Why Some People Change and Others Don't
The issue is not how or why you might change, but whether you're flexible enough to change at all.
“The speed of change today is faster than the human psyche seems to be able to handle.”
— Marianne Williamson
Flexibility
The underlying issue is flexibility. We would like to discuss this as if it’s something we have control over, but I don’t think we do. I will overstate the case that people are inflexible because, if I don't, then you'll excuse yourself. If you want to change, you must be brutally honest. Change involves your full participation and alterations of all aspects of yourself. There are no “small changes.” If you don't put everything on the table, nothing happens.
Being a psychotherapist is being involved with change. Without change there is no insight or healing. You can tell that you’re approaching change when many issues reduce to a smaller number of core issues. As you focus on core issues, they come out from hiding, it can feel like things are getting worse.
There’s a difference between being reductive and making things clear. Reduction collapses issues in on themselves. It encircles issues and puts small boxes inside large boxes. Reduction simplifies by equating things.
Clarity simplifies things by clearing away what does not matter. Rather than equating things, you’re eliminating things. You’re left with what’s at the center, and it often isn’t pretty. Even then, issues try to hide or you hide from them. You are the active agent of change, and you are evasive.
Most people are partly evasive, a smaller number are completely evasive, and a smaller number still are ready, willing, and able to change. I deal with all of these people, and, when faced with their core issues, it quickly becomes clear which group a person is in.
Anxiety spreads widely across a person’s landscape so that many things can make you anxious. Dealing with each anxious situation by changing your thoughts and reactions has no benefit. Anxiety is not the problem. The problem is what causes it, and “resolving” some original conflicts can cause many anxieties to disappear.
Subjective problems are not in the realm of objective medicine, but they’re not entirely intuitive either. They are real problems, they’re just not scientific. Therapists will dismiss as delusions the reasons behind your anxieties, while intuitives will embellish them as central causes in some spiritualist sense. They are both wrong; there is a middle ground.
Explaining that your anxieties don’t make sense is reductionism. It says that either your anxieties serve what you believe is a purpose, or they are misconceived. Resolving your trauma is simplifying. It shifts the weight of your identity onto another foundation. The difference is that reducing doesn’t require change because you remain the same. Finding clarity means you let go of an aspect of yourself and see the world from a different perspective. As a result, you become a different person.
Voices
I speak to myself with other people's voices. People I know and whose ways of thinking I respect will explain to me how I should understand a situation. This isn’t entirely a matter of thinking or feeling because I rarely remember what they say.
I may “remember” later, but I rarely remember at the time that they speak to me. This contradicts the notion of memory since I experience a vague encounter first and details come later. I suggest that this is the signature of real change: first you envision a broad new context, and later you understand its details. This not reductive, and it's not what we think of as memory, which is something that is detailed first, and then spreads out to generalities.
My voices come to me in my imagination and in my dreams, and they clarify the nature of things. But clarifying may be the wrong word since I don’t remember what they said. “Encourage” might be a better word. They advise a certain frame of reference in a compelling manner and then, as I think about, a deeper understanding dawns on me.
I get encouragement to explore things from a new direction, nothing detailed, just direction. But it’s a direction from a trusted source. This guidance contributes to my resolve and it begins the process of draining my hesitance and uncertainty. It allays anxiety and reassures me.
Herb, my college physics professor, was one of the first people to explain things simply. He was also one of the first people to recognize my brilliance. I didn’t feel brilliant then and I don’t feel brilliant now, but he indicated that I was. Maybe he told that to everybody! I continue to see him every few years in reality, and he continues to provide clarity, good references, and encouragement.
We do not have a personality, that is an illusion. We have various personalities that ebb and flow with our situations and states of mind. Each of these personalities advocates an approach to problems and opportunities. Some are fearful and hesitant, others measured and judicious, and still others are impulsive and enthusiastic.
We have another level above our personalities in which we find guidance and support. We might refer to this level as deeper or higher, it might be the source of our inspiration and guidance, but it can also be a negative, injured, or a traumatized voice.
Mediums call this the level of spirits, angels, and demons. Science gives this no credence, and psychology considers it pathological. This is a measure of how little we understand ourselves, and how limited we are in our ability to change.
In truth, all of science is built on emergent structures, and this “spirit” level is such a structure. It’s not science that has trouble with angels and demons, it’s the scientific method. But then, science that cannot go beyond method is hardly science at all, it’s just problem solving. I have no problem with angels and demons, and, if you hope to evolve your personality, you shouldn’t either.
Navigating Change
Change without direction is chaos, and direction that doesn’t introduce novelty keeps you within your box. If you rely on drugs to maintain yourself, then your coping mechanisms are not providing direction, they’re limiting your vision.
People who are able to change have access to direction beyond what they can see, and they are able to let go of what satisfies them in the present. This could be a sense of something greater, or a view beyond their addiction or their fear.
Addiction and fear always come together. Addiction being the coping mechanism we use to repress the fear. Addiction can be physical or psychological. You can be addicted to unhealthy relationships as much as you can be addicted to unhealthy substances.
These addictions assuage inner fears, not material fears with visible consequences. It's the inner fear that we’ll disintegrate if we go outside the boundary of what we understand. It's a lack of confidence and a desperate feeling. The antidote to this is guidance, but it’s not material guidance, it’s guidance on a path of personal safety.
My habituated clients don’t have this guidance. They are either addicted to substances or fears, and removing either threatens them beyond what they can endure. Both of the people I know whose lives are defined by their fears are abusive, but they won’t admit it. They use other people for their own protection. They build unhealthy, unsustainable relationships because they’re unable to be honest with themselves. The question that I ask myself is, how I can help them find guidance?
Guidance
I believe that guidance is not a thing that one finds, but a state of mind that one adopts. Once you achieve a state of guidance, you become open to new directions. The state of guidance is the state in which you have faith in yourself.
To have faith in yourself you have to honestly meet yourself. This means see yourself honestly, both in terms of what you intend and how you affect others, and it also means coming to terms with your past. For people who have endured childhood trauma, which means all of us to some degree, this means meeting your childhood self.
It’s important to know that resolving childhood trauma does not require reliving it. The trauma you carry now is not an old event, it's a still-active template for thought and behavior. You don’t need to re-experience your trauma, which you can't do accurately in any event, rather you need to bring old memories of pain, weakness, and vulnerability into your current context of security, ability, and resilience.
The problem my addicted clients, friends, and family members have is that they have not built a current context of stability and they are not resilient. They don't know how to create a “guidance mindset,” or even know that there is such a thing.
My task is to help these clients understand what guidance means, and then to help them move into that mindset. I try to do this, but I’m still a beginner at doing it myself. I am not that versatile, and I don’t have much patience with my recalcitrant clients.
From my point of view, honesty comes first. That’s first being honest in recognizing your needs and intentions. Second, it’s honesty in recognizing your effect on others.
If you’re abusive, then you must first see your own deceptions, and then see beyond them. This is partly intellectual, partly emotional, and partly neurological.
Neurology
My understanding of psychology is informed by my experiences with neurology, neuropsychology, and neural modeling. Modern psychology, and hence modern psychotherapy, knows nothing of this. This is why psychology’s move to incorporate psychedelics is a farce because you must at least understand neuropsychology before you can understand psychedelics.
Neuropsychology is based on rhythms. Your personalities are distinguished by their rhythms in the way that types of music have rhythms. Going from Punk Rock to classical music is not just a change in style, it’s a change in state of mind.
Melodic rhythm is the arrangement of notes in time, regardless of the notes. Harmonic rhythm is when the chords change, not when the notes change. Your personality is your harmonic rhythm, not the melodic rhythm of your words and thoughts. You might think of this as your emotional landscape.
I base my efforts to introduce change on a person’s awareness. Their awareness of themself and their environment. If you compare the brainwaves of differently aware people, you’ll see differences in their brainwaves. The brainwaves are a signature of how we pay attention, which determines what we’re aware of and how we assemble our thoughts.
A person whose awareness is an agitated pile of dirt will never find a stable mental structure within which to place themselves. They won’t find guidance, as their world is in constant chaos. Such people gravitate toward situations that provide structure or reward, such as the co-dependent aspects of religion and other authority-based relationships. Their dependence on external structure creates personality disorders.
You cannot reason with these people and, to a real degree, some of these people reside inside us. For those captured by such people, either inside or outside of themselves, my approach is to loosen the death grip these personalities have on your awareness.
Ways To Change
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it.”
— Alan Watts
There are three ways we can change awareness. First and easiest is hypnotherapy. This is simply dropping ones frequency to the lower ranges of one’s awareness. This means discarding vigilance and opening somatic and sensual awareness to your body and your imagination. This allows people to clear the deck and rebuild their personalities, albeit temporarily. It’s my hope that with practice a person’s better adjusted states of mind can take sufficient root to prevail outside of hypnosis.
Hypnosis is similar to dreamwork and psychedelics, but easier. Dreamwork takes concerted effort, and psychedelics takes practice and mastery. But if you cannot advance with hypnotherapy, then I don’t think you have much chance of making progress in either of these other two modes.
A second method is cognitive therapy. This is the basis of all currently popular psychotherapy and it is weak. It’s based on behaviorism, and the idea that if you change your intentions, you’ll change your awareness. It’s a thinly disguised version of the “Law of Attraction.”
The idea is that you can think your way to other ways of thinking, but you can’t. You can only disrupt your way of thinking and hope to find another. This short-term approach also fails with the Law of Attraction: it works only as long as you can sustain it. Lacking something more attractive, you return to your old ways, either through reward or rationalization.
I use argument to inject chaos. With enough chaos, the preexisting order no longer makes sense. Science is useful here because people believe it, but it makes little sense. I am not trying to change your sense of what’s reasonable, but to dissolve it. You’d be surprised at how refreshing this can be.
The third way of changing your awareness is with brainwave training. This is easy and effective but little-known, unrecognized, and expensive. The best was to do it is with neurofeedback, and that is still out of reach as an affordable modality in the remote therapy setting in which I work. I try to incorporate brain rhythm training into my therapeutic approach, and it’s possible to do this, but it’s indirect.
The best brainwave training is regular and measured, and for that you need an instrument to measure your brainwaves and a means of visualizing the result. Some home-based devices exist, like the MUSE headband and various alternatives (CB Insights, 2023; Medical Futurist, 2020), but they’re not designed for therapeutic use at the lower price levels, and we still don't know how to use them to address many higher-level issues. Still, if these devices can help you understand and control anxiety, vigilance, and tension for $400, they might be worth it. They really should be available at half that price.
There are other therapeutic approaches to change, such as movement, diet, mindfulness, yoga, self-expression, illness, crisis, massage, and life. Hypnosis, reason, and brain rhythms are the three I use most, but I involve myself with as much as possible.
If you’d like to explore or expand your own ability to change, then click this button to pick a time on my schedule, and I’ll speak to you at no cost for 15 minutes.
https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/schedule15
References
CB Insights (2023). Muse's alternatives and competitors, CB Information Services. Retrieved from: https://www.cbinsights.com/company/interaxon/alternatives-competitors
Medical Futurist (2020 Oct 29). We Used 3 Devices For Meditation – Here’s What We Found, https://medicalfuturist.com/we-used-3-devices-for-meditation-heres-what-we-found/