Dysfunction lives in darkness.

Addictions thrive in secrecy, and bad habits—rendered sub-conscious by our well-meaning, efficiency-seeking brains— depend upon our ignorance of them to survive.

Whatever the truth, we don’t like to think about it. This tends to apply across the board: death, childhood, relationships, unmet needs, violated boundaries. We are compartmentalizing creatures, the soft, grey mass of our brains composed of cognitive layers and shortcuts that prevent us from seeing the world how it really is.

It is said that if we could perceive without interpretation— if we could see clearly through the tricks and machinations of the human mind—we would surely perish— since no one can handle the truth in its entirety.

And yet, we seek awareness as though it equates to enlightenment. 

We are a world of self-seekers, of truth-finders, driven forward—through therapy and self-help books, through mental health awareness campaigns on social media—by the erroneous belief that the truth will undoubtedly set us free.

And yet…

We are also the most mentally ill generation in modern history. We are also addicted, exhausted, unhappy. We are also mired in insanity, in repetition—the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

It is not for lack of perception that we compulsively repeat the same behaviors our parents subjected us to, that we reenact childhood scenarios and seek familiar figures to recreate—as the 12-step program Adult Children of Alcoholics so generously puts it—“our sick abandonment needs,” that we continue to overeat and overdrink, to smoke and spend, to imprison ourselves in behaviors that have long ceased to serve us.

It is said, thanks to the ongoing, antiquated influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, that knowledge is power—that awareness is all you need to enact change. If this were true, why should it be so hard to change? Why do recent studies then confirm the prevalent suspicion that it is much harder for thoughtful, intelligent people to recover from addictions than it is for the…less so? Why does self-awareness so often seem to coincide with compulsion, with apathy, with resistance to change?

We know this, and yet we persist.

The very institutions we have erected to promote change—education, prison, rehab, 12-step programs, therapy—are founded on this very misconception: that the right information is all it takes, that all we need is a little more therapy, a little more self-help, a little more exposure to increasingly complex— yet interchangeable—theories. And yet, our studies—and our personal experiences—seem to suggest otherwise.

Nearly 97% of people on diets regain the weight. Is it because they are ignorant and don’t know any better? Is it because they simply “don’t have the right information?” From reading the comments on a plus-sized woman’s TikTok you would think it was. Nothing is so simple as to be resolved by mere human willpower. We are not as omnipotent as we might think. 

Do people continue to shoot heroin because they are unaware of its deleterious effects? Do women love abusers out of naiveté? Do men practice stoicism out of stupidity? Do I bite my nails purely because I don’t know how utterly disgusting and unhealthy auto-cannibalism really is? Do I date broken men because I can’t tell they are broken? Do they date me for the same reason?

Clearly, knowledge has nothing to do with it.

We know that prison doesn’t work, yet we continue to send people there. We know that kids aren’t learning, yet we trudge on with business as usual. We know that opiates are addictive, and we continue to hand them out like candy. We claim that AA works for everyone, yet we watch as millions of people succumb to the disease. We agree on the benefits of therapy—and yet it seems to accomplish little in terms of substantive growth. 

When clients come to me to heal from their addictions and compulsive behaviors, I have to explain to them—every time—that their problem isn’t a lack of information but an excess of it. The issue isn’t an absence of good choices but a veritable cornucopia of bad ones. They aren’t suffering from weak willpower, or temporary insanity, or vindictive demons. They, like everyone else, need more than just information to change.

We know this intuitively, yet we need scientific studies to prove it. For whatever reason, we cling desperately to the belief that the right information at the right time will change our lives forever. But until the cost of staying the same supersedes the cost of change, an individual is unlikely to succumb to external pressure.

In fact, according to a 2013 study, external pressure not only fails to redress our ambivalence towards change—it exacerbates it. Persuasion not only doesn’t work: it provokes us to resist the proposed solution. 

If this doesn’t evidence that we are far from rational creatures, then I don’t know what does.

And yet we persist.

We persist in attending therapy: week by week, month by month, year by year. We persist in attending webinars and seminars and workshops. We read books—lots of them. The self-help industry is worth an estimated $13.2 billion. We pay teachers and gurus and coaches and leaders to divulge their secrets, to show us the way. We bookmark fad diets, keto diets, paleo diets, vegan diets, gluten-free, dairy-free—maybe try them for a week or two and succumb, understandably, to the pull of deprivation. We attend 12-step meetings and listen to others share their stories of misery and depravity. We read Instagram posts and watch TikTok reels and peruse Facebook for proof that there is something wrong with us, for a name to set to slap on our perpetual sense of dis-ease. We decide we must have autism, ADHD, borderline personality—that we are neurodivergent and thus immune to the resources and therapies that work for others.

There must be something wrong with us if all of it—the videos, the articles, the workshops, the tips and hacks and optimization tools—has failed to work for us. 

It is quite understandable that we would seek answers, that we would experience comfort beneath the warm shroud of a label, a community that includes others like us. I am not suggesting that we do not have the various disorders and exceptionalities with which we diagnose ourselves—only that labels are immaterial, insubsantive. 

Semantics matter, but only so much.

Because understanding—awareness—is insufficient. We do not lack options; we lack the opportunity to seize them. 

I find it difficult to explain this to my clients, who, in this day and age, have witnessed countless others heal and grow and succeed because of a specific set of “secrets” divulged to them by a benevolent miracle worker. We find it hard to believe in anything that eschews vision, so we trust only what we see. But the process through which other people achieve their milestones is invisible to us. No matter how much we think we see, it is—all of it—mitigated by filters, both virtual and psychological. And even if we could see it—the dirty, painful process of growth—it wouldn’t make much of a difference at all. Because the human capacity for observational learning is limited. So much of growth is incited purely by experience.

Our neurology prevents us from changing just because we want to. The complexity of the human brain is largely the result of an evolutionary need to maximize efficiency. Learning was originally a tool to improve our chances of acting quickly and effectively. As a result, every behavior, every environmental trigger, is encoded in our neural circuitry—neurons that fire together, wire together. Our environment determines our thoughts, which determine our behavior, which determines our environment. We use our beautiful, complex brains to limit ourselves to redundant, ineffective patterns and call this personality. We like to think that we are more than animals, yet that which sets us apart is that which prevents us from evolving. 

So how, then, are we to incite change?

If our beliefs translate into habits, which only further encode our beliefs, are we not caught up in a vicious cycle of iterative compulsion? Are we not condemned to the same personality, the same experiences, the same results, over and over again? How, then, do people change as much as they do?

Because, by the way, people do change.

Research—and personal experience—confirm not only the possibility of change, but the inevitability of it. Despite what we may believe—that certain facets of our personalities are engrained within us forever—we are never the same as we were a moment before. But then again, as we have seen, research is rarely enough to sway the mind.

Change, like every other fundamental truth, is a paradox. We must change our minds to change our behavior. We must change our habits to change our minds. This is discouraging. We throw up our hands in desperation.

But this is just another example of the brain’s limitations. The brain has never been any good at managing contradictions. 

We fail to recognize that change is not a duality but a dichotomy. Growth is not incongruous with stasis but profoundly related to it. To change is not to reject existing conditions but to accept them as they are. The secret to growth is not information, motivation, accountability, or incentive but acceptance.

It is this—the impulse to think in strict dichotomies—that prevents us from accessing the reality of human experience, of recognizing and embracing possibility. When we divide the world into shades of black and white, we lose the ability to envision color. When we cleave our judgment between that which is good and that which is evil, we lose the capacity to imagine growth. 

To change, then, is to break from dichotomy, to envision all possibilities at once. There is no convenient, foolproof roadmap to change. There is no one way to disrupt the nefarious, self-reinforcing cycle of change. But the fundamental process is the same. 

I am typically not a fan of cheesy acronyms, but science supports their efficacy, and I have built my practice around neuroscientific methods. The change process can be summed up by meditation teacher Tara Brach’s famous acronym “RAIN:” recognize, accept, investigate, and nurture. Alternatively, you can use the acronym I created for my recovery program: “DARE” (irony intended) stands for discover, analyze and accept, rewire, exercise. 

It doesn’t matter what you choose to call it. The process is the same across therapeutic models, new-age theories, and healing modalities.

The first step toward profound, lasting change is recognition (or discovery). Without awareness, we are doomed to repeat the same patterns of behavior time and time again. The learning process can happen wittingly or unwittingly—but the re-learning process requires a conscious choice. 

Learning happens like this: 

We try something new for the first time—whether a new drug, a new experience, a new instrument, or a new negative spiral. The first time, the action or thought requires effort. The brain’s neurons learn to communicate with one another in a new and unfamiliar way. They expend great energy in doing so. Because the body is an energy-conscious machine, it seeks to maximize effort. Neurons learn with practice. As we practice the thought or behavior—intentionally or not—our neurons internalize the particular communication pattern that allows the thought or behavior to happen. 

For this reason, I tell my clients that every habit has a good intention. Regardless of the judgment value we place on the particular neuronal circuit, it exists because we have signaled to our brains that it needs to exist. Our brains and bodies interpret repetition as desire. This is important to remember as you navigate change. Condemnation does not promote growth because the brain knows no judgment. It knows only what you teach it.

So we begin with a non-judgmental state of awareness. Mindful meditation is effective in this regard, though sitting meditation, as I have explained in a previous blog post, should not be substituted for cultivating a perpetual state of mindfulness. In nurturing this state of open awareness, we rob our habits of their power. Like the demons of lore, habits are disempowered only when named. A subconscious habit depends upon ignorance to survive. In doing so, it convinces us of its authority. When we allow it to dictate our behavior without consent or accountability, we allow impulse to supersede agency.

Naming the habit is only the beginning.

Next, we must analyze the source of the habit and the (often subconscious) beliefs that fuel the behavior. You are likely familiar with this process since it has dominated so much of our cultural discourse around growth and mental maturation. Many of us believe that all we have to do to rid ourselves of a habit is “understand” it. 

So we spend months on the fourth step of the 12-step program. We spend years in therapy, uncovering the many layers of pain and desire that dictate our actions. We spend decades journaling and maintaining intimate conversations. We interpret dreams and palms and tarot cards, we pray and meditate, we read self-help books and attend workshops, we ruminate and reflect our way through sleepless nights. And most of us stop there and scratch our heads, wondering why change hasn’t come.

We prioritize investigation and analysis because our parents did not. Like every generation before us, we have sought to redress past missteps—to the exclusion of everything else. Our parents were repressed, so we are unequivocally open. Our parents suppressed their feelings and memories, so we share everything all the time.

It’s progress, but it’s not even half the battle.

This misunderstanding—that growth is born of awareness—inhibits our success. There is an inherent risk in cherry-picking. The stages of growth are iterative and non-negotiable. Navigating recovery is like taking antibiotics. There are many different types of pills you can take at any time of day, but if you fail to maintain your treatment—if you pick and choose if and when you take your pill—not only will you neglect to heal your condition, but you will exacerbate it. When we veer off the path, we are sure to get lost. Incomplete recovery is often worse than no recovery at all. 

When we commit to this step without pursuing those that follow, we find ourselves trapped in a repetitive cycle of dwelling and rumination. Research maintains that venting does little to heal pain—in fact, in narrowing our attention to the very trigger for our pain, we commit to living in it. Screaming into a pillow only makes you want to scream more. A punch to the wall rarely eases the anger that provoked it. 

Thorough investigation entails more than just uncovering a behavior’s backstory. It requires uncovering the truth behind that backstory. We cannot take our judgments and feelings at face value. We must assess their relationship to reality. When we prioritize validating our interpretation of an experience rather than the experience itself, we risk apathy. Growth happens not when we fixate on that which has happened to us but on what we can do about it now.

The world will continue to disappoint us. Bad things will continue to happen, and there is little we can do about it. We continue to face disappointment because we nurture the unrealistic expectation that we can change the facts of life. We can neither prevent nor amend the catastrophes that befall us. But we can certainly choose the narratives we attach to them.

My clients often protest: but don’t I need to validate my feelings? Shouldn’t I get to feel however I want?

Of course, you should. But is this what you want to feel? Is this the feeling you choose to live in? There is no such thing as valid and invalid feelings. Feelings either are, or they aren’t. Every feeling is legitimate because it is experienced—we have invited it into our reality. The discussion around the legitimacy of feelings is not only immaterial—it is a distraction. We must dig up the root of that distraction and examine it with conscious empathy.

Once we have done so, we are ready for the third step.

The third step of profound change requires creativity. Here, we permit ourselves to envision an alternative reality in which we behave as we intend to and believe the things that feed our strength rather than inhibit it. We investigate the potential inherent in every situation, every experience. We rewire our neural circuitry to accommodate the reality we want.

The field of quantum physics is based on this very notion of possibility. Thanks to recent research, we know that every dimension of reality contains infinite dimensions of possibility. In the quantum field, everything exists as a wave of potential energy. Only when a conscious observer directs awareness to a particular space within this wave does it collapse into a particle and materialize into the physical dimension. This may sound like nonsense, but it’s science. And it proves that, no matter what our instincts suggest, our attention determines our experience.

So we begin to envision each particle as a wave. We grant it the freedom of possibility. We acknowledge that things need not be the way that they are, that we have the power to co-create a new reality for ourselves. We explore this reality as we would virgin terrain. We investigate it as we would the object of our love and affection. We learn everything we can about it to introduce it into our lives. We establish new patterns in our neural circuitry that diverge from those that bring us pain. 

This is our re-imagination of reality. It is neither goal-setting nor wishful thinking. It is neither aspiration nor affirmation. It is co-creation—a process of re-design and re-configuration. It is the lost art of make-believe, which we mastered as children and surrendered over the years. We visualize the behavior—the life—we want in real time, happening now, and we act as if.

We ask ourselves: how does this change affect every facet of my life? How does it change my perspective of the world and its inconveniences? How does my new reality affect my career, my relationships, my innermost thoughts and emotions? How do others perceive me? How do I perceive them? What do I experience differently? What remains the same?

In doing so, we touch upon the quantum field of possibility, exploring the limitless horizon of potential and opportunity. We do this with humility, acknowledging that there are boundaries to the human imagination, certain outcomes we could never envision and for which we could never prepare. We leave room for the miracle, the possibility of universal intervention. We focus on the experience we want rather than the material conditions we desire. We ask, humbly, for a miracle.

Once we have done so, we nurture this new reality, we exercise it with patience and diligence—and faith. The mistake so many of us make at this juncture is to seek an end to the often tedious and burdensome journey of self-development. In anxious anticipation, we draw up a blueprint for the structure we have in mind. 

When I have/am X, I will be fulfilled. Then, I can truly enjoy my life.

There is, however, no final step on the road to progress. Change is iterative; it never ends. To speak of a “final step” is to fail to acknowledge the cyclical nature of progress and human development. There is only the moment that newfound change becomes the status quo, and we embark on the journey again. Enlightenment is a process rather than a destination. The moment light spills over the darkness is the moment we discover shadow. 

The purpose of practice, of nurturing a new habit or pattern of thought, is to invite this new status quo. We must be willing to balance the paradox of change, acknowledging that it will both bring us fulfillment and provoke us to change some more. To gain satisfaction—enlightenment, serenity, whatever we may call it—we must continue to enlarge and expand the horizon of possibility. We cannot stand still, for the moment we do is the moment our immediate surroundings command our attention and eclipse all vision of the future. 

Exercising change requires effort and effortlessness, willpower and surrender. 

We must contemplate and act, direct and accept, nurture the vision and allow for the mystery. In all likelihood, the road will be long and arduous. Any expectation is likely to foist the entire endeavor. Entitlement is the antithesis of gratification. Should we decide that we are owed something by the universe, she will withhold it. Should we determine that change must occur according to our standards of space and time, it will eschew us. The purpose of effort is to facilitate effortlessness. In practicing for the outcome we want, we rewire our neural circuitry until new behavior becomes habit and habit becomes identity. Action invites automation. One day, we will no longer need to practice the change we so desire since we will, in all likelihood, have moved on to something else.