In both my past and present, I have had much difficulty with accepting change as normal and integral to the lifelong process of making meaning and finding my purpose. Looking within myself, I see a young woman who prefers a sense of control, who finds solace in stable and secure environments, and who often fears the unknown. I wouldn’t say that these characteristics have transformed entirely over the years, but as I gain more life experience, I think these anxious proclivities can coexist with the inevitability of change. As I see it, the individual self is constantly at the whim of their environments and the social circumstances that shape and in many cases govern their decisions. This relational perspective connects to change in that, when we ourselves aren’t the ones making decisions that provoke change, we feel threatened or powerless, even if the change might guide us in the right direction or teach us something about resilience, coping with distress, etc. Here, I argue that, while change is inevitable and healthy, I also see the validity of people resisting change, because I often took this path myself in order to avoid psychological discomfort and throw the fears associated with change to the backburner.
In my early teenage years, my father decided to move back to his country of birth, where he immigrated from as a young man to build a life in the United States. My parents were separated but on good terms for as long as I could remember, but there had never been so much physical distance between my dad and his children until this point. I was only 14 at the time, and already dealing with the emotionally turbulent experiences of high school in the midst of a pandemic, so coping with this sudden, life-altering change was deeply challenging. I never expected a future with one of my parents so far away, so out of reach and removed from my everyday life, and I was so frustrated that he made the decision without leaving it to me or my siblings’ discretion. For a while, I avoided this pain by downplaying the experience, treating it as “no big deal” both internally and externally, and not giving myself time and space to process the anger and sorrow I felt.
Before I came to college, I began feeling dissatisfied with and disconnected from the friendships I made during the formative years of my life. At this tumultuous time, there was an undeniable feeling like I didn’t belong and that the love and care I unconditionally gave my friends was not reciprocated. However, I kept shaking this uncomfortable truth because I was already preoccupied with making friends in college, and it was challenging to wrap my head around a “new normal” in such an uncertain time, i.e., a world without the friends I knew since I was a child. I even tried to maintain these relationships during my freshman year, despite knowing that it would be more advantageous and fair to myself to move on. In the end, those friendships either had bitter ends or grew old and faded into the recesses of my mind. Looking back, I realize that embracing change, e.g., crafting a life without unhealthy or toxic friendships, would have caused acute emotional pain for me, but also would have been more respectful to my well-being and my inner peace.
I offered these examples from my own life to emphasize the very common human experience of resisting change. When I neglected and rebuked change, I had well-founded reasons for it, such as fearing the unknown, losing my locus of control, and feeling excluded from decisions that directly affected me. Nonetheless, I couldn’t fully recognize and validate these psychological dilemmas until after I began studying psychology and taking my therapeutic journey seriously. Self-awareness and introspection are critical factors that influence how much you get out of therapy, and for me, learning these skills “from the books” and through my own experiences with psychotherapy allowed me to support and understand my past self, the younger self who wanted to evade the pain of change. I also began to nurture my present and future self through this work, by “training” myself to accept changes in my life, major and minor. This is not to say that I’ve perfected this art and that my present self wholeheartedly accepts change. The more self-aware I become in my therapeutic and academic/professional journey, the more I acknowledge that fearing and accepting change can exist simultaneously, and that acceptance includes making space for discomfort and the fears that plague our decision-making process.