Letter 25: Why Is It So Hard to Change?

“You cannot heal what you cannot feel.”

— John Bradshaw

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Dear Future Human,

If you are still here with me, it must mean you are ready to listen for your Signal. Now comes the hard part: acting on what you hear.

Until now, you and I have been walking together through the shadows, naming the unhelpful patterns, the deeply ingrained noise, and the distortions that block us from fully experiencing reality. This was necessary. We had to see how childhood adaptations become adult limitations, how survival strategies that once kept you safe become cages that feel like safety but are really prisons. But excavation is only the beginning.

Your task now is to keep adapting, not in the same unconscious way, but consciously. You need to evolve beyond the neurological patterns that took root when you were small, and to move toward your fuller self, toward wholeness.

This is where new experience begins to rewire old patterns. Be patient. This will be a slow and sacred work of the brain—dismantling the old pathways of fear and adaptation, and forging new ones rooted in presence, courage, and authenticity.

The first step is simply being able to see what’s happening inside you. It’s like turning on the light in a cluttered room. When you can actually notice your triggers and feel your body’s responses, the stories attached to them start to reveal themselves. For example, noticing a tight chest or shallow breath before the familiar story of “I’ve done something wrong” takes over.

Then you can begin to examine those stories with curiosity, from a place of objectivity, evaluating whether you are, in fact, reacting to something occurring in the present—or to something else based on old neural circuitry that reads meanings from the past into your adult life.

Just as we once needed help making sense of the outer world, we need help making sense of our inner one. Our emotional interiors can be just as chaotic as the world felt when we were very young—before we understood what our sensations meant or where they were coming from.

But here is what is rarely discussed about transformation: your brain will fight you every step of the way, for two reasons. First, it thinks it is protecting you.^¹ Second, it is designed to conserve energy, and when you start initiating new responses to familiar situations, that takes more effort.

Psychologist Robert Kegan spent years researching why people resist change even when they genuinely want it. He discovered that we’re often working against ourselves. You want to change, but part of you is determined to stay the same. You might want to speak up more, but you also want to avoid rejection. Or you want to set boundaries, but you also want to be seen as helpful. Kegan calls this “immunity to change”—your system’s protective response to what it perceives as a threat. This part of you is protecting what it believes keeps you safe and alive.²

These outdated patterns operate like wearing danger-sensing goggles engineered when you were a helpless child, calibrated for threats that no longer exist. They are archaic filters formed in response to early childhood experiences as you adapted to fit into your environment—not just behaviorally, but neurologically, emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually.³

We seek the familiar, even when painful, because it feels safer to your nervous system than the unknown.⁴ As we discussed earlier, the very adaptations that kept you alive as a child will resist the growth that could free you as an adult.

Transformation can only happen when you realize that resistance is the path to the Signal.

What follows are the predictable ways this resistance will manifest. Many of them we have discussed in prior letters. I am reiterating them here as a reminder, to make it easier for you to recognize them.

Your brain makes patterns, and those patterns become how you relate to people in your life—your family, friends, and colleagues.⁵ Much of your day runs on wiring created when you were small and helpless, when you had no power to change your circumstances.

One of the hardest parts of change is the fear of who you’ll be without the identity you’ve relied on. When that identity has been your survival strategy, letting it go can feel like free-fall.⁶ Your psyche is going to protect the structure that once kept you safe, even though it doesn’t fit anymore. It remembers that it helped you survive childhood and stay connected.⁷

Your brain is not comfortable with this “new you“ and floods you with alarm signals, pulling you back toward the familiar. Be prepared for this and remember your brain is not trying to sabotage you; it is desperately trying to preserve what it thinks keeps you alive and loved.

This anxiety is temporary. With support, you can reframe it into excitement, recognizing it as evidence that you are stretching beyond old limitations.

Family therapist Virginia Satir mapped the journey of transformation and discovered why it feels so disorienting. Change follows a predictable pattern: you start with the familiar, introduce something new, and then, inevitably, hit what she called the “chaos stage.” Everything feels worse. Your old patterns don’t work anymore, but the new ones aren’t established yet. You feel overwhelmed and confused. This is where most people quit because they think the chaos means they’re failing. But Satir showed that chaos isn’t a sign you’re going backward; it’s proof you’re in the middle of the process. It’s necessary. It’s temporary. And on the other side of it, new patterns begin to integrate and stabilize.⁸

Some of the friction comes from the people around you, who are invested in their own patterns and rhythms of relationship. Unintentionally, people may nudge you back toward the old ways. If you’ve ever tried to eat less sugar and suddenly cake shows up, or drink less and hear “just one more,” you know what I am referring to.⁹

The need to be right protects you from facing the possibility that you are not as smart as you believed. There is comfort in feeling that you understand your world and know what you are doing. As you begin acting differently, your ego may feel destabilized. If you have been “wrong” about your relationship choices or life decisions, how can you trust your judgment? What is your worth? This creates resistance that suggests it is safer to defend your existing worldview than risk the vulnerability of not knowing.

It is essential that you release any regrets of believing you should have known better when making past choices.

Those choices are not representative of your failures; they reveal you as human. You did the very best you could with the awareness and resources you had at the time.

Avoiding discomfort has helped you survive. Change, however, almost always brings discomfort, because you will be entering conversations and experiences that stretch your familiar view of the world. Feeling resistance is part of this process. This work brings up old memories that trigger vulnerabilities and fear. The intensity of these feelings will diminish as you stay the course.¹⁰

Your inner critic can do more to stop you than any external obstacle. When you stumble, and you will, that familiar voice will show up with shame and self-criticism. You have internalized the judgement you learned early in life.¹¹

I have invested a great deal of time normalizing our shared human experience, because learning to stop blaming ourselves for how we were evolutionarily conditioned is essential. We didn’t choose the conditions that shaped us. When we stay in self-criticism, the very places that need care and growth remain hidden. Healing isn’t possible while we’re attacking ourselves.

Not knowing can feel threatening, so these patterns step in to restore a sense of control. We often believe our power comes from having the answers and predicting outcomes. Not knowing threatens both our physical sense of safety and our social credibility.¹² But in order to grow, you necessarily need to go into uncharted territory.

Over time, you will come to experience the rewards of learning and growing, and even welcome the confusion and excitement that accompany it.

Overwhelming feelings arise when you experience that change requires too much work. You already have a lot on your plate, and now you need to take on this challenging process where you have to intercept your automatic reactions and choose conscious responses.

Consider this: isn’t it more tiresome to keep repeating patterns that aren’t serving you, thereby depriving you of the life you really want? When you feel overwhelmed, ask for help, even if you are not comfortable doing so.

Feeling helpless may be triggered when old patterns feel intractable. Depending on the issue you are working on, it may take a great deal of consistent rewiring before you experience measurable change. You may feel your reactive brain is too powerful, leaving you defenseless against its messages. This triggers our childhood sense of helplessness, the “I can’t do it” state you felt when you truly were powerless.

But now you’re an adult, equipped with the capacity to learn and grow. Real strength doesn’t come from doing everything alone; it comes from supporting one another in community and recognizing that we’re meant to rely on each other.

Fear of failure protects you from the pain and humiliation associated with not meeting expectations. Psychologist Carol Dweck’s research helps explain why this happens: many of us developed what she calls a “fixed mindset”—the belief that our abilities are set and that failure proves we’re inadequate. This mindset often develops in childhood, when approval and love are tied to how well we perform. In that context, being wrong can feel like a threat to who we are.

But Dweck also discovered that mindset can shift. You can develop a “growth mindset,” in which failure is not perceived as proof of inadequacy, but as information—evidence of stretching, learning, and trying something new. When you stumble, you are learning.¹³

We have developed the unreasonable belief that failure is bad, when it is actually necessary for learning.¹⁴ Your subconscious childhood memories, filled with negative associations around trying and failing, can derail you before you discover what you are capable of. While frustrations and disappointments are not comfortable, they can’t truly hurt you.

Unrealistic expectations come from trying to maintain control over an inherently unpredictable process. To stay the course, you will need to release expectations and remain committed to the process itself. Remember, your reactive brain is going to be pretty tenacious, so have a sense of humor and continue to put one foot in front of the other.

Hopelessness can feel like the ultimate obstacle—static that drowns out all signals entirely. You feel like this always happens, wondering why you bother trying to change. Most people hit walls when working on painful personal issues. This feeling should signal that you need more support, not that you are broken. Ask for it.

If you experience persistent hopelessness that interferes with daily functioning, please consider speaking with a mental health professional who can provide appropriate support.

If self-love feels difficult, there’s a reason. Evolutionarily, you were wired to fit into your early environment not to assert your authentic voice. Your brain developed pathways for seeking external approval and validation—from your family, friends, and social groups. There has been little evolutionary “space” for this until recently. Self-love, as we understand it today, is a relatively recent focus. Developing it often means gently loosening old drives to seek caretakers and approval, and rewiring patterns that once helped you belong but no longer serve you.

The Deeper Truth

Resistance is inevitable; it is a natural reaction to discomfort and change. We are caught between our animal instincts and the complex environments we created. That creates friction.

When you feel this internal pushback, it means change is already beginning. The old patterns that kept you safe as a child are fighting to stay alive, but your authentic self is starting to break through. Every time you notice the resistance, every time you feel that uncomfortable stretch, recognize it as an affirmation: you are on the path to freeing yourself. These fears are transformation’s raw material. With practice, you will learn to meet fear, discomfort, and the unknown with curiosity and skillful action rather than avoidance.

The brain that created survival patterns in childhood has the capacity to rewire itself throughout life.¹⁵ The interventions I will share aren’t merely theoretical—they’re proven methods for literally reshaping neural architecture.

The goal is to practice lowering the noise so you can more clearly attune to the Signal for your authentic response. As you learn to embrace discomfort instead of fighting it, you discover that power doesn’t come from controlling outcomes, but from staying present with whatever arises.

In my next letter, I will explore the deepest obstacle to integration: our relationship with fear itself. You will discover how the very fears that seem to protect us often become the prison walls that prevent us from accessing our authentic power and potential. But I will show you how fear can become our teacher—how the terror that may be keeping you small can actually become your greatest guide toward freedom.

Until then, sit with the resistance you have identified. Notice it without judgment. The awareness itself is already beginning to create the space for change.

With unwavering support,

Ronit

1. Lena Forsell and Jan Åström, “An Analysis of Resistance to Change Exposed in Individuals’ Thoughts and Behaviors,” Comprehensive Psychology, January 2012.

2. Robert Kegan and Lisa L. Lahey, “Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organizational,” Harvard Business Press, pp. 1-32, February 2009.

3. Norman Li et al, “The Evolutionary Mismatch Hypothesis: Implications for Psychological Science,” Singapore Management University, February 2018.

4. Patrick McElwaine, “Why We Fear Change, and Why It Might Be Exactly What We Need,” Psychology Today, April 2025.

5. Andy Clark, “Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, pp. 181-204, May 2013.

6. Thubten Chodron, “Parting from Our Self,” ThubtenChodron.org, December 2008.

7. Emilija Marković et al, “Attachment and Forming of Identity,” Science International Journal, September 2024.

8. Virginia Satir, John Banmen, Jane Gerber, and Maria Gomori. “The Satir Model: Family Therapy and Beyond,” Science and Behavior Books, pp. 139-145, 1991.

9. Shane Parrish, “Homeostasis and Why We Backslide,” Farnam Street Blog, April 2024.

10. Jaimie Lusk, “Crossing Our Thresholds: Finding the Courage to Make Change,” Psychology Today, May 2025.

11. Barbara Barcaccia et al, “The More You Judge The Worse You Feel,” Personality and Individual Differences, February 2019.

12. James Langabeer, “Embracing Uncertainty in Decision‑Making: Making Peace with Not Knowing,” Psychology Today, September  2025.

13. Carol Dweck, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success,” Random House, pp. 6–18, 2006.

14. SACAP Staff, “The Fear of Failure: Understanding the Psychology Behind It,” The South African College of Applied Psychology, February  2024.

15. Jonathan Power and Bradley Schlaggar, “Neural Plasticity Across the Lifespan,”Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews, January 2017.

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