How Is Change More Likely To Be Made?

The structures of personality are strongly built. They do not tend to be very flexible, or subject to easy change. Instead, they provide a concentrated base upon which a life can be established, developed, grown and understood. This is not to say that these structures are altogether desirable, or altogether admirable. They have their purpose.

When it is determined that these structures are not serving one as happily as one might wish, questions arise as to how they might best be approached, worked with, influenced, transformed or shifted. A typical response that one sees in therapy is the expectation, the hope, the desire, that they will be amenable to being discarded, and that this strategy will be, or ought to be, relatively easy, if only it is conceptualized properly, and the right intention is set into motion. This response is not usually explicit, or even conscious. It can be surmised though without too much difficulty, and brought into awareness so that it can itself be examined and reassessed for its relationship to reality.

Here's how that reality tends to look: in line with the first paragraph, the typical response, with its attendant expectations and hopes and desires, will need to be abandoned, and in its place what will be needed is a set of more appropriate and realistic expectations. Central to this new set of expectations will be the willingness to cultivate and develop a new kind of relationship with the offending personality structures. This new relationship will be one of friendliness and acceptance, forgiveness and humility, with regard to all of one's imperfections and flaws, all of those aspects of oneself that one instinctively wishes to discard out of hand.

This new relationship is actually motivated by very pragmatic considerations in the therapeutic context. It embodies the wonderful paradox that the kinds of changes one might wish to make will in fact be facilitated by an attitude of acceptance, rather than by hostility and aggression toward oneself. Indeed, the very act of acceptance and forgiveness loosens the inflexible structures of personality and renders them more amenable to the kinds of reshaping one might desire, while a strategy of aggressive self criticism elicits an internal and rather automatic response of defensiveness and tightness, thereby further strengthening the very structures one wishes to alter.

This is a surprisingly radical concept at first, and so is not as easily undertaken as you might imagine it would be.














mdavid-lpcc.com