Making Lasting Changes
Much of therapy focuses on the worthy goal of getting your symptoms under
control. If you are depressed, it’s important to feel better about yourself,
more hopeful about the future, and be able to eat and sleep normally. If you
have anxiety problems, it is important to reduce and manage your fears. If you
have marital difficulties, it may be important to reduce the level of tension
between you and your spouse. However, this reduction in symptoms is often only
the first step in making changes that last.
If you are like most therapy clients, making changes that last means working on
becoming more mature as a person. So what does it mean to become more mature? As
I see it, becoming more mature is a life-long process involving two closely
intertwined projects:
1. Learning to accept, understand, and be at peace with
your true self. You may need to learn to accept and value yourself
more if you tend to see yourself too critically. You may need to clarifying what
your talents are and figure out how to use them more fully. You may need to
clarify what you value in life and what you want to live for and then shape your
life accordingly. You may need to listen to yourself more respectfully and think
more carefully about who you are and what you stand for.
2. Learning to accept those closest to you and learning to be yourself with
them. This usually means being respectfully assertive about who you are and what
you stand for even though the others may feel hurt or strongly disagree. It also
means giving up on trying to change others to live and think the way you think
they should.
These two projects intertwine because the clearer you are about who you are and
what you want, the clearer you can be with your family members. Also, the more
you focus on getting yourself straightened out, the less energy you will expend
on straightening others out.
This is a good place to put in an important note about changing others.
Therapists get a great deal of business because people are working very hard at
changing others but not very hard at changing themselves. Here’s how this works:
one person tries very hard to pressure another to change and that
second person resists and they don’t change.
The first person continues to work very hard to get
the other to change but has no success. That first person ends up frustrated,
stressed, symptomatic and comes to a therapist, complaining that the other
person is impossible to deal with. Much of my work in therapy involves helping
partners, parents, and
adult children work less on changing their partners, children, and parents and
more on changing themselves. Changing others is an impossible task; changing
yourself is difficult but at least it’s possible!
Ok, back to maturity. To the extent that you become more mature, you will
experience some great rewards:
1. A reduction in your psychological symptoms
2. More inner peace, less stress, and less anger
3. A renewed sense of accomplishment and clarity abut
your purpose in life
4. Increased closeness with those you value, increased
tolerance for those you don’t
5. A stronger “psychological immune system” that can
help you deal with future difficulties without getting back to your
psychological symptoms
In other words, by becoming more mature, you will make changes that last.
The Wavy-Line Theory of Change
Most of us hope that if we work on making changes, our progress would be steady;
we hope that every day we would get better and better without relapsing.
Something like the green line in this graph:
The green line represents the “straight-line theory
of change” which says that progress is steady without any relapses or declines.
Few people, if any, change this way. If a person works hard on changing
themselves, their change from worse functioning to better functioning would be
more like the
red line which illustrates the “wavy line theory of change”. This theory says
that when you start working on making a positive change in your life, you will
have some success and might feel very good about it. However, something will
happen fairly soon inside you (uncomfortable thoughts and feelings) or outside
of you (the reactions of others) which will pull you back down to lower levels
of functioning. In simple terms, you will get worse. But if you continue to work
hard on change, you will stop yourself from going all the way back to the level
at which you started. You will recover at a point which is higher than where you
started.
Then the process will repeat itself. You will
make some good progress, to a point higher than your previous high, only to
begin slipping back again. You will feel some pain or frustration with this
backward movement and that will motivate you to continue working. You will
recover again at a higher level than you previous low. You will continue working
on the changes you want to make, going to a higher level than your previous
high. The wavy line theory of change says that if you work very hard on making
positive changes, you will not get better every day but through a process of
two-steps-forward-and-one-back, you will get better.
I should point out that the “relapses” in which you go backwards to lower levels
of functioning paradoxically promote the process of change in two ways:
1. Because it is painful to go back to ways of
thinking, acting, and feeling which have caused trouble in your life, you become
motivated again to work on yourself.
2. When you relapse, it is difficult to get back up. If
you manage to struggle through a setback, you get valuable practice working and
maintaining your changes under difficult circumstances.
So, when you find yourself relapsing, whether that means getting more depressed,
more anxious, or more irrationally angry with your spouse, remember that
relapses are an important part of the process of change. Two steps forward and
one step back seems to be the fastest way to get better!
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