“If a person really wants to, they change.” It sounds reasonable — but how possible is it, actually?
We have all said at some point that we want something to change, something that wears us out in ourselves or in our relationships, without knowing how. On social media we see accounts every day that equate change with determination and discipline. They tell us we can change our whole day and our whole life if we simply start waking up earlier, or if we decide to add exercise to our lives. And yet there are extremely disciplined people who have no good relationship at all with wellbeing and mental health, or with change.
For change to come, we have to receive it. It is not something we produce mechanically and suddenly, but something that emerges from how open we are and how much room we leave for things to exist around us and inside us. There is a Latin word, limen, meaning threshold. From it comes the beautiful word liminal, describing what is in a transitional phase, between the old and the new, the known and the unknown.
The moment just before we fully wake is a level between sleep and alertness. When we separate from a partner, there is a phase in which we no longer feel like a couple but not yet like an individual either. Or when we lose someone we love, it is as though they have gone away temporarily; we struggle to accept the finality of the event.
These places — psychological, temporal, existential — are places of potential transformation. They are points in life where behind us lies everything we knew and ahead of us everything we have not yet known. They are spaces in which, if we can bear to stay and to see them as places of possibility rather than as gaps to be filled, transformations and changes can happen. This threshold is a place of possibility, but the world often tells us it is an uncomfortable emptiness we must fill with something else.
The contemporary way of life — with social media, the glorification of consumerism and the inexhaustible distraction of our emotions and attention — constantly pushes us to cover that space with fast images, fleeting feelings and hasty pleasures. The world seems to press us not to stand at the threshold, to treat feeling something different as an evil to be avoided. An inner state that never settles into stillness, but is instead trained to keep moving and to go somewhere else. A psychological fragmentation through the sensory fragmentation of fast content on screens.
Psychotherapy is the space that helps us bear all these feelings. We go as we are; it gives us room to be heard and to choose what we want, what we can bear and what we are able to do. The therapist does not change us; she holds up a mirror to what we do and what we are. We change by seeing ourselves more clearly.
The therapist’s role is not to lead and advise (even though at many moments in life we long for that), because advice is based on her own experience and life, and each of us alone knows what is “best” for ourselves. What she must do, then, is accompany us and stand beside us, and make it easier for us to stay with uncertainty without panicking or looking away.
A teacher does not learn for us; they help us learn, answer our questions and explain knowledge in a way that is more familiar to us. It is the same with psychotherapy.
It is very common for clients to come and say “I don’t know what to say”, or “I was thinking all week about what I’d say here”, as though psychotherapy were a place where they have to report in and present something finished and organised. The point is to come as we are. It is not the therapist’s role to tell us off for not having all the answers, nor will she give us a bad mark. It is not an examination, but the space we come to as we are, without needing to be ready. In a world that constantly demands that we know, psychotherapy is one of the few places where we can sit with what we do not know — and where that is fine.
One of the most important things we learn and practise in psychotherapy (and in life) is how to be present. How to be at work with our colleagues, how to stand in the face of death, of pain, of joy. How to be parents, partners, children, and how to exist. Not how to be ideal, nor how to know everything, but how to be present in this moment, without focusing on yesterday or tomorrow. The simplest thing is also the hardest in practice.
Change in psychotherapy does not come when we try to become something different from what we are. It happens through what we are, in the moments when we allow ourselves to stand at that threshold of possibility. When we stop resisting the reality of the moment and stop loading the present with the weight of the past and the dread of the future. It takes will and determination — and just as much, the capacity to remain with uncertainty without panicking and without trying to make it artificially disappear.
The most radical change does not begin with dissatisfaction with ourselves. It begins with the capacity to see ourselves fully, without running away.
