I’ve been very busy exploring the emotional reactions that people have to change: particularly radical change. These reactions, to a large extent, underlie the ‘net zero’ change effect that people experience when they attempt to create change within any social system of any size, from a family to a multi-national corporation. Have you ever noticed that, when you attempt to change the way you do things at home or at work, you run into resistance? That’s the ‘net zero’ effect in action: you apply pressure to create change, and the social system you’re trying to change pushes back so that, at least over the long run, the change turns out to be temporary at best.
Think, for a moment, about how you create and implement plans. You engage your values and choose goals, then you select various tasks that will, you hope, take you all the way to the attainment of those goals. Your planning process takes place in your mind — your intellect. You may feel all sorts of things in the process, like excitement or anxiety, but these reactions are most often mild and somehow synchronized with your planning process. All the while, you’re sitting in the driver’s seat. Step out of the driver’s seat for a moment, imagine yourself as the object of change, rather than it’s subject, and the situation changes radically. Suddenly, your proactive intellect fades into the background while your reactive emotions move to the fore.
Reaction to change (yes, any change) presents you with a double-whammy. On the one hand, you have the knowledge that the change is taking something away from you. The grief that we’ve been talking about recently is the way your emotions deal with loss. Even this loss is a strange beastie of sorts: you can actually miss a pain that you’ve become accustomed to! It’s a grief reaction that motivates people to recreate chaotic relationships over and over again: when they extricate themselves from one bad relationship, they may boomerang back into another one. We look at them from the outside and wonder why they’re stuck in the same repeating pattern. It’s actually their reaction to the loss of their accustomed emotional chaos. From that perspective, it’s grief!
On the other hand, your anticipation of what lies ahead on the other side of the change engenders a second set of emotions: fear of the unknown. If grief represents your reaction to the occasion of loss of the familiar, then fear looks forward to the prospect of loss of anticipated gains. In other words, you’re afraid that you’re not going to get what you want. Your emotions are both reactive and illogical, so, naturally, fear shows you a future of discomfort and scarcity, regardless of the promise that the change offers you.
I’ve written before about approaches that you can take when you’re the change agent and wanting to create effective change around you (it can be done, but it takes approaching the project indirectly, rather than trying to tackle it head-on). What can you do when you’re on the other side of the equation, and change is happening to you? How can you manage your side of the change equation effectively when someone else (including your Higher Power) is in the driver’s seat and controlling the change? As is true of everything in life, it’s all a case of mind over matter. Change your mind, change your world!
What happens to grief when you reach acceptance of the loss, and become willing to let go of whatever is binding you to the past? The pain slowly recedes until it is imperceptible, remaining as only a fond memory of what was, but without the sense of woundedness. A similar transformation takes place when you replace your image of the future as a time and place of sadness and depravation with one of a future bright with promise and opportunity.
If you are a person of faith in a Power greater than yourself, then the course mapped out for you and represented by your understanding of the future will become a true source of inspiration and anticipation. Just as, when you were a child, you experienced joy in the prospect of what those who loved you had in store for you, so you can feel a similar kind of excited anticipation concerning what your Higher Power has in store for you on the other side of your transformation, if only you decide that’s what you want. There’s no growth without growing pains. Who would be shortsighted enough to refuse to grow just because it might be uncomfortable at times? Just as the antidote for grief is faith; so also is the antidote for fear: hope.
Just the fact of knowing what your emotional reactions to encountering change will most likely be (grief and fear), will also allow you to begin opening yourself up to the possibility of achieving an appreciation for the change process in your own life, and the rich rewards that are yours, if only you can train yourself (and your pesky emotions) to look beyond the momentary present discomfort to the growth experience that awaits you.
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown
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acceptance, anger, bargaining, denial, depression, change, grief, mastery, midlife, Spirituality, transformation, transition, fear, emotions
Tags: acceptance, anger, bargaining, change, denial, depression, emotions, fear, mastery, midlife, Spirituality, transformation, transition