Living Change
Why we must experience change, not just have it explained to us
“Approaching Change”, by Cynthia Schira (Art institute of Chicago collection)
While shaving the other day, I had a realisation about why so much self-help advice falls flat: we can understand an idea intellectually, but until we live it, we don’t truly know it. This gap between knowing and experiencing might explain why lasting change feels so elusive for many of us—and why our culture seems increasingly trapped in cycles of aspiration without transformation.
In my therapy training I learned to let clients experience their own feelings and emotions through description and engagement, rather than me talking them through everything as their therapist. The goal is to allow something to unfold, to allow the client to go through their own experience. When a therapist explains too much too early, it gives the client’s ego time to analyse and assess. That snap judgment is usually unhelpful and often inaccurate. Our egos make assumptions before we have the experience, then struggle to control the real process from that point forward, undermining any chances of meaningful shift or growth.
Through my own therapy journey and years of helping others through theirs, I’ve noticed a pattern: the most profound and lasting changes—the ones that feel deeply satisfying and expansive—require us to move through discomfort. We have to face pain, make sense of it, and weave it into our story meaningfully. The discomfort makes this prospect utterly unappealing to our ego.
I think that’s partly why pieces like this can make for an uncomfortable read—it can be hard to stomach or accept. It is difficult to hear before living it yourself. We naturally avoid discomfort or pain, and understandably so. Much of the time it can harm us. We think there must be better and more appealing ways forward. I know I did, and still do a lot of the time…
Contemporary culture reinforces this too. We are constantly presented with narratives of limitless possibility and personal agency—that with sufficient effort and the right mindset, most obstacles can be overcome and aspirations realised. When reality fails to align with these expectations, we berate ourselves. We feel profound guilt and self-recrimination.
Despite material advantages that previous generations couldn’t have imagined, many of us struggle with feeling psychologically burdened while recognising our relative privilege. This creates an uncomfortable tension: we question the legitimacy of our emotional struggles when our circumstances appear objectively favourable, wondering why we experience distress without apparent justification.
We lack adequate rites of passage in contemporary society. Looking at other cultures and how tribes historically helped their children transition into adulthood through initiation, I believe the discomfort and experience young people underwent was psychologically beneficial for several reasons:
Building self-confidence through surviving an ordeal
Breaking away from family ties
Releasing childhood anxieties and neuroses
Expanding one’s perspective and understanding of the world
This may explain why we sometimes observe people engaging in risky behaviours that appear self-sabotaging. Or maybe we have done this ourselves. Perhaps there is an unconscious drive to find our limits, to test ourselves in a world that has become so comfortable and secure we no longer know our actual boundaries.
Modern psychology is beginning to validate this ancient wisdom. Research demonstrates that voluntary stress exposure provides psychological benefits. Cold water immersion, for instance, offers both physical and mental advantages. Exercise operates similarly—both can cause discomfort in the moment but strengthen us through beneficial stress responses. Passive consumption, being glued to devices, stationary in our work, constant distraction, offers no such benefits.
We need to embody change, not merely conceptualise it. Our egos process the experience afterwards and, ideally, recognise the value that emerged from the challenge. Much of my therapeutic work involves helping people make sense of their difficulties. That said, some experiences are so painful that attempting to extract meaning can feel superficial and invalidating.
This is why experience must precede understanding. Sometimes we only recognise that change has occurred much later—perhaps part of us died, but that death enabled growth and self-discovery at a deeper, more authentic level.