Reflections On Change

Some perspectives on change from Paul Gillis, Project Officer & Gambling Counsellor for the Illawarra Gambling Assessment and Treatment Program, Warrawong Community Health Centre—an Illawarra Area Health Service.

When thinking about the subject of change I remembered a line I’d once read that was written by the renowned Taoist LaoTzu in the Tao Te Ching. It went something like ‘the only constant in life is that it keeps changing’.

This thought certainly expresses one of the great truths and the paradoxes about change in our lives. It is well recognized in the behavioral sciences that big changes result in the most stress that people experience in life and I guess this is only natural.

This does however raise a number of questions about why people have so much trouble coping with change, why we are so often ill prepared for it, and why are we so poor at managing change when it happens. This article is a very brief attempt to examine some of these questions.

Most of us want changes to be on our terms, in line with our hopes and aspirations, and we want them to occur in an orderly fashion. It seems that even though this is how we want change to be it is usually a lot messier and more difficult than this. Career changes, taking up new activities, children growing up, moving house, etc, all involve big changes in our lives.

Making internal changes is something we also often hear people talking about and is also something that is rarely a straightforward process. Things like, making new years resolutions, giving up some undesirable habit, or just trying to be different in some way because there is something in ourselves that we want to change.

There are also unpredictable changes that result from events that happen to us or happen to people close to us. These are often totally different types of change experiences when compared to those that we have had an opportunity to give some forethought to.

Ultimately and at some deep level we are the same person now that we were on the day we were born and presumably this part does not fundamentally change. Occasionally we may become aware of this sense of ourselves, but in the face of change, it is a bit much to expect to be able to call on this sense of ourselves at will.

Of course there are lots of things and influences that make up the entity of a person including, conditioning, hereditary traits, desires and appetites, sexuality, beliefs and values, the physical self and probably lots more. It seems more the norm that change highlights issues in these aspects of ourselves and we often want to make changes in these areas of ourselves.

We also have functional parts of our makeup that we have to work with on a day-to-day level. These we could classify as our thinking, our feelings and our practical selves.

These are probably the most available resources we have to deal with change and they are also parts of ourselves that can change in the sense of growth, learning skills and developing understanding. Using these parts of ourselves, and using them effectively, is not simple or easy. It requires work, learning, practice, trial and error, and more.

Change is going into the unknown because we cannot know fully what it will be like when change has occurred or what we are going to experience when going through the change process. We also don’t fully know what is going to happen when the forces in us that resist change are awakened. Change also highlights things in us like our inadequacies that are not apparent when our lives are running smoothly.

All these things are difficult and confronting on multiple levels but it doesn’t change the inescapable fact that it is up to us all as individuals how we respond to change in ourselves or in our external lives.

We could come up with a thousand scenarios about possible changes here and each one could highlight ways we could be tested. For example, implementing a plan from our thinking that we have limited practical capacity to achieve, or facing a life event that we can’t make sense of from a rational perspective. Others could include dealing with a change in someone close to us that brings up unfamiliar emotions in ourselves, coming to terms with a new life stage that we have little experience of, etc.

What then is the best approach to change? Perhaps we could take a leaf out of Lao Tzu’s book to look at this question. At the time I read Lao Tzu’s words the reason they struck me was that I was going through some pretty big and unplanned for life changes myself. Reading these words helped, simply because they normalized what was happening.

When we look around, change is happening to everyone. If change is a constant perhaps the lesson is to be constantly preparing for it, aware of it, and working through the subtle little changes that are part of the big ones.

Perhaps it is the wrong perspective to view change as something that only happens at certain stages of life or when something unexpected happens, and the rest of the time we can forget about dealing with it. This approach would require vigilance, persistence, planning, goal setting, self-monitoring and other skills. If we take this approach, change may not come as such a shock or be so difficult to manage at the time.

Perhaps seeing change as a constant is more the way it is, the objective view of change. Perhaps adopting this attitude would help us become more objective to ourselves and our situations.

There is a big difference between subjective experience and an objective happening or event. Objective experience is what in reality happens and subjective experience is how we personally experience the effects of events on us.

We can often be more objective to others because it is difficult for us to be objective to ourselves. An example of being more objective is to see there have been thousands of other people who would have successfully been through similar experiences to our own or worse and that we can learn from these people’s experience when negotiating our own changes.

Change therefore is inevitable and it is going to happen to us whether we like it or not. The choice we have is whether we are going to accept it and deal with it’s effects on us or not.

If we don’t face the changes we need to make it can only lead to a build up of further consequences and problems that are going to be more difficult to manage. Whatever attitude we adopt is a choice that we make and any change can be viewed as an opportunity or a problem, a challenge or a setback.

At the fundamental level managing change requires us all to change our attitudes from reactive and negative attitudes to positive attitudes that motivate us through change. We can change anger to acceptance, frustration to calm or patience, being fixed to flexible. For every negative there is always a positive. These positives then become the results of change and the outcome of accepting the challenge.

Human beings grow or evolve through different stages of life. At each of these stages we leave behind certain things and take on the responsibility of moving onto the next stage. We leave behind being fed to using our hands to feed ourselves. We leave behind an egocentric view of the world and move on to a view that understands other people’s perspective. We leave behind dependence on our parents when we leave home and take on the responsibility of independence, we leave behind the freedoms of a single life when we get married and take on the responsibilities of children.

All these changes require growth and development and these are not always as apparent as they might seem and they don’t all happen automatically. Leaving home physically for example is straightforward compared to leaving home emotionally. Walking down the aisle is easy compared to living up to the commitments of married life etc. We may have left behind an egocentric view of the world but how often do we revert to this when faced with difficult circumstances.

If we did change our attitudes, change would be viewed differently. It would become a necessary part of life that provides us with the opportunity for growth and understanding of ourselves. It would be viewed as the force against which we can test ourselves, learn to extend ourselves and hopefully tap into resources in ourselves we otherwise may not have known about.

‘Every day is a winding road’ is a line from a song on the radio at the moment and probably reflects a good attitude to have to change. Life itself is also a bit of a winding road and although it may involve the negotiation of lots of changes it may also be helpful to remember that unchanging part of all of us that makes us who we are. From this perspective I’m sure we also wouldn’t take our selves and our lives quite so seriously, after all we’re all just passing through.

Please let us know whether the information on this page was useful.

 Not Helpful  1   2   3   4   5  Very Helpful

Comments:

Disclaimer - The opinions expressed in this website are not necessarily those held by the Gambling Impact Society (NSW) Inc. No responsibility will be accepted for anything that may occur as a result of anyone relying on the information and opinions contained in the website.