The adult students with whom I worked generally came to our efforts with a desire to make their future substantially different from the past. For one reason or another, they believed they needed new instrumental skills to realize that difference. Most if not all of them posed this need for difference as a need to change themselves. If someone wants to make a difference in her/his life, that person almost always says, "I need to change."
I accepted that phrase as quite natural and normal until quite recently. In the midst of the intimacy of working individually with these adults, I found that phrase unfortunate although well meaning. In that I worked with people so they could discover and enjoy what was right with them, it seemed counterproductive to say they needed to "change." In fact, it seemed like a return to a previous meaning perspective we often hold about ourselves. If someone needs to change, there must be something wrong with that person. When we evoke the need for change, we may well say to ourselves that we are, in some substantial and essential way, wrong in ourselves, failed in ourselves, and unworthy in ourselves as ourselves. That's why we need to change.
The meaning perspective we hold demands we must change ourselves to do something with our lives. At the same time, and from the same meaning perspective, we hear that we can't possibly change. In the parlance of a meaning perspective I have known, it sounds like this: "You're a bum. You need to change." That always got me going, and then this followed: "You're a bum, how in the hell can you change? You can't." Fearing that I would commit some sort of relative solipsism on others, thinking they experienced my experience because everyone must have experienced my experience, I asked my students if the word "change" had such connotations for them. Upon reflection generally everyone agreed. Besides what I asked, they often said that "change" just sounded so huge, so overwhelming that it felt necessary and impossible. As a result, I looked for another idea and word that would take us into the future without the onerous and paradoxically charged word and idea of "change."
The answer to that need came nearly spontaneously from the voice and thoughts of Viktor Frankl as soon as I asked. In the depths of his stay at the concentration camp Auschwitz, Frankl looked nakedly into the face of meaninglessness and hopelessness. Stripped of everything that made his identity before, nearly egoless in his lack of ability to defend whatever identity he could maintain, he found the following and recaptured it in his book Man's Search for Meaning:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
The word and conscious perspective he gave me was and remains "choice." When we say "change," we clearly imply there's something wrong with us. If there wasn't something wrong, we wouldn't need to change.[116] However, there isn't anything wrong with us essentially. We may well make choices or have made choices we no longer want to make, but those are choices. Choices are not the becoming self. The becoming self can generate new choices without changing itself. Indeed, it can make new choices by becoming more of itself.
No matter our past, whatever we have done, we remain healthy and whole in our essential being, in our becoming self. Frankl refers to that essence of self as the "defiant human spirit." That defiance isn't about anger. It's about that kind of moment where we feel stripped of everything, and yet we remain defiant to the whips and scorns of time however they have come to us, even if we brought them upon ourselves in some way. The defiant human spirit forms part of the resilience of our human nature. In that way, those who enter a recovery program, for example, haven't failed because they are there. They have succeeded in returning to their becoming self, their defiant human spirit in order to liberate themselves from choices they no longer wish to make.
Our defiant human spirit stays whole and healthy whatever happens to us, and we can choose to turn to that spirit within us at any time. It may not provide us with a way to remove ourselves from some situation. It does provide us with the remarkable ability to choose how we respond to that situation. All of these qualities we can ascribe to the becoming self which remains the positive core of our essential being of our whole being. In essence, again paradoxically, we do not need to change, nor do we change, even as we become more of our becoming self. Experiencing the transformative may more fully express our becoming self and whole being. Nothing about our previous lives and sense of self disappears or changes. All of our experience and learning remain with us in the present and the future, not as an anchor or box but as a vital foundation for more and more expression of our essential, becoming self and our whole being.
It's our choice.