We Change When We are Ready, Not a Minute Sooner

It would be wonderful if change could come through fiat alone. Instead, it seems the more we need to make a significant change, the more fragile our vow to get going on it may prove to be. Long-desired shifts in the way we live may go on eluding us in spite of our best intentions.

Resolving to do things differently is energizing. An idea for a fresh start occurs to us and committing to it feels good – then comes the difficulty of following through. Over time, when such vows remain unfulfilled, they tend to wear on us and may hurt our self-confidence instead of mobilizing us.

A few days ago, I asked a group of elders if they bother to make resolutions for the new year any more. Most of them laughed and said, “No, I take things as they come.” They had learned over the years that promises to ourselves are often flimsy and don’t contribute much to forging a good life.

Source: Wendy Lustbader

What makes us change, then, if not deciding to do so? It turns out that we make changes when we have to, not when we want to. This isn’t a bleak assessment of the human prospect, even though it may sound that way. It’s just that the changes we most desire are hard, involving emotional responses that can be tricky to identify and challenging to unseat.

We require urgency to delve, to examine what we haven’t wanted to see. A crisis in a relationship or some other kind of exigency thus often supplies the right kind of push and readiness. If not now, then when? In Hidden in Plain Sight: Getting to the Bottom of Puzzling Emotions, psychiatrist Barry Grosskopf refers to “the knifepoint of separation” as the time when couples are most likely to face the issues that have bedeviled their relationship. “It is precisely at the point of crisis, when a couple is often ready to give up, that buried problems come to the fore and there is finally an opportunity to heal core wounds.”

Necessity is a more powerful motivator than preference, willpower, or even a loved one’s pleading. Philosopher William James said, “Do at least two things every day that you don’t want to do, for the very reason that you don’t want to do them.” Some people may have the capacity to force themselves over the hump of deep reluctance, but most of us take the path of least resistance day by day.

Times of extremity are often enlivening, even though there may be tremendous suffering. When the bottom falls out and it seems there is nothing left to lose, we may find ourselves suddenly unfettered. A woman who left her abusive husband when he threatened their twelve year old daughter thrust herself into a period of homelessness, poverty, and loss of the friendship community that continued to envelop her outwardly charming husband. Gradually, she re-built her life as a single mother with self-respect and raised a daughter who thrived from her example of courage and strength.

During ordinary times, there is value in envisioning what change would look like when we are ready for it. We can resolve that sometime, when circumstances are right, we will enact a certain set of re-orderings of how we conduct our relationships or strategies for how we will manage the many competing and exhausting priorities that besiege us. Meanwhile, life will go on as it has, but with the addition of an observing self who watches our successive compromises and takes note of how we often subvert our best intentions.

Copyright: Wendy Lustbader, 2017. Author of Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older, (New York: Tarcher/Random House), 2011.