We've got the concept of change wrong

Baring mutation, genetic engineering, and plastic surgery, voluntary self-supported behavioral change does not involve the synthesis of entirely novel traits or capacity.

I've always maintained the position that people don't change. I know... you could swear you have gazillion examples of people who have changed including yourself! Let me explain myself further.

First, because of this simple belief, rooted at once in experience and logic, that people don't change, I'm genuinely surprised and positively impressed when I do come across or witness someone who appears to have managed to achieve a positive (or negative) shift in their usual pattern of living and relating. This extreme pessimism paradoxically keeps me grounded as a psychologist as well as a human being. I'm never much surprised when people are being people nor too disappointed when people are unable to change their metaphorical skin.

Second, if people do change as a matter of course, then the field of applied psychology (and psychotherapy in particular) should have been able to come up with a routinely effective formula for actively and deliberately making people change. We know we're not even close to this! Rather, what we do know is that psychotherapy and other macro change systems at group or society levels routinely fail at achieving this goal. And of course, when this happens we blame not the system but the subject.

So how do you then explain the often observed and reported phenomenon of people who "appear to have achieved a positive shift in their usual pattern of living and relating"? The fallacy of people changing is a consequence of how we understand and talk about the concept of [behavioral] change. When people talk about change, usually they mean one of these two processes:

🔸A <=> B

🔸A <=> AB

In both scenarios, change is conceived of as something entirely novel appearing in the subject or something very familiar regressing into something entirely novel. A new trait, a new attitude, a new capacity, a new interest, etc. I contend that this kind of change rarely ever happens and that this is not the true nature of individual process of change. The above understanding is what is responsible for most of the confusion and puzzles and frustration we often encounter when observing and talking about the phenomenon of behavioral change in humans.

There's no doubt that people do evolve (and this isn't the same thing as "change") or regress. And evolution, as is well known, doesn't happen through the instrument of elements entirely alien to the evolving organism. “Evolution” or devolution, seen through the lens of an individual’s progression through life, works primarily on the basis of environmental forces acting upon genetic materials and, baring some mutational anomaly, tends to be directional and continuous along developmental pathways genetically established. This is the core of the principle of natural selection or survival of the fittest: the environment constantly varies in ways that favors or demands the activation of certain class of characteristics/traits. Those whose genetic base configuration lacks the emergent capacity to fashion these functional requirements will struggle to adapt or adjust to these dynamic shifts in environmental properties.

But, contrary to the above and normative conceptualization of the change process, this is how I imagine "change" occurs:

🔸Ab <=> aB

🔸AB <=> ab

🔸Aa <=> AA

How is this different from the common conception denoted earlier? You'd observe that in the second illustration, none of the "new" state is indeed new in the sense of something emerging out of nothing. There is a recessive capacity only waiting for the right time, right condition, right pressure, or right influence to come online.

Thus, I conceive psychobehavioral "change" as something that we observe when someone discovers/activates a latent/dormant capacity or when someone exhausts/suppresses/deactivate previously dominant tendencies. This is largely the reason why the same techniques of change don't work with everyone. It is the reason why some people find it quite easy to self-transform while others don't quite achieve this. And it is the reason why sometimes radical acceptance of who one is is a legitimate therapeutic goal.

I have treated this topic in an essay-length writeup here. You may check it out if you’re interested in seeing my argument here fleshed out in more detail.