It can be really hard to make sustained changes in our lives. What seems to be relatively easy to achieve, perhaps with a little more focus or a little more sweat, mostly turns out to be harder than we expected. Faced with unexpected difficulties, we can become frustrated and dispirited. We can find that our resilience gets eroded in the process.

Nature of Change

But there is cause for optimism. We can make sustained changes without heroic amounts of effort if we develop a better understanding of the mechanics of change and respond from that place of deeper understanding. 

The key thing to understand, care of systems theory and ecosystemic psychology, is that there are two forces at play in our lives at all times. 

  • Morphogenesis. This force drives the quest for improvement
  • Morphostasis. This other force drives the quest for stability. 

These two forces act in different directions, one pushing and the other pulling. If we understand this, we can approach our desire for change with greater compassion for ourselves and with greater optimism.

Both of these forces are necessary and each has its role to play in ensuring that complex systems such as we human beings are able to survive and thrive. We need to achieve maintenance and stability in the context of change, which we do by resisting or rejecting some change. And we need to achieve improvement and enhancement in the context of stability, which we do by accepting some change. 

We need to be both closed and open, or more precisely we need to find a dynamic balance between rejecting and accepting change that is appropriate for the context in which we find ourselves.

Without the awareness of these dual forces, we tend to round up the usual suspects to achieve change. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn:

  • Intention
  • Motivation
  • Effort. 

Intention

Self-help books suggest that if we crisply define and articulate our intentions, then we will be able to make the change happen and last. Except that the mere setting of intentions alone doesn’t do the trick. 

Most of us at some point in our lives will have made explicit our intentions to achieve something, perhaps to lose 5 kilograms by the start of summer. That’s a clearly defined intention. 

We may even lose those 5 kilos, but in no time at all we magically seem to have regained them plus a few extra. The setting of intention can make change happen, but it seldom sustains the change.

Motivation

Another shelf in the self-help section of the bookshop will contain suggestions that motivation is what is required, the more intense the better. There is probably no more intense motivation available to human beings than the threat of ill-health and early death, yet even this seems to be insufficient to get us to make lasting change. 

In one of many similar studies amongst a group of people who were advised to quit smoking as a way to prevent cardiovascular disease, 62% of the group relapsed within two weeks of their quit date. 

In another study, even after twelve full months of continuous abstinence, 43% of people who had quit returned to regular smoking. Motivation, even of the most intense sort, doesn’t bring about sustained change.

Effort

The next brief stop on this slippery slope is effort. Surely, we say, we could achieve more if we just tried harder, just like we were probably told a few times during our school careers. I know I was, often. This continues to be a powerful socially-validated injunction, that exerting effort is good and will bring about lasting change. 

Most of us can generate intense effort for short bursts, but sustaining this over longer periods is far more tricky. And all the muscular efforting is not terribly effective. It’s as if we somehow invoke Newton’s Third Law of Motion, that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. The harder we try, the harder it becomes.

These usual suspects get a lot of unwarranted shelf-space, but that’s not where it ends. If we do as the self-help books say and it still doesn’t work, then we come to the insidious and corrosive conclusion that we ourselves are somehow defective or weak. As this conclusion takes root in our inner worlds, we wind up worse off than before we started trying to make positive changes in our lives.  

But if we are aware that there are always the dual forces of morphogenesis and morphostasis at play, then this really need not be our conclusion. The path that we choose need not end in frustration and self-recrimination if we understand this paradox: As much as we are committed to changing, we are always also committed to not changing.

One of the reasons that morphostasis can kick in is that we might subconsciously and correctly intuit that we don’t yet have the capacity to cope with the very change that we seek. If we try to hurry it along, recklessly pressing the accelerator, the brakes will automatically be applied with matching pressure. 

But if we shift our attention to developing our capacity to cope with change, then the brakes can be naturally released a little and we can move forward into a new balance between the always-present dual forces.

Inner Posture

A correlate of our capacity for change is the state of our inner posture. When our internal world is constricted and resistant, or punitive and aggressive, that inner posture virtually ensures that we will remain stuck in deadlock between seeking and resisting change. We generate lots of activity but no movement. But when we become a little more still and centred, we can make space around our knots and entanglements into which they can be released to dissolve. 

This allows us to approach a more fluid and compassionate state where change can take place naturally and organically, where we are more powerful but have less need of force. When we expand our capacity to cope with change, we become more able to thrive in the midst of change and bring about sustainable change.

Reflection

  • Where are you seeking change, but finding it difficult?
  • In what ways do you find yourself self-sabotaging your own efforts?
  • What capacity might you begin to build that would allow forward movement?

References

  • Justin Newdigate: Noise (2019)
  • Dorothy Becvar: Family Therapy, A Systemic Integration (2009)
  • Peter Senge: The Fifth Discipline (1992)
  • AJ Garvey: Addictive Behaviours, Volume 17 (1992)
  • US Department of Health and Human Services: A Report of the Surgeon General (1990)