Stop Trying to Change: A New Year's Paradox
On making resolutions and Arnold Beisser’s Paradoxical Theory of Change
January is the season of resolutions, and the resolutions tend to follow a familiar shape. We are going to be different. Stronger, leaner, kinder, more patient. We will force the change through. It is worth pausing on this approach, because there is a quietly contradictory idea at the heart of one of Gestalt therapy's most cited papers, and it has something to say about why our resolutions so often collapse by February.
The paper is Arnold Beisser's 'The Paradoxical Theory of Change', published in 1970. Beisser was an American psychiatrist whose understanding of human transformation came out of an unlikely place. He had graduated from Stanford Medical School and won a national tennis title before he was twenty-five. He was about to report for duty in the army when, in 1950, he contracted polio. Within a short time he could not stand, walk, sit, eat, drink, or breathe on his own. He was permanently paralysed from the neck down and dependent on an iron lung. He went on, from this position, to write, teach, and practise as a psychiatrist for the rest of his life.
It was out of this experience that Beisser articulated what he called the paradoxical theory of change. The central proposition is simple. Change occurs when one becomes what one is, not when one tries to become what one is not. For a man who had lost every physical aspect of his former life, this was not theory. It was something he had been forced to find his way to.
Somewhere along the way Beisser must have come up against the recognition that fighting reality was exhausting him without changing anything. Only by accepting what he had become, by inhabiting his new circumstances rather than raging against them, could he begin to discover what was still possible from where he actually was.
This has implications for how we approach change in our own lives. We frame our resolutions as battles against our present selves. We will overcome our weaknesses through determination. Beisser's suggestion is that this framing is part of what keeps us stuck. The more we disown aspects of our experience in order to force a change, the more internal resistance we generate.
The alternative is not passivity. It is what Gestalt therapy calls heightening awareness of what is. By acknowledging and inhabiting our present experience, including our cravings, our fears, our familiar patterns, we create the ground from which change can actually happen. The smoker who pays close, curious attention to her desire to smoke, rather than fighting it, may notice something about the desire that shifts her relationship to it. Acceptance, in this sense, is not approval. It is contact with what is actually there.
It should be said that some contemporary writers have questioned how universally this theory applies, particularly in work with trauma, where the nervous system may be so dysregulated that the capacity for self-regulation is compromised. In those cases, preparatory work is often needed before paradoxical change becomes possible. The point still holds. We cannot get to somewhere else without first being properly in contact with where we are.
So if you are turning over the question of what you want to be different this year, Beisser's theory offers a slightly different angle. The deepest change available may not come from fighting against yourself. It may come from the harder, less heroic work of acknowledging where you actually are. In his own words, the contrast between winner and loser is in our minds much more than in our circumstances. Change begins, paradoxically, with acceptance.
Reference
Beisser, A, The Paradoxical Theory of Change (1970)
