It’s an interesting question. Since clients know they want to change, and often know how they want to change, why don’t they?
There’s a more complex answer to this, but let’s start with the simple one. They do. Most of the changes our clients make are changes we never get to see.
Our clients are powerful people. They make changes in life all the time. For our clients, change is easy – except when it isn’t.
When it isn’t, they seek our help. Even then, they could change without us. After all, the mechanism of change is memory reconsolidation. Everyone’s brain has that.
Our job is to make the process of triggering memory reconsolidation more efficient. That’s why getting help can make achieving change easier.
The key part of that process is figuring out how the resistance to change makes sense. This won’t be obvious to you or your client at first.
When change is easy, we simply make the change. It is so effortless as to feel almost mundane.
When change is hard, there is a good reason for that.
Our client says “I want this change! I no longer want this problem!”
Their nervous system responds: “yeah, you might want that, but I predict that if I let you have it, you’ll get an even worse problem.”
It’s hard to defeat your nervous system. Your nervous system’s job is to keep you alive. No wonder it fights you if it notices you stepping towards unsafety.
Getting to these core predictions of safety is a key part of our work. Until we discover these, we aren’t ready to set up mismatches that will remove and update the prediction.
So let’s summarise the answers to the question of why our clients don’t change without us:
- They can and do because most change is effortless for them.
- They can and do because their brains have the ability.
- There is a core prediction around safety that is keeping their problem alive.
When change is hard, we can help our clients discover these predictions, and then use memory reconsolidation to update them.
Without these old predictions, change becomes effortless.
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