Let It Go: Why Change Is So Hard

Have you ever quietly believed you were flawless? That whatever you touched came out right, and mistakes belonged to other people? Plenty of us carry some version of that belief, and it turns out to be one of the heaviest anchors against change. Changing course means conceding that the first attempt missed. For some people, that admission feels close to unbearable. We hold ourselves to a standard so strict that we refuse to grant ourselves even one error, and forgiveness becomes something we can't imagine needing. Edison and Lincoln, for whatever it's worth, both carried the same so-called flaw. Each racked up failure after failure, which meant each had to look at what went wrong and do it differently.

In therapy this shows up constantly, and it's often the thing that stalls progress. The person in the chair has to say out loud that something they did, maybe several things, didn't work, and that the not-working is why their life looks the way it does now. Men will tell me, for instance, that if they could just meet the right woman, everything would fall into place. Group work can chip away at that story. When a man floats the idea that a different partner is the fix, the other members have a way of handing him example after example, pulled from his own life and from what they've just watched him do in the room, showing him the strategy has never once delivered.

Control is the quiet center of all this. The only person you can actually steer is you. Build your hopes on the idea that nothing improves until everyone around you changes first, and you've walked yourself into a corner with no exit. We're a culture that loves locating a culprit, but blame goes nowhere if the one you've fingered refuses to own it. Nothing moves.

Science runs into the same wall. Discovering what fails can matter as much as discovering what succeeds, and people resist that so strongly that they fudge the numbers, sometimes on purpose, sometimes without realizing it. Consider the research on snake phobia. Psychologists needed subjects who would admit to the fear and then sit in a room with a live snake to test whether a treatment did anything. The catch: someone genuinely terrified of snakes won't volunteer for that and won't even cop to the phobia, precisely because confessing it might land them in a room with the animal.

So a researcher walks away convinced the method cured something, except the people it cured were never truly phobic to begin with, and the effect only held in that narrow setup. The real phobics were nowhere near the building. They were doing what I did: hiding, the day someone carried live snakes into the office tucked inside shoe boxes.

Some of the best discoveries arrive by accident. The procedure goes sideways, and the result comes out right anyway. Therapy has that quality too. A person spends enormous energy hunting for someone to love them and never notices that the someone has to be, first, himself. You can't love yourself while treating every misstep as unforgivable, and if you can't forgive your own errors, the forgiveness of others stays out of reach. A lot of people cling to the opposite idea. They decide they must be perfect to be loved, that owning a single mistake disqualifies them, and in doing so they lock the door on exactly the thing they're reaching for.

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