The Loss in Progress
There’s a beguiling idea that personal development should be a steady upwards ascent, and it’s often presented as such in content that focuses on ‘optimization’ and the like. In my experience, genuine change more often involves lurching, uneven progress, with pockets of regression along the way.
Some of the reasons for this are pretty straightforward. First off, we’re usually motivated to change because the wheels are coming off in some area. The origin point of change is often pain. Research suggests that the most fundamental human motivation is not to seek ease or pleasure, but rather to alleviate discomfort. If you’ve ever stood on a Lego brick in your bare feet you’ll understand the swiftness of the human desire to alleviate pain.
In his book Indestractible Nir Eyal says that
“All motivation is a desire to escape discomfort. If a behaviour was previously effective at providing relief, we’re likely to continue using it as a tool to escape discomfort.”
It’s only once the cost starts to outweigh the benefit, do we begin to question the behaviour.
Therefore, the starting point itself is often rough terrain. We’re rarely motivated to change out of pure driven righteousness. There is nothing more ‘motivating’ than a health scare in overhauling exercise or nutrition, or financial distress to address problematic spending patterns. The truth is there’s often a reactive, sometimes even desperate, aspect to change.
We don’t change until staying the same becomes untenable.
Secondly, change in and of itself involves going against our internal grain. If we’ve been conditioned to keep quiet, then beginning to speak up - even in the mildest ways - will feel unnatural and aggressive. If we’re been raised to believe our purpose is to serve others, then to assert the most basic boundary will feel selfish and shameful. Alongside our own internal resistance, we’re quite likely to experience push-back from others who’ve benefitted from our old patterns too.
All of this is fairly straightforward, but one aspect of internal positive change that I don’t think we give enough attention to is the feeling of loss it can bring.
If I’m trying to make things better, where does the loss come in?
By its very nature, coaching attracts people with the motivation and ability to introspect, and the desire to influence their own outcomes. People often come to coaching at a juncture, with the express intent of changing old patterns, and creating new opportunities for themselves.
Why then, even when we show up willing and able, is change so hard?
I’ve seen that when we change anything - even when the change represents a conscious, intentional improvement, it still involves a sense of loss. Genuine change requires the loss of the identity of the person we were, who formed the patterns we’re now trying to disrupt. The truth is, we usually formed them for good reason, in the beginning, and it can require some level of grieving to let this pattern go.
Often, some part of us will strengthen under stress. If we’ve come through serious adversity - and all of us do at some stage - we will, consciously or unconsciously, develop a strategy to survive, and to protect ourselves. If we’ve been in an unhappy or abusive relationship, we might (even unconsciously) keep others - particularly partners - at arm’s length moving forward. If we experience some form of relational danger as a pervasive pattern in childhood, this will infiltrate our attachment system, causing us to develop problematic relationship habits that will persist into adulthood. If we grew up with a sense of having to earn a parent’s approval, we might in response develop a powerful pattern of overachieving at any cost, and so on.
These experiences sometimes happen before we even have language, and are therefore embedded into our implicit memory - imprinted into the nervous system at a level well below our conscious awareness. No wonder it can be so hard to change.
Additionally, we’ll usually have formed our patterns for good reason. If we witnessed a trait - such as weakness - being rejected or punished in our family, we’ll disown our own weaknesses. In his book Already Free, Bruce Tift describes the paradox of change as follows:
“Something that I find all the time in my work is that we all seem as adults to want to resolve our neuroses, our limitations, but we don’t understand that we have an incredible investment in maintaining them. In maintaining our young survival strategies, because they were put into place for our own survival and wellbeing and protection...
So in a therapeutic session, a lot of times there’s this exact same process where somebody claims that they want to change their habitual patterns, but when we actually start to investigate what would be required, which is to feel exactly the feelings that that person has dedicated their life to avoiding, when that starts to become experientially clear, of course a lot of very mixed feelings come up.”
What does this look like?
Let’s take the example of perfectionism. Most of us would now recognise that calling ourselves a perfectionist is not the badge of honour we once thought. We have at least some awareness of the costs involved - the self-sacrifice, people-pleasing, overburdening and burnout.
It would seem welcome, therefore, to take the foot off the pedal. Where’s the downside?
The loss, in this instance, would be both of the (impossibly) high standards we strive for in perfectionism, and, even more so, the loss of the identity of somebody “perfect”. If we’ve embraced perfectionism as a strategy, it will have been for good reason. Somewhere along the line, often way back in childhood, we’ll have gotten the message that we need to hustle for love, acceptance, or belonging. We’re not good enough as we are - we need to endlessly strive, control and prove our worth.
The truth is that we can spend the rest of our lives in this state. Nobody is coming to stop us. People in our work or personal lives might even encourage it, if they profit from this overfunctioning. We need to take an honest inventory of what is keeping us in perfectionism, and weigh the benefits we have to forsake, whatever they are, alongside the costs.
We don’t continue any behaviour unless it benefits us in some way, even if the benefits are somewhat shadowy. In this instance, running ourselves into the ground might alleviate some unconscious fear of being inherently flawed, or just not good enough, whatever that means to us.
So if I say I want to work on my perfectionism, where, in reality, am I willing to let things slide? Where am I willing to turn a blind eye? Where can I let my own standards drop? And how will I deal with the existential panic that changing this behaviour will inevitably bring up?
When we speak about the “comfort zone”, we take that to mean true comfort, where in fact a more accurate description would be the familiarity zone. We can be “comfortable” in toxic or distressing situations, if they are familiar enough to us. Setting unrealistic standards, feeling constantly harassed and overburdened, and running on a relentless treadmill of over-functioning will in its own way feel familiar, and weirdly comfortable, if that’s what we’ve been doing for years.
No wonder then it feels so difficult to change.
Change, in this case, would require the loss of a decades-old strategy originally designed to keep us safe. The initial, legitimate trigger - such as feeling we needed to be the good girl or boy for our parent’s approval - may be long gone, but the pattern remains. Losing the strategy might feel like the loss of a part of ourselves - a part that developed in response to a very real sense of threat or necessity we experienced in the past. The danger may be long gone, and the strategy taking its toll, and the protective part of us worn out, and still this pattern will persist until we do the work to soften it at its origin point.
I have a deep respect for the parts of us that have struggled so hard to keep us safe. IFS therapy recognises the inherent goodness of the parts of us that step in to deal with the struggles we go through, and the strategies we create, even when the outcomes are no longer working for us. We need to work with the vulnerable parts of ourselves that formed these strategies, updating our entire system with the felt sense of safety that’s available to us as adults in trusting relationships, and emboldening ourselves to take the risks worth taking for meaningful contributions in the world.
Genuine progress involves a commitment to wobble our way through some small, genuine changes in behaviour, and the willingness to let go and grieve whatever part of us set up our patterns as they currently are, dealing with the unfelt feelings that caused this strategy in the first place. Unless we address the origin of our strategies at the root, any change is likely to be superficial.
Deep change, even for the better, requires a letting go of the past version of ourselves and the sometimes impossible goals they set, alongside the embrace of a better choice for the future. Acknowledging that there may be some loss involved - even if it’s of a past part of ourselves that deserves to be unburdened - can truthfully bring up some sadness. The more we can deal with the full spectrum of the emotions of change, the more likely we are to experience true transformation, and to treat ourselves with a little patience and compassion as it happens.
