We have looked a little at the idea of change as opposed to choice before, but it bears reexamining here. This difference, I have found very recently, may well work in a vital fashion in our search for and union with the becoming self fully.
When students told me that they needed to change because of the things that had done in their past that had not worked out, I always felt ill at ease. I wondered who I was to help someone change. Besides, once they changed, I asked myself, then who were they and who would they change into. When I approached myself with the idea of change, as I noted, meaning perspectives that plagued me its truth about my weaknesses every day spoke up and told me that those weaknesses made it impossible to change. It told me I was just—stuck. When students talked about change, they spoke about it with general disappointment because they felt if they failed at any small changing task in any way, they felt they had failed in the entire project. They felt that if the little went wrong then the big just couldn't happen. They felt failed, and that feeling of failure brought them right back to their negative meaning perspectives. I really knew how that worked.
Besides all that, it finally came to me that when I asked myself or my students asked themselves to change, or anybody wanted to change, we all told ourselves that there was something wrong with ourselves in ourselves. We said we didn't like ourselves very much. We removed any possible unconditional positive regard for ourselves by asking for change. That being the case, there was no way in the world that we could change. Who did we think we are in the first place? That certainly makes for a cycle of doom.
Along with all that, when I actually tried to think about change and the nature of making a change, it felt quiet huge—an enormous and an incredibly daunting idea. That made change seem an even crazier notion. Then I realized that it made very little sense in any case. A good deal of what people wanted to change wouldn't change.
Frankl did not tell us in Man's Search for Meaning that he could change himself or his situation. He knew that the only things which would free him physically from the camp came in the form of death or military liberation. He told us that he could choose how he responded to his situation, to life in the camp. He tells us right now that we can choose how to respond to any situation or condition in which we find ourselves. Choices of that magnitude, as small and simple or as big and complex as we wanted to make them, felt like something I could accomplish and everyone could accomplish. At that point, I resolved to take the idea and the language of "change" out of myself and my work with myself and put in the word "choice." It has made an enormous difference in ways that I had not anticipated.[121]
For all my adult life, for as long as I could remember, I lived with what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders called then Manic Depression. I called it just plain crazy.