the power of not changing

I’m (obviously) super interested in personal growth as well as mental, physical, financial, and creative health. I spend time reading about these topics, writing about them, and thinking about them. (It’s the INFJ in me.) Often, growth and health mean change, and I write about how to make it easier to change. (Read: Atomic Habits.)

But what I’m thinking about today is when it’s safer not to change.

To explain:

I pride myself on the fact that even though I’ve been afraid to make deep, lasting changes, I’ve done them anyway. I’ve opened the mental cupboards, poked around in my back closets full of trauma, and excavated under my house of behavior, trying to find out what my root beliefs are so I can change them. It hasn’t been easy, and I haven’t liked it. But it felt like cleaning out a wound, a necessary pain for healing.

This means that, for example, when I decided to recover from depression, I took a hard look at why I was depressed.

The real reasons.

The ones that hurt. From miscarriage to financial stress to existential crisis. I took a clear-eyed look at what wasn’t working in my life (being all things to all people, ignoring my dream of writing, not being happy with my work—and then being mad at work for not letting me be with my kids, etc.)

Just doing that step took a long time.

Also, it wasn’t easy to admit these things. There’s safety in the status quo.

But there’s a danger in this analysis, because it can dredge up all kinds of hurt, from the original pain to the layers of guilt, shame, and more pain we pile on top from putting off dealing with it for real.

Take it from me, it’s worth it to be honest with yourself because then you can see what you need to do to be happy.

HOWEVER.

The thing is, this kind of honesty implies responsibility, because once we know what the problem is it’s up to us to change it.

For example, if I know that I can’t be all things to all people, that means I have to learn to say no. I have to have enough self-esteem to say that “no.” I have to be okay with disappointing people on occasion.

If I know what’s wrong and what I need to do to change it, if I don’t make the change, then I’m just a complainer. Don’t get me wrong. I have all the patience in the world for those who are trying to change. It’s hard. And I for one understand that we are human and aren’t perfect. If, for example, you say, “Yes,” when you should have said, “No,” and you realize it’s an old habit and take the time to try and do better next time, god bless you.

(In a similar vein, I often tell my kids that they can’t complain about something they can change. Caveat—this is in the context of things they truly can fix by themselves. Like them saying something along the lines of, “I’m cold.” Solution? Go get a jacket. Don’t waste the energy complaining about it, just go get it. “I’m hungry.” Go eat something. And so on. I’m not saying either that they can’t express their feelings or that there are some things that they can’t do anything about. My intent is only to get them to see that they have the power to change, well, changeable things.)

But here’s the rub. There’s another layer on top of the pain of excavation and the difficulty in changing habits.

The layer is that denial helps us. The “bad” habits help us. Ignoring things, letting them go too long, putting off conversations, our lives becoming unmanageable—all of that helps us in a weird way.

We have to be getting something out of our chaotic, unhealthy, unsatisfying lives, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it. Truly.

Like, maybe getting clear and organized means we have to confront the truth that we don’t like our job/spouse/place we live/what we are doing with our lives. So we put off getting clear and organized because we don’t want to face our truths.

We can get blocked from the very thing we want because we unconsciously know it will be painful to fix it. And we know we’re getting something out of our lives being out of control. After all, if you have to focus on all those car repairs you have to do because you’re too busy to take your car in for basic oil changes, that’s a lot easier to deal with than the fact that you’re deeply unhappy with your marriage. It’s much, much easier to complain about that check engine light coming on yet again.

Sometimes we don’t want truths. Sometimes we don’t want to be set free.

So, we might give lip service to our real desires. Generally, we know what they are. Examples: I need to clear up my health/save money/confront my boss/change my living circumstances. But if we think the pain of facing our truths and why we don’t have the thing we want is worse than the pain of our current circumstances, we won’t actually do any deep dives into our psyche. We’ll keep complaining. We won’t get to the place where the only choice is responsibility for change.

Being busy and overwhelmed can be, paradoxically, at least a temporarily effective way to stay comfortable. — David Allen

I guess the point of this blog post is to say, if you find yourself complaining over and over again about how you’re overwhelmed, busy, burdened, taken advantage of, I suggest you stop and get clear on what you want. 

I’ve done the confronting and the deep excavation and it’s worth it. I am so much happier and more direct these days than I ever used to be. I’m not perfect. I’m now in the deep excavation process of trying to get to the root of my anxiety (spoiler: I think it has something to do with enough-ness) and deal with that.

If something is in your life that doesn’t serve you, I challenge you to look again. I’d wager it actually does serve a purpose. Only when you look at what that purpose is will you be able to change.