Happy People are Open to Change - Unhappy People Resist It

 Two nights ago, my husband and I watched a movie called, "Flight". The movie had Denzel Washington as the lead role (for which Denzel Washington earned a "Best Actor" Oscar nomination for his portrayal of an alcoholic and drug-using airline pilot). This movie was so intriguing that I HAD to write about it. I'm not going to give it away (don't worry). In this movie, there was an ugly and destructive power of a lying your entire life, which I call a "life-lie." It's a gut-wrenching and gripping film, but if you do choose to see it, I think you will appreciate how the concept of a "life-lie" (and the eventual confronting of that lie) is played out in the life of a single human being. However, just to warn you, there is strong nudity in the beginning of the movie.

Here's a quote I found to be terribly true...  "We would rather be ruined than changed." -W.H. Auden
What does this mean? Basically, it's someone deciding to risk everything, even flirting with personal ruin, rather than make a change that needs to be made. The phenomenon shows up most dramatically with addicts and alcoholics, of course, but it's such a regular feature of everyday life that psychologists have a phrase ("highly resistant to change") for such people.

In everyday life, we say that people who are unwilling or unable to make changes are stubborn or recalcitrant. But psychologists are fond of searching for deeper reasons, as Alfred Adler did when he wrote about patients who, instead of taking personal responsibility for their lives, blamed forces outside themselves. Such people, he wrote, generally lived their lives according a "life-lie" which they concocted in order to safeguard their self-esteem and maintain the status quo. The challenge to the therapist, he argued, was to help patients confront their "life-lies."

The film also illustrates other important lessons that we have learned from others or from personal experience:

(1) Change is never easy, even when we know it is needed.

(2) Even when we are committed to change, there are often dark forces
within us that ferociously battle these healthy desires.

(3) When change does occur, our lives can be transformed in the most amazing ways.

(4) If change does not occur, we will almost certainly experience consequences
that will not be to our liking.

It might be worthwhile to give all of this a little thought as you consider the changes that you -- or others in your life -- need to make. Here are are some quotes that should help motivate you to make the necessary changes in your life, or at least see the changes necessary to made, in order for you to live your life to its' maximum potential!

 

 "The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind."
Maya Angelou

"We shrink from change;
yet is there anything that can come into being without it?"
Marcus Aurelius

"Before you'll change, something important must be at risk."
Richard Bach

"Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born,
and go through our changes in a similar state of shock."
James Baldwin

"All birth is unwilling."
Pearl S. Buck

"The world hates change;
yet it is the only thing that has brought progress."
Charles Kettering

"There is no sin punished more implacably by nature
than the sin of resistance to change."
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, which demanded that
one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same."
Norman Mailer

"What is necessary to change a person
is to change his awareness of himself."
Abraham Maslow

"It's the most unhappy people who most fear change."
Mignon McLaughlin

"Life is a process of becoming,
a combination of states we have to go through.
Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.
This is a kind of death."
Anais Nin

"Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative."
H. G. Wells