Richard Hogan: Change can happen, you just have to work on it

Richard Hogan: Changing the direction of your thoughts can change your behaviour.

One of my favourite David Bowie songs is, ‘Changes’. It captures the recalcitrant teenage heart driven to delirium by the adult world’s inability to understand it. Like the terrible fish in Sylvia Plath’s mirror, we are surrounded by change. In fact, the life of a human is marked by a series of changes. Which, in many ways, is a good thing. We are constantly in a state of change. flux. 

We are never one thing for too long. As soon as we are comfortable in the sun, a leaf falls. And the minute we feel we have it figured out, it slips away and we shed that old skin and morph into something else. So, we are used to change. 

Or at the very least, we have to get used to change. If we don’t, we will suffer like the old king who tried to keep the tide out with a spoon. Even though change is ubiquitous, it isn’t something we are often very good at. Most of the clients who come to see me are looking to change. They know they are stuck in a particular habit or behaviour that isn’t good for them but they can’t seem to stop it. The premise of psychotherapy, traditionally, is that through understanding the genesis of the problem you can eradicate it. The old cause and effect model. But most people I meet, understand their problem. 

They have thought about little else – and yet are still trapped repeating it over and over again. Perhaps, the model needs an upgrade. There is a science to change. The word science is an athame in the psychotherapy world. Yet, science has increased efficacy across the health sector. I mean, if you looked at the success rate of open-heart surgery in 1970 and compared it to the success rate in 2021 now that they have developed more sophisticated minimally invasive techniques to end large-incision surgery you’d find exponential growth in positive outcomes. You’d have to arrive at the conclusion; utilising innovations in science and technology impacts significantly on the health of patients. Could we say the same about therapy? Have outcome success rates dramatically improved over the years? Research would suggest, no.

There is a famous saying in neuroscience, ‘Neurons that fire together, wire together’. What they are explaining with this saying is how we come to think in a particular way. 

When we are young and the plasticity in our brain is significantly more malleable, the story we hear about ourselves gets written. When we learn something new synapses are connecting, so our brain literally changes with new information. Billions of neurons fire when we are thinking, which is all the time. The more we think a thought, the more those neurons connect. Once they start to connect all those other potential thoughts fade. So let’s just say you are constantly making yourself sound weak in work or you wonder why you never go for a promotion. 

These are common problems I meet in my clinic. Understanding a childhood incident where you first spoke negatively to yourself, is not going to help you to change without intentional action. It’s a nice starting point. But there is much more work to do to seriously attempt to effect change. I had a client tell me recently, ‘I hate when I say yes to everything’. 

And of course, trying to please everyone is a futile endeavour and it only gives root to self-loathing and resentment of those you attempt to please. As we explored the paradigm that was causing this behaviour, the client explained that he was adopted and always felt like a stranger or an outsider in his family. 

In the conversation, he elucidated an experience where he felt his adopted parents made him feel that he should be thankful for the life they had given him. As we were talking I could see the paradigm he had developed through these early thoughts. Once we repeat a thought it becomes a pathway. Almost like an algorithm, the more you watch a particular video the more the algorithm gets written and all other potential videos disappear. So, the more you think something the more the neural growth factor knits around that thought. Which means all other thoughts never get a chance to be heard. This can cause an incredible amount of distress as we get caught thinking in negative patterns, even though we know it’s not correct, we still think it. That can cause a lot of suffering. Which was happening with this client. He knew the way he was thinking and therefore behaving was not congruent with how he wanted to be in the world. But what was going to change that behaviour? He knew why he was acting like this, but changing behaviour only arrives when we change how we think. And changing the way you think is all about re-wiring those neurons that fired many years ago. Once you do that, you can do anything.