Can People Change?
"We ask, typically and acutely, when we’re in a relationship with someone who is inflicting a great deal of pain on us: someone who is refusing to open their hearts or can never stop lying, someone who is aggressive or detached, someone who is harming themselves or managing to devastate us. We ask too because the one immediately obvious response to frustration isn’t in this case open to us: we’re not able to simply get up and go, we are too emotionally or practically invested to give up, something roots us to the spot...
One thing is likely already to be evident to us: even if people can change, they certainly don’t change easily. Maybe they flare up every time we raise an issue and accuse us of being cruel or dogmatic; maybe they break down late at night and admit they have a problem but by morning..
We might ask a prior question: is it even OK to want someone to change? The implication from those who generate trouble for us is, most often, an indignant ‘no’. ‘Love me for who I am’ is their mantra. But considered more imaginatively, only a perfect human would ever deny that they might need to grow a little in order more richly to deserve the love of another...
Why might change be so hard? In other words, the unchanging person doesn’t only lack knowledge, they are vigorously committed to not acquiring it. And they resist it because they are fleeing from something extraordinarily painful in their past that they were originally too weak or helpless to face...
very importantly, we might not stick around as long as we often do. We should at this juncture perhaps ask ourselves a question that may feel at once unfair and rather tough: given how clear the evidence is of a lack of change in a certain person, and hence of a lack of realistic hope that our needs are going to be met any time soon, why are we still here? What broken part of us can’t leave a lack of fulfilment alone?
We may need to rebuild our minds in order – with time – to change into people who don’t wonder for too long if, and when, people might change."
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