Existential Psychology

Change Is An Active Attitude

By  | 

Most people who are struggling in their lives believe that if they could just think and feel differently everything would get better. They’re waiting for a fundamental shift, a personality overhaul, a sudden flash of inspiration.

They’re going to keep on waiting. Why? Because their underlying attitude is passive not active. They want this change to happen to them, to occur from the outside in when really it’s got to occur from the inside out. And positive change doesn’t happen all at once, it’s a process. During this process the person doing the changing is the central actor, the main participant, not an audience member.

That passive attitude is ingrained into most of us though, and really it’s indicative of a psychology that hasn’t matured into adulthood yet. Children have the luxury of being passive recipients. Whether at home or at school it’s parents and teachers who carry the burden of responsibility for skill and knowledge, who seek to instill this skill and knowledge in their pupils. The pupils only need to open themselves up to it.

But an adult psychology stops relying on passive introjection to learn and grow, trading it for active participation. People who are struggling in their lives first have to come to terms with the fact that they’re fully responsible for their situations. They may have gotten to this point due to circumstances partially or totally outside of their control but what is fully within their control is how they decide to respond. They can decide it’s fully up to them to improve their lives and then get down to work rather than waiting for a lightning bolt that’s never going to come.

Related posts:

  1. Clients Have To Want To Change You may have heard this joke: Q: How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? A: One. But the light bulb has to really want to change. It actually exposes a fundamental underlying truth of the therapeutic endeavor, which is that clients must be fully invested in the process of change or […]...
  2. Helping People Change Maladaptive Behaviors The same rules apply for helping people change in therapy as in the wider sphere of life. Probably the most fundamental, inalterable rule is that no one changes in a lasting way unless they decide they really want to, unless they decide it’s in their own best interests and the best interests of those around them […]...
  3. Helping Clients Get Over Their Fear Of Change This is going to sound blatantly obvious but for clients to derive any benefits from the therapeutic endeavor they have to be willing and able to change. The reason we bring it up is that a deep seated fear of change is not specific to the problems people bring to therapy but is an underlying […]...
  4. Three Routes To Change A useful way to conceptualize change is to think of a triangle where thoughts, emotions, and behaviors represent the three points. A change at one of these points will exert an influence on the other two points as well. Different thoughts will affect how you feel and act, different feelings will affect how you think […]...
  5. Change The World Many of us want to help change the world for the better but we don’t know where to start. The task seems too big or maybe unrealistic. Am I supposed to go live in a hut and teach children how to read? Dig a well somewhere? Get more active in government? Work for a charity? […]...
  6. Change Familiar Patterns of Behavior When people try to change their lives, a common mistake they make is trying to change many behaviors at the same time. It’s as if they are spring cleaning, except instead of a house it’s their entire being, and they invariably meet with frustration and failure, simply because they have bitten off more than anyone […]...
  7. Keep Hanging On And Things Will Change Suicide is, at bottom, a strategy to change an unwanted situation that feels unchangeable. It was Rollo May who said “Depression is the inability to construct a future.” In severe cases of depression there is no future, just intolerable, interminable present, a hopelessness stemming from the belief that things will be this way forever. In […]...
  8. Helping Clients Change With Motivational Interviewing When trying to help clients change maladaptive, entrenched patterns of behavior counselors might be using intelligible words but they’re speaking an incomprehensible language if they don’t account for the stages of change in order to tailor their interventions to the current cognitive space of their clients. Motivational interviewing was devised to help drug addicts break […]...
  9. Responsibility For Change Most clients come to therapy with the stated intent of changing some aspect of their lives, but when push comes to shove they often secretly desire something else. All of us have the uncanny ability to place the responsibility for our problems on other people or on factors outside of our control. Sometimes to truly […]...
  10. Telling Your Story As The Expert Most therapists, regardless of the psychological theories they use, consider themselves to be experts, and rightfully so. The problem with this attitude is that as experts they feel that they are the ones with the access to the knowledge and wisdom that will help their clients improve. The role of the client in this context […]...
  11. Active Listening Primary narcissism is probably the biggest reason that real communication breaks down. Many consider listening to be a passive state and are really just waiting to pounce on any opportunity to shift the focus back onto themselves. They don’t take the time to process what is being communicated and their goal is definitely not to […]...
  12. Love As Active Interest If love were synonymous with unconditional acceptance then it would be hard to get behind the idea of loving those who have wronged us, loving aspects of ourselves that we know are detrimental to our health and happiness, or loving people with whose values and behavior we don’t agree. But from the existential point of […]...
  13. Believing Someone Can Change Versus Trying To Make Them Change More therapists should take heed of the classic idiom “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” But they don’t. They try through sheer force of will to make their clients change, considering themselves to be successes if it happens and failures if it doesn’t. This is narcissism at its […]...
  14. Depression And The Competitive Attitude Separating normal from abnormal is, for most people, a question of which norms and values their particular cultural group embraces and which norms and values their particular cultural group disavows. They take it as a given that one dominant set of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors derived from the norms and […]...
  15. Condescending Attitude In Romantic Relationships A condescending attitude in romantic relationships seeks to instill a power imbalance, an irrational hierarchy, which necessarily chips away at the sense of community that’s vital to mental health and happiness. Of course it hurts in the moment to feel minimized, but at the psychological level it’s the subtle trading of community for irrational hierarchy […]...
  16. Setting An Intention To Change Regardless of the presenting problem, what we usually see from clients is that they dearly wish to overcome that problem but have no idea how, which is obviously why they’ve booked a session in the first place. If they were able to make the change all on their own seeing a therapist would be unnecessary. […]...
  17. Paradox Of Change “When I accept myself as I am, then I can change.” – Carl Rogers Acceptance and change don’t appear to be related entities and in fact seem to be contradictory. Isn’t the desire to change just about any facet of life spurred by dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs? To us the central paradox […]...
  18. Trying To Make Others Change Most Of Us Are Resistant To Change The irony is that most of us are pretty resistant to external attempts at changing us, which we equate with authoritarian control, but at the same time have no problem trying to make others change, which we equate with benevolence. What we call a gentle push in the […]...
  19. Embrace Change “You kids and your newfangled music!” How is it possible that the cycle keeps repeating? The same people who, once upon a time, were interested in novelty, originality, and forging a path outside of set cultural norms themselves become wary and contemptuous of anything new. They believe their way is the only way even though […]...
  20. Use Your Newfound Insight To Change The Practice Of Your Life A lasting effect of the psychoanalytic tradition on the common understanding of how therapy works is that increasing insight leads to cure. The idea in psychoanalysis was that bringing unconscious drives, motivations, and other hidden material into conscious awareness was the endgame, the way to eradicate neurosis. The problem though, and the various therapeutic paradigms […]...
Related Items