our intransigence: the relationship patterns we repeat time after time; the evenings spent scrolling on social media instead of really living; the keeping things as they are because it feels easier than making a real, profound change.
What has also been crucial for me is acknowledging where all those social evils out there begin: with each of us. In order to build not just a better life but a better world, we need to understand that society would not be this discriminatory, misogynistic, abusive and the rest, if these tendencies did not exist inside all of us in some form – a feeling of being special and superior to others, or a disrespect for anything feminine or maternal, or a mocking neglect of emotional vulnerability, our own and in others.
It can be horrifying to realize how these unconscious beliefs and patterns have been trapping us and our loved ones, preventing us from developing – but it is also a liberation. Such self-understanding can be life changing. It allows us to recognize, for example, that we might be unconsciously drawn towards a neglecting, “hard to get” relationship dynamic that feels exciting but is also harmful.
By understanding our own role in the situations and relationships in which we find ourselves, we can then begin to experience aspects of life as something we choose, rather than only as something that happens to us. We can learn and grow from our experiences – even from the deprivation of our backgrounds.
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