To Change Is to Stay First
By Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Leah’s eight-year-old son, Tom, comes home from school in tears. Most of his class has been invited on a weekend trip—except him. Leah does what many of us instinctively try first: “It’s not a big deal; we can do something fun,” she says, offering distraction, a bright tone, reassurance. But nothing shifts. Tom withdraws even more.
Then she tries something else. “Not being invited really hurt your feelings, didn’t it?” she says. And something changes. Tom begins to soften. He talks. His mood seems to reorganise itself without pep talks, strategies, or clever reframes.
This moment reveals something fundamental about how we change on the inside. A shift happens not because we push it, but because we see and allow what’s real. There’s a paradox here: the more we try to force ourselves out of a state, such as sadness, anxiety, shame, the more entrenched it becomes. Our emotions and thoughts transform the moment we stop fighting our experience and begin to allow it. Inner change resists forcing.
In 1970, psychiatrist and Gestalt therapist Arnold Beisser named this tension the Paradoxical Theory of Change. He wrote that “change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not.”
This might sound like something you’d find stitched on a throw pillow—or dismissed as woo woo self-help sentiment—but it’s deeper than that. T
Beisser wasn’t arguing for passive acceptance or blind self-love. He was pointing to a mechanism of psychological change that many practitioners witnessed in the therapy room. That change, paradoxically, happens not through relentless striving toward an ideal state, but through fully inhabiting our current one.
Much mainstream advice about change assumes that if we push hard enough in the “better” direction, the old state will disappear. And sometimes that’s true, especially for certain habits. You can set a timer, move your phone, or lay out gym clothes to change behaviour. In competitive sports, too, it might be the right approach.
But when it comes to psychological change—around identity, grief, anxiety, or complex behavioural patterns—“be different now” can actually reinforce what’s already there and backfire. The harder we strain to feel different, the more stuck we become.
In one study, participants who actively tried to suppress thoughts about smoking actually experienced more frequent and intense cravings, which led to increased cigarette consumption compared to those who did not try to suppress their thoughts. Deliberate efforts to avoid or control unwanted thoughts paradoxically made them more persistent and intrusive. This finding aligns closely with the idea that resistance deepens the struggle, while letting go of resistance can create space for real change.
Most clients come to therapy wanting to change, usually by getting rid of some feeling, thought, or behaviour they see as a problem. But if we focus only on that desire, we risk ignoring the part of them that's invested in staying the same. Often, they're caught in an internal tug-of-war: longing for change while also resisting it. If we push too hard toward change, we can unintentionally strengthen their resistance.
So, instead of jumping to solutions or coping strategies, we stay with “what is”—to explore the full complexity of the person in front of us, including what the unwanted (or the disowned) part might mean, protect, or cost to let go.
This is one of the core ideas in many relational and humanistic therapies. The therapist isn't a fixer. "Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world," Archimedes famously declared. The therapist serves as the lever. Their job isn't to change people but to meet them exactly where they are, trusting that change occurs as a side effect of growth. And growth happens when we make full contact with our experience—either on our own or with the help of someone else, just as Leah helped Tom connect with his inner experience. Because the idea is that the more we try to be something we’re not, the more we stay stuck.
This might seem counterintuitive because the goal of psychotherapy is psychological change. But change doesn’t happen through persuasion, insight, or quickly reaching for the other pole of the undesired state: what could be different, what’s better, what’s wanted. It begins when someone is willing to let go—at least temporarily—of the image of who they think they should be or what they should feel, and instead turn toward who they actually are. Like needing to plant your feet before taking a step, we need grounding in what’s real before any movement is possible.
Growth happens after allowing what is. Change unfolds by staying there long enough. With that acceptance, an exploration begins. The person begins to understand the costs of their present patterns and recognises the need for something different. This awareness creates more choice about what's possible and a greater capacity to entertain other ways of being. And because they stop the battle, they now have more internal resources to focus on what actually matters.
This dynamic shows up everywhere.
Grief doesn't soften because we tell ourselves to "move on." It shifts when we allow the empty chair, the changed routines, the unexpected wave of emotion. Recovery from addiction often begins not with grit, but with surrender—the moment someone stops saying "I'm okay" and starts admitting, in painful detail, what's actually happening and what it's costing them. Burnout doesn't fade because we push harder. It begins to move when we say, "I dread opening my laptop every morning."
This attitude breaks the spell of pretending. It provides us with clarity to see our choices. And it frees up energy to do something different.
Even physical healing starts this way. "The bone is broken. I can't keep running on it," is what moves us toward healing. Not, "It's fine, I'll just push through."
Are these at odds with behavioural interventions? In a sense, yes. Behavioural methods can be effective, but relying on them too early, or too directly, can be counterproductive. They can unintentionally short-circuit a client’s process of self-recognition and acceptance. Clients may interpret the introduction of active techniques as a subtle message: You need to be fixed. This can amplify feelings of guilt, shame, or inadequacy. It can also create the impression that the therapist holds the solution, knows the desired outcome, and is here to guide the client toward it—whether the client is ready or not.
Perhaps we might question not the value of strategies themselves, but the timing and attitude behind their use. What if, regardless of how we aim to change behaviour or thought patterns, we began from a place that doesn’t demand improvement right away? What if we began with an atmosphere that allows what’s here, first?
This isn’t just about therapy. In daily life, we often jump to fixing: changing routines, improving habits, pushing for a better mindset, trying to think and feel positive. But when we do that without first acknowledging what’s really going on, and by rejecting of our inner experiences, the changes tend to be surface-level or short-lived. Starting with acceptance doesn’t mean giving up on change. It means giving change something real to work with.
This paradox around change extends even to our most cherished emotional goals like happiness. The more we try to feel happy, the more it backfires. Wellbeing science offers evidence for this: relentlessly chasing happiness leads to disappointment about how we feel, which in turn fuels more unhappiness and depressive symptoms. Besides, continuous acts of happiness-seeking deplete our resources, which leads to daily self-regulation failures and more unhappiness.
Research in psychological inflexibility shows us that fighting our inner experiences—like anxiety—can make us paradoxically amplify the problem itself. The more we push back, the worse we feel. Wanting to change our inner experiences not only maintains them but can also make them worse.
Of course, part of the pressure to change is cultural. In negativity-averse, happiness-obsessed societies where "positive" change is celebrated and acceptance or expression of the "negative" is discouraged, wanting to be and feel different becomes a problem. This is especially true in Anglo-American cultures like the UK, where people often mask sadness or frustration to appear upbeat and quietly endure hardship without complaint. Expressing pain or disappointment is often seen as a personal failure, a sign that one hasn't lived with enough energy or optimism to deserve happiness.
Take the "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters, now found all over Britain. First produced in 1939 by the government to raise public morale before World War II, the slogan didn't gain popularity until the early 2000s when a bookshop rediscovered it. It has since been reissued by countless companies and turned into a decorative theme for everything from mugs to T-shirts, coming to represent an essential sense of Britishness.
Although the message is benign, even charming, it also highlights the social expectation to be cool in a crisis—to downplay unpleasant emotions and admire those who stay cheerful even in difficult times. Beisser's idea of trying to be something you're not seems to be about trying to follow a societal rule that is at odds with your own internal sense of yourself. The result is a culture where we don't give ourselves enough time to feel sadness, grief, or disappointment long enough to process them. But many people get stuck instead of moving on or feeling better.
How we perceive our inner experiences, with flaws, unpleasantness, or inconvenience and all, makes a difference. In one study, participants ranging in age from 14 to 88 were asked to track their emotional experiences daily for three weeks. When people were in a bad mood, those who saw negative emotions as harmful reported lower life satisfaction. But those who believed their negative emotions had value—who saw them as part of the human experience—reported the same level of life satisfaction, regardless of how they felt in the moment.
It’s natural, and even noble, to want to change. And it makes total sense to want to feel better, especially when you’ve been in a low mood for a long time. But both clinical practice and psychological science offer us a more nuanced, though paradoxical, way of looking at psychological change: one that is less mainstream but also less pressured. One that may look like resignation, but in reality is a more grounded and organic path to growth. One that isn’t about relentless self-improvement, but instead begins with starting where we are and accepting who we are, no matter how uncomfortable.
There’s one more thing I often notice about change. Yes, without action, change doesn’t happen. Beisser, along with many others in the field, understood that well. But “action” doesn’t always mean things like socialising more, taking a vacation, or switching jobs. Sometimes, action means taking a different internal approach—and that’s often at the heart of real psychological change. Because the truth is, many people already know what they need to do. What they don’t know is why they’re not doing it. So change doesn’t just start with doing something different—it starts with relating to our inner world differently: seeing emotions in a new light, softening our defences, making peace with our impulses or our past, or learning to forgive ourselves. And from that internal shift, meaningful change begins: real, lasting, and more aligned with who we are.