Is it possible to change? Yes. But paradoxically, you change not by attempting to become someone else, but by becoming more yourself.
A concept in Gestalt therapy, the Paradoxical Theory of Change says this: transformation happens when you stop forcing yourself into an idealised version of who you should be and turn instead toward who you already are.
For many of us, that’s not straightforward. Early in life you learned, even pre-verbally, what parts of you were welcomed and what parts weren’t. You adapted, shaping yourself to fit the environment you were born into. You learned to comply, to maybe stay quiet, or perform, be good, and take up less space. These adaptations served a function: they protected your connection to the people you depended on. They helped you feel acceptable to them, safe, and included.
The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called the cumulative result of these adaptations the False Self. Not false as in fake, but as in a defensive structure, an organised way of being designed to meet external demands and preserve attachment. A version of you built out of compliance, where spontaneity is limited to a greater or lesser extent, and authenticity is replaced with what’s required of you.
Over time, this False Self becomes so habitual that you mistake it for you. It becomes your personality, your default stance in the world. But it is a survival achievement. Useful then, but unwarranted and costly now
Meanwhile, the True Self – the spontaneous, alive, unforced core of you – is pushed to the down. It becomes something unfamiliar and even unconvenient. It doesn’t disappear, but it lives underground and unattended to. It shows up in flashes: in what moves you, irritates you, attracts you.
Therapy becomes the place where the outer layers can be unpicked. Not by attacking the False Self – because it once protected you – but by recognising its historical role. Seeing how it operates. Feeling the pressure it still exerts, its critical voice, its alienation. That recognition creates space from which the True Self can begin to reappear, not dramatically but gradually, through small, surprising moments of spontaneity, honesty, or desire.
Winnicott had little to actually say about the True Self, other than that it was the unlimited organic functioning of a healthy self. It doesn’t have a defining identity – it is merely what it is to be alive.
This process is the paradox of change. You don’t become a different person (which is anyway an impossibility). You stop contorting yourself into what you needed to be long ago. You recover the parts of you that were put into hiding. You become more congruent, less compliant, more alive.
The world feels different because you are meeting it from a truer centre. You haven’t become someone else; you’ve stopped being constrained by who you thought you had to be. And you experience that as change.
Image credit: Christopher Michael
