Why is it So Hard to Change?
Written by JD Ward
For many, the new year symbolizes a new start - a new day to enact our resolutions to change for the better. Our resolve in our own willpower is renewed and we feel inspired and empowered by friends who have made similar commitments. Everywhere around us people commit to lose 20 pounds, read more books, learn a new skill, or limit a bad habit.
Those Fleeting Resolutions
Several years ago, I was part of a beautiful community that celebrated New Year’s Eve each year with a midnight party and then gathered for brunch the next day to discuss what word or concept each of us would like to define our lives in the coming year. Some would pick vague ideas like, “wear more purple.” Others would choose words like “Perseverance” or “Grace.” Then, we discussed why that particular word or idea was important to us and how we envisioned it shaping our upcoming year. It wasn’t the same as committing to some physical or moral improvement, but it had similar results.
After a short time, most of us totally forgot the word we had chosen that blurry-eyed morning and our attempts at personal change would fade away again, just like they had each year before.
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Our Best Intentions
While the New Year is the culturally honored time for making commitments to better ourselves, every day of our lives, most of us make commitments to be a better self. We might decide we need to tighten our budget or pay down our credit card. We might decide we want to get up earlier to have space to pray, read or exercise. We try to stick to new routines that we know would make our lives healthier. We wake up some random morning and decide we are going to send a nice email to a friend or make sure we don’t react negatively to our boss. Every day we are confronted with opportunities, big and small, to try and become a better human being. We all do it and we all fail. Willpower and intention are powerful forces and occasionally they succeed in making the world a bit brighter. But if you are like me, more often than you like to admit, your will is fickle and weak and our best intentions are overrun by our emotions, our cravings, and our fears.
This urge to become a better person, Christian, father, friend, husband, and my continual disappointment in my efforts, has led me to question why it is so hard for us to change. Thankfully, I’ve recognized that this isn’t just a problem that I have (which is something many people end up believing). This is a deeply human condition. Our human determination and will power has given rise to empires. Our will power shapes the history that we make every day. So why does it seem like it is easier to shape the world around us than it is to shape ourselves? At the end of the day, even though each of us is capable of doing profound things, we still struggle with personal change. This inner world is one that human determination has not conquered.
Here is an example to illustrate the point.
Harry was a hard worker. Yet, in his work life Harry was not receiving the financial compensation he felt he deserved, he felt micromanaged by a boss, and he was not getting recognition for the huge amount of work he had put into a project. One boss had even singled him out and blamed him for the loss of a major client when he knew it was the whole team’s fault.
Harry left that company and was now determined to have a better experience with a new company for which he was excited to work. The first few months went quite smoothly and he had thought he had found his perfect fit. He liked his co-workers, his boss seemed reasonable and relaxed, and he was given meaningful work to do.
But inevitably, a conflict broke out on Harry’s team around which implementation strategy they would use to finish a project. After several unsuccessful attempts to have the team consider his ideas, Harry found himself yelling at his co-workers in the meeting.
He eventually gathered himself, lowered his tone, and said he was sorry. That night Harry felt terrible about what he had done and committed to his wife to never act that way again. He went back to work the next day ready to be a positive influence again.
The change in Harry’s spirit was welcomed by the team and they jumped back into the project.
As they were finishing the project the next week, the boss came in and congratulated two of the team members for their innovation. He did not say a word about Harry’s effort. Harry seethed inside with anger. He knew how hard he had worked and he felt overlooked. He tried not to let it show, but the anger was there. He went home that night and ranted to his wife who listened with great empathy.
By the next day, Harry was able to stuff this emotion below the surface knowing his anger would not be helpful to the team’s morale. They were starting a new project and he did not want to be a source of bitterness. So, he readied himself and started anew. Harry noticed, however, that he had begun to tell himself a narrative about the two colleagues that received praise from their boss - and those narratives were less than flattering. He thought to himself that one of his co-workers just loved to show off his intelligence and the other was just a big brown-noser. Harry confirmed these caricatures in his own mind by little actions each of them had taken during the week. He subtly began to ask other team members if they saw the same traits in these two colleagues. The ally building communication validated Harry’s view but began to negatively impact the cohesion on the team. Harry kept wanting to be a positive person but kept finding his ego wounded by other people on the team. He felt miserable and yet, as hard as he tried, he could not find the joy he once had. Each day he would commit to do his best and be positive and each day he would come home disappointed in his experience or ashamed of his attitude.
Our Human Condition
Harry’s story shouldn't be all too unfamiliar to most of us, in some form or another. As we will see, there are many conflicting forces at work within Harry. Without an awareness of how these desires, motivations, and needs are operating, even Harry’s best self-willed efforts to change himself will most likely fall short of his desired outcomes.
This is the human condition. Even with our best intentions, we are often ruled by emotions and inner forces that are difficult to identify. Our inner swirl of thoughts and actions betray the generosity and kindness we hope to extend to others. Each of us long to be a light to others yet we seem too often to be dragged down into the mud of self-pity, jealousy, anger, fear, and frustration. It is right here, at this gulf between who we want to be and who we actually end up being, that we have a choice to make. We can get back up on the proverbial horse and try again to will ourselves to better living or we can give up trying and let the chips fall where they may.
God-Given Needs
There is, of course, a brave third way. We can surrender our planning and efforts and seek a deeper spirituality that finally brings freedom and change. To better understand our daily impulses, it is important to turn inward to reflect on our identity. Christian contemplatives like Thomas Keating, Thomas Merton, and Basil Pennington teach that we, as humans, have legitimate basic needs that we all seek to meet. Humans have a need for safety, survival, autonomy, affection, belonging, and meaning. These basic human needs are by design. We had these needs before the fall. They are God-given. (There are some who will read this blog who REALLY need to let that idea sink in). You are not a bad person for having needs. Your basic human needs are not a product of sin.
In the beginning, there was unity between God and God’s human creation. In this unity, human needs are satisfied by God. But then, something happens. The unity of the Garden is disrupted when Adam and Eve decide to take matters into their own hands. The serpent causes Adam and Eve to question the intentions and faithfulness of God, which leads to a self-interested action aimed at self preservation. The tragedy of the fall in Genesis is the separation between God and humanity where there had been unity.
As soon as this separation occurs, Adam and Eve become aware of their human needs because, for the first time, they experienced their needs as unmet. The experience of unmet needs immediately prompts them to more self-determined action. The cycle of determination and will begins.
Unmet Needs, Unpleasant Emotions, Untrue Narratives
We’ve all experienced unmet needs. When our basic needs are not met, we find ourselves filled with afflictive emotions like guilt, shame, envy, anger, fear, etc. These aren’t nice feelings to have. They hurt and we all have unhealed wounds because of our unmet needs. We don’t like experiencing them - and we will go to great lengths to alleviate the negative experience.
In our illustration of Harry’s workplace relationships, Harry experiences a number of afflictive emotions. Some of these experiences are more obvious than others, like his explosion of anger in a meeting with his co-workers and the seething anger towards his boss when his efforts were not recognized while others were. Then, there are some less obvious afflictive emotions at work as well. Harry “felt miserable” at the reality that, despite his best intentions, he could not manage to be a more positive and joyful person in the workplace.
We read deeply into our experiences of afflictive emotions, both consciously and unconsciously - and we tell ourselves powerful false narratives that attempt to explain why we are experiencing these negative emotions in the first place. These false narratives play a powerful role in shaping our perception of ourselves. Ultimately, we believe these narratives to be true - narratives that say we are not good enough, as we are, to have our basic needs met. But we must do something. The needs don’t ever go away. We will always pursue them. So, we find ways to try to prove our worth and value under the assumption that our needs will be satisfied when we do. From here, our false narratives devolve into complex strategies that influence our choices, actions, and behaviors.
Programs for Happiness
Humans are quite resourceful. At a very young age we learn how to stop the pain and we develop the initiative to create schemes to get our needs met. We perform. We self-medicate with behaviors that dull our pain. We learn to bandage our own wounds. Maybe, when we need affirmation, we create some art piece just to hear our parents say, “good job.” Or, when hungry or cold, we cry so our parents come to our aid. It all happens quite naturally, but in the end, we learn a pattern. If we do not want the pain of unmet needs, we only need to take it upon ourselves to do something to get our needs met. And it works! Most of the time we do get our needs met and our sense of balance and happiness returns. This process becomes deeply embedded in our psyche. We find our way out of pain and into temporary happiness, and when we start to feel another need arise, we do something else to bring happiness back. We do this over and over and over again, and most often, we are able to at least temporarily make the pain stop (though not in more traumatic situations, but that is beyond the scope of this blog post). This has been called a “program for happiness” because the constantly repeated process gets hardwired into identity. It becomes as automated as a computer program. Some programs for happiness simply dictate our day-to-day compulsions in the moment. Other programs are complex and deeply embedded in the ways we live our entire lives. Either way, they are an attempt to meet our own needs through our own self-determination.
When we start to attempt to meet our own needs, whether we are successful or not, we start to identify our worth with our ability to achieve our own happiness. We work to secure affirmation, autonomy, security, or significance and when we obtain these things, we feel happy. This happiness remains until someone or something threatens our program for happiness and then we go spinning into an abyss to correct the situation. This is exactly what Harry was doing in his job situation above.
Freedom from Our False Self
Self reflection through Christian contemplation can help us spot this self-willed attempt to meet our own needs. Reflection can help us see just how addicted we have become to gaining as much affirmation, security and control our program can produce. It can help to free us from the addictive power of our programs as we surrender to God. When we find our being (identity) in God through surrender, we find an unconditional love that meets our deepest needs. The freedom, happiness, and satisfaction we seek in life does not come from a self-willed actualization but from a surrendered soul into the loving care of God. This is the goal of prayer. Prayer helps us find our identity not in what we achieve through self-discipline but in our union with the God who meets our deepest needs.
So, Why is it So Hard to Change?
The short answer to the question we started with is this: because we cannot transform ourselves. You may succeed in sticking to an exercise plan or getting a promotion at work, but these changes are simply different manifestations of our programs for happiness. There is a deeper unmet need at work under the surface. The only way to address these deep inner motivations is to let go of the compulsion to satisfy your needs according to your own determination. The only way to let go is through surrender in prayer. This is the true freedom and the source of true personal change.
The Human Condition Workshop: True Self Vs. False Self
This process of inner reflection, awareness, and surrender is not exactly a “fix-it-quick” solution. Our human condition is beautifully complex. We are each a unique embodiment of our own unique stories. But, there are common elements that show up in everyone’s story in some way. Our experience of unmet needs, the false narratives we’ve bought into about ourselves, our worth, and our acceptance, the wounds we’ve received because of these false narratives, the barriers we build around our wounds, the power of our programs to determine the shape of our lives - all of these are elements of the human story. They are elements of your story. And, in order to move towards greater freedom, healing, and deep transformation, it is helpful to see these interrelated pieces of the story for what they are.
This is the direction of our upcoming ReWireU workshop The Human Condition: True Self Vs. False Self. If you are interested in taking a deeper look into these ideas, join us for this 6-week journey. In this workshop, you will join in contemplative community with others who are on the same discovery journey.
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