Embracing Change: A Study in Acceptance

Hello dear FPA community! Happy October. I hope this time finds you crunching leaves underfoot, enjoying fireside chats with your loved ones, and baking all the spiced goods for the season.

This season I personally am facing the challenge of embracing a big change and wanted to share some thoughts with you on why change is hard for many of us and what we can do to navigate it with better agility and grace.

Change is the one constant of our human experience- ironic, isn't it? Change happens in big and small ways, across our health, our relationships, our work and even our identities. Change feels hard for most of us. As beings of nature humans are wired to seek predictability as a way to minimize risk and maximize survival. Uncertainty usually incites fear, in turn triggering a stress response in the body and in the mind. Emotional responses to change might include grief, anxiety, resistance, and irritability among many others.

We are constantly faced with options in confronting change: we can embrace and accept, or we can resist and reject. Sometimes the changes we face are from external sources, like a job transition, a geographical move, or a relationship change (either gained or lost). Sometimes our changes are internal, like aging and mindset changes, or personal growth and calibration of foundational values.

Some changes are sudden, and some are gradual. Some are chosen, and some are involuntary.

If your instinct in response to change is to resist and reject, you might find yourself stuck. You might attempt to deny or avoid the reality, you might try to overprepare for the change in an attempt to exert control, you might even romanticize the past and cling to the status quo out of fear. Although these are all natural and common responses, my advice would be to take a different route.

If we can respond to change with acceptance, if we can be curious rather than fearful, what might we gain? Change is a wonderful teacher. We can learn how to better align our choices with our values. We can practice resilience in hard situations, where our choices are limited. We can exercise creativity in solving problems or seek collaboration with others to ease discomfort.

If you're someone who struggles to embrace change in life, try practicing these few things. Validate your own experience here. You don't need to know how it's all gonna unfold… none of us has a magic crystal ball that predicts with 100% accuracy what the future will look like. It's ok to not know. It's ok to acknowledge how you feel about not knowing. Focus in on what you can control in this transition time. Build a routine for yourself that brings comfort and ease. Any daily structures of predictability increase our sense of stability. Spend time with people you love. Give yourself some space to be a learner, to bump up against uncertainty and continue on down the path regardless.

Change is hard, my friends. But it is also transformative. It is freeing, it is energizing, and it is clarifying. Embracing change doesn't guarantee you won't experience discomfort… it just means you can meet the discomfort with an open mind and a gentle heart. 

- Rae Cowen, LMFT