Photo on Pexels by Jill Wellington
Happy New Year, everyone —
I was taking a walk in a park two days ago and almost everyone around me was talking to another person about either something that was really bothering them—there was a lot of gesticulating and audible growling happening—or about their goals or intentions for the new year. It was a clear sunny morning. Hearing that everyone was pretty much doing the same thing at the same time made me feel we were in communion, even as we were separate.
It also made me reflect on the way the dominant culture tells us how to do behavior change. First, celebrate. Second, stay up late and drink. The next day, get up, set your intentions, and then declare to others your resolve in making these changes. The day after that, start implementing the changes. Repeat, for the next 364 days.
What’s been striking me is that everyone knows at some level that this is a horrible way to do behavior change. It’s almost guaranteed to fail. Nevertheless, at least according to my statistically unsound sample of walkers, and the exhortations in my inbox and other media, it seems a lot of people are still actually following this script for change.
This brought me to a bittersweet recognition: people really do long for change. We have an entire day when almost everything closes down so that people can reflect, with the hope that they’ll consider how they can make something better. We’ve normalized it, which in some ways dulls its power. There is tremendous potential here: what might happen if people were taught what it actually takes to make a change, and what might it take to have that change be about more than simple self-improvement? And here’s the bittersweet part—what is the consequence of having a cultural map for change that contains within it an expectation of failure? What are we teaching ourselves about how easy or difficult change should be?
Here’s the thing: determining what you should change, and then telling other people you are going to make a change, is an act of tremendous vulnerability. We are publicly describing something about ourselves that is painful to acknowledge, or we’re letting others hear about our dreams and what we wish we could create, or we’re sharing our heartbreak about how others are treated and our hopes to restore justice. There’s a wistfulness, here, even in sharing with another person that we’re going to embark on a change. It’s risky. We need a nest to cocoon our future dashed hopes.
There isn’t much attention given to the fact that in announcing our resolutions, we are simultaneously announcing our needs. These needs generate hope, fear, uncertainty, loss, desire. The naming of needs often brings us into direct contact with how we were treated as a child when we tried to tell someone we needed something, or we didn’t like something about ourselves, or that someone else had pointed out our flaws.
You can see it behind someone’s eyes, or in the way they control the edges of their mouth when they tell you what they’re going to change. You can see the adult who had power over the child; see them standing there, or reaching out, or ridiculing them, or walking away. That’s all in there, when people think about whether they want to change and whether they think they’ll succeed. To be witnessed as we acknowledge our needs is an act of courage. But too often, the fear of ridicule by others forecloses the change process before it starts.
There’s something of a wish-fulfillment in this idea that we can decide to change in one day and execute it the next, and the friction and resistance will just fall away, like tall grass in late summer, laying flat under our boots. It’s change-by-fiat: a declaration, followed by force of will and endurance.
Most people are surprised when I tell them the research on behavior change shows that self-punishment is not an effective tool for change. Anyone with an anti-authoritarian streak already knows this: tell me I can’t, or I have to, and all my force and energy will go in the opposite direction.
So there’s the resistance to the inner voice that demands we obey. That’s one block to change. But another difficulty is that because we have this story that the decision to change comes from the head, and the execution of the change from the will and the drive, that if the change is a rational good, it actually shouldn’t be that hard to implement. The model of the New Year’s Resolution does an end run around the vulnerability and the feelings that change evokes, and thus doesn’t account for how intrinsic they are in making a change stick.
In my own life, I’ve found a decision I make from my mind or my will feels categorically different from one I make from my center or my body. I’ve had times when my body makes a decision that “I” don’t actually want to deal with, but the change has already happened, outside my thinking self. It’s just done, and announces itself in my gut, or my breath, and I have to accept it, because there’s no going back to the former state. I can’t explain how this happens; I just know what it’s like.
Sometimes I make a decision from my mind, but my body isn’t into it. I push myself; I use my tricks; I can go for a time this way, but it doesn’t last. Often, I’m sad to admit, my inner longing and self-knowing are recommending one course of action, but my obedience to norms and expectations mandates I take a different direction.
There’s a third leg to this triad: the pull to access the fire and energy of creativity, which is often counter to both my embodied knowing and my productive goals. I talk frequently with people who are making, creating, conjuring, and many of them are afraid of this energy, in part because of how disembodied it is. Connecting to it is like plugging an old Apple charger into divine fire. They’re afraid if they give into it, it will take over every aspect of their life and they’ll lose the people they love, or their capacity to meet their basic needs.
I know other people have figured out how to integrate the spiritual, the creative, the embodied self; the witness, who holds all of it and is outside its permutations; the self that’s aligned with culture; the self that wants nothing other than pure solitude. I know that Western culture is in me, teaching me to break Being into pieces, and that this is part of why I buy into the misguided belief that I can make a change from one part of myself and demand the other parts fall in line. How can we talk about change in a way that allows for all aspects of Being to be in communion with one other? How can we hold the vulnerability of the child self and the ambition of the adult self in the same moment? What kind of support can we give one another, as we do this?
The way we talk about resolutions doesn’t recognize the power and vulnerability evoked by the longing for change. What’s needed are conversations that take into account what change demands, from all aspects of the self; how iterative the process of change actually is; how to anticipate and work through our resistance, which can deepen our commitment to change; and how to maintain that commitment when an unanticipated crisis throws us off course.
We aren’t normalizing the fact that individuals can engage in structural change as much as self-improvement, and that individual change occurs in the context of systems that often are not working on our behalf. The dominant culture, which contributes to and reinforces the status quo, doesn’t represent structural change as the responsibility of the individual because it is not in its interest to remind citizens that we can prevent and contest structural violence; that we can refuse to participate in acts of extraction and exploitation that destroy ecosystems; that if people had a fuller understanding of what change work looks like, they wouldn’t fear it so much.
Many cultures in the US and elsewhere demystify structural change and make it ordinary—not easy, but part of everyday life. But white culture, which is most mirrored by the dominant culture, and most benefits from the current allocation of resources and power, cordons off the structural from the individual, seeing the self as only really capable of individual change. I think that’s part of why this year, when it’s clear just how much structural change must happen, and fast, I’m seeing so many articles encouraging people to think smaller, when they think about what they want to change, in order to protect themselves from inevitable disappointment. I find it fascinating to consider these articles not as friendly advice, but rather as tutelage: cautioning me not to see myself as capable of making enormous change, not to ask what I need to know in order to move forward, in tension with a culture that benefits if I feel powerless and weak.
I want to see more vibrant examples of change that take my breath away and teach me how to do it, too; how to join in and be useful in movements and everyday projects that are already occurring. I want to be with people who teach me to enhance my endurance and show me how to change from the unified aspects of my being. I want to read aloud the stories of the peoples who have been doing this for eons.
Here’s to a New Year full of considered, supported, and extravagant change, steeped in longing, desire, and hope.
Stay safe out there this week —
xo
Rebecca