By Cayla Berejikian
The past year of my life saw a lot of change. None of it felt monumentous, special, transformative, or like it was “meant to be.” It was simply constant and uncomfortable, like a dull headache. And the only side effect was vague sense of confusion and detachment, at least in the midst of it. Looking back, I can see how enduring so much change had worn me down and exhausted me in a way I’d never been before.
As we slowly emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, this feeling of exhaustion is shared by many. We’ve just experienced a heightened version of what happens to us every day, often subtle and behind the scenes: change. More specifically, uncontrollable change.
Now more than ever, I feel completely at the mercy of change. At one point, this feeling would have bothered me. But I no longer see the point in resisting life’s perpetual cycle of loss and gain.
I have always wanted to control my trajectory in life, as is human nature. Unfortunately, every new phase of life feels like starting at square one. Transitions are exhausting, and each one seems just as scary as the last.
Still, there are ways we can train our minds to navigate change. Immunity to Change (ITC) coaching was developed at Harvard by developmental psychologist Robert Kegan and teaches you a step-by-step method for understanding and overcoming your barriers to change. According to ITC, our fears and beliefs make up a psychological immune system that prevents us from changing even when we know we want it more than anything in the world.
Completing my own ITC map helped me get to the root of my resistance to change, particularly as it has affected my life most recently. There are behaviors I have been struggling to change, negative thoughts I haven’t been able to reason with, and fears that have kept me from taking action to better myself.
Collectively, these things were getting in the way of me reaching my goals. It was like I had taken apart a slow-running computer and discovered faulty wiring. It was refreshing to realize that I could reprogram my thoughts the same way I might reprogram a machine.
Being alive can feel like sitting in a rowboat without oars. Tides change and we follow. We are constantly pulled from places of security and comfort to new horizons. More often than we’d like, we are pulled from something good to something that could never be as good, or so we’re convinced.
Change is the only constant in life.
I have always been partial to seasons of change.
I tilt my head to see
branches jostled by wind
and leaves drained of color,
each erupting into its respective dance.
A familiar chill touches my face and hands
kissing with lovely contrast
the warmth in my stomach and chest –
an enchanting reminder
that I am never safe.
Every love of mine
will shrivel with time.
We start lush and green and close,
but in the face of the wind
we darken and wither and fall.
Still, I smile because
there is something
enchanting
about a passing leaf
dancing on the winds of change.
My blood cools with a
deep, eternal peace
as I think to myself,
“in loss
we will always be freed.”
Despite its perpetual presence in my life, change has always felt intimidating to me.
Think about the dizzying fear you might feel before ending a relationship, confronting a family member, or leaving a stable job. In each of these cases, making a decision to enact change is not the first catalyst; it is the inevitable result of a changed situation.
Initially, this relationship or commitment benefited you. You needed something from it. It was the right place to be at the time. But now, something has shifted. You know it’s time to quit or leave. It’s natural to feel angry. After all, you liked how things were before. Why did they have to change? Why didn’t you get a say in it?
It’s difficult to accept that we’re unable to control when and how life happens to us. But one thing is certain: we have no choice but to behave in accordance with change. We must follow the inevitable spin of the compass.
Loss of a Girl
In a dream
I stood at the end of a long dock
surrounded by fog
before an old steel ship
that would take me
to my future.
“Are you ready to board?”
droned a voice from above.
I squinted up to see who spoke, when
a gaping wind blew from the water
and howled all around me.
That’s when I noticed
the ocean and sky
were the same
bottomless
gray.
Palms clammy,
I turned back to shore and saw
several rays of sun
trickle through the fog, but
they could not reach me.
Faint music and laughter echoed
from deep in the shrouded beach.
The shore, the shore.
“I don’t want to go,”
I called up to the voice that beckoned me.
“Let me stay as I am-”
Before I finished speaking,
a steel deck moaned beneath my feet
as I watched as the last of the shoreline
was swallowed by fog.
You aren’t in control of your situation, and change is a jarring reminder of that. But you are in control of when and how you respond to it.
Still, sometimes it takes us months or years from the time we know a change needs to be made and the time we enact it. We are in denial of the necessity of the change. We may feel sadness and not give it time to pass, or we may feel anxiety because we’ve buried our sadness. Avoiding negative emotions only gives them more power psychologically. In the end, if we face our changes earlier, the emotions can be less intimidating and even enjoyable to move through. This is exactly what ITC helps with. It builds awareness of these mechanisms and reduces this time frame spent denying change.
There is a scene in the television series Fleabag that opened my eyes to an uncomfortable truth. The protagonist, Fleabag, asks her therapist what she should do about her feelings for her priest. Her therapist responds with:
“You already know what you’re going to do. Everybody does. You’ve already decided what you’re going to do.”
I had to pause the show when she said that. Suddenly, I felt like I was being sucked backward, revisiting every time I’d asked a friend, family member, or my own therapist for advice. In retrospect, the resolutions to those problems had been predictable.
I already knew, deep down, what I was going to do before I did it.
Usually, if I was asking for advice, it was to confirm or evaluate the decision I had already made. I would use the opinions of others to get a read on my situation. How difficult did they think my decision would be to carry out? What did they think about the kind of person it made me?
I strained to remember a time where I “debated” a choice that I hadn’t already secretly reached a conclusion on. But I couldn’t.
However, that doesn’t mean I was doing the wrong thing.
Delaying change is a survival instinct based on fear.
The longer we let a problem be a problem and debate what to do about it, the longer we get to keep living in our current story. And we want to keep living in the story. Even misery is less daunting than uncharted territory. The healing that changes bring sounds great in theory, but in reality, it can be uncomfortable and uproot key components of our lives.
When you can’t see past the horizon, it seems there is no plot or story in that direction. With nothing to propel you forward, you may feel you’re better off staying where you are.
What could be worse than being trapped in perpetual pain and grief?
The answer is nothing.
We fear periods of transition because we fear detachment and feelings of indefinite emptiness.
A recent loss sent me to an emotional low-point. I confided in a friend who offered me a quote to help me understand what I was going through:
“Grief is love with nowhere to go.”
My problem was that I was being faced with nothingness. Here is how I coped.
Stargazer
Anything I could
write or say
about love is cliche
so I will state this fact :
I am gazing
through the stratosphere
into the Milky Way galaxy tonight.
Bashful, she hides from the city lights
behind a black curtain and
teases me with
a single glowing dot.
So here I sit.
The cosmos – infinite and
magnificent and awesome
are winking at me – limited and
wretched and
small.
But I reject their gesture
and this is why :
the only thing
that might light me up tonight
is you
beside me, speculating
whether that wink
is a planet or star.
So I submit to your absence
and let it swallow me
in oblivion and
apathy.
Instead of dealing with my grief and sadness, I had settled for apathy. I would rather feel nothing than acknowledge reality. This is a fear response, and it is a common one.
Every major transition I’ve endured has convinced me that whatever awaited me was intrusive and unsafe. When I moved to New York at a young age, the city seemed so massive and alienating that I felt nauseous just walking down the street. I remember thinking if I stayed there even a week longer, it would be too long. I had to escape the city and retreat to safety.
Over the course of a couple of years, that feeling evolved and eventually faded. The process of change proved itself trustworthy. The long, slow, process of making New York my home has become an integral part of who I am now. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
So how can we overcome our aversion to uncertainty and embrace the process of change?
First, you have to understand that your sense of comfort and certainty, essentially the worldview that’s keeping you where you are, is malleable.
Our fears are driven by underlying assumptions, which more often than not, are not rooted in our current reality. We decide what “truths” to believe in, not the other way around.
To understand our underlying assumptions, we must first identify our fears and commitments.
Our goals reflect desired self-images that are only obtainable through change, but fear inhibits us from enacting change and reaching those goals.
It is crucial to identify what our specific fears are. Ask yourself, if I’m not doing something that could help me reach my goal, why am I afraid to do it? And if I am doing something that gets in the way of me reaching my goal, why am I afraid to do the opposite of that?
For example, you might have trouble saying “no” because you’re afraid others will reject you if you do.
Acknowledging what you’re afraid of is not easy. We hide these fears from ourselves, but they permeate everything that we do.
When we don’t identify our fears, they emerge in other areas. They affect our identity, emotions, and behaviors in ways we don’t fully understand. You might feel a sense of disconnect from yourself, or general dissatisfaction and unease in your life and relationships.
This happened to me recently. I had felt detached for a while, but it took me a long time to understand why. By the time I was ready to admit that I was scared, my fear had become deeply rooted in my life and who I was.
series of realizations
these things may seem small,
but
I have not sent a text
with an exclamation point
in so long,
nor have I assumed the best
in a stranger
or friend
and I can’t remember
the last time I laughed
with enough verve
to disrupt
a room full
of strangers
also, I think maybe,
lately,
I like myself better
when I’m watching TV
I suppose the truth is,
if I drop this charade,
I am no longer living
I am only afraid
Once you’ve identified your fears, they can lead you to identify your commitments. We are all committed to doing things that prevent us from achieving our goals. Those commitments evolve from our fears.
For example, you might be afraid of saying “no” and facing social rejection because you’re committed to having people like you.
These commitments can feel impossible to shake. Certain habits and impulses are so deeply rooted in who we are that letting them go requires a whole shift in identity. In that sense, we can’t force ourselves to be authentically “over” something before we’re ready. So what inspires us to want to be over it?
Left to their own devices, people often don’t change until a narrative has played itself out. If you’re committed to making someone like you, you won’t give up until the pain is no longer worth it. Or, you have to genuintely believe that they’ll never accept you so you feel motivated to look elsewhere for validation. But getting to this place can take months or even years.
This is how it has felt for me.
giving up
it feels like
reaching down to scratch an itch
only to find that itch has gone
recalling a sad thing
to find sorrow does not surpass the thought
peering into an empty room
to find it plenty full of air
shrugging with a sigh
a hollow victory cry
I suppose I am
giving up
on you, I have
given up
Sometimes, sitting with dissatisfaction and pain is important. It doesn’t always need to be corrected immediately. Eventually, we will tire of chasing a dead end and holding ourselves back.
But we can’t always wait around until we “feel up to” changing. When our fears and commitments escalate to the point where they interfere with our happiness, growth, and progress, we need to move on.
This is where our underlying assumptions come into play. You will know you’ve identified an underlying assumption if it justifies both your fears and commitments.
For example, if I am afraid of saying no and having others reject me because I am committed to having people like me, then my big assumption is: ”If I am not seen as friendly and accommodating, then people will lose their respect for me.”
Identifying and changing our underlying assumptions is the first step to embracing change.
But how do we combat our big assumptions? Even if we know something isn’t true, we often can’t surpass it on a deeper level.
I often find myself stuck in cycles of dissatisfaction because I’m not ready to let go of fear and false expectations.
Sliding Sand
With a thoughtless thought
I reach for the thing I want
In this moment where it’s not
Sigh once more because
Life is a cycle, an
Endless collision of hope with reality
Waves crashing into the shore
Trying to claw their way up
To Utopia
Towering cliffs of crystal that
Glisten above the sand
I went through a period of very low self-esteem in college. It felt like reality was distorted. My self-perception was so negative that I hardly recognized myself. I remember going about my day feeling like I might melt into the walls. I wasn’t at peace in my own body.
I knew that I was sick. I understood that my negative thoughts were not “actually” true, but I still couldn’t shake them. I thought I would never get better, but I did.
Here’s how it happened.
better
better
happened
I didn’t have to
look for it
reach for it
let go
lift myself up
push through
or
try
it just happened
like sitting up
and smiling
to the hum of silence
inside me.
“It takes time” might be the least comforting platitude you can offer someone who is struggling to heal. But time is essential to processing emotions.
After you’ve done the cognitive work of understanding the fears, commitments, and assumptions that are getting in your way, you still might feel hung up emotionally. That’s okay. You might feel like nothing has changed, but it has. You are aware of what’s happening internally and driving your behaviors.
The ITC Map is just the first exercise in the process. It helped me to uncover and realize all of these things. Later on, I learned how to observe my assumptions more closely, dig deep into my past to understand their origins, make a plan of action for change, and eventually, hold myself accountable to those changes. Learn about the entire process further or take the initiative and create your map today. Don’t be afraid to take the leap, change is always good.