Why Some People Change
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I do not always go looking for my own healing. One time I went looking for a skill.
A client of mine was stuck. Deeply stuck. The kind of stuck where everything I had been trained to do was not reaching him. Someone I trusted told me that Ericksonian hypnosis and inner child work could help me recode trauma at the level where it actually lives. Not the cognitive level. Not the insight level. Deeper.
So I found a teacher. A master therapist named Dr. Wendy Hill, who had learned directly from Milton Erickson himself. And when I told her I wanted to learn the method, she said something I was not prepared for.
You go first.
Twenty hours. Intensive inner child work. My own material. Not as a formality. As the price of admission. She would not teach me to guide someone else through territory I had not walked myself.
I did not want to do it. I want to be clear about that. I was not sitting around journaling about my childhood, waiting for an invitation to excavate. I had catalogued all of that years ago. Filed it in the rear view mirror. Done. Handled. Ancient history that I genuinely believed no longer applied to me. But it applied to my client, and I wanted to help.
I did it because I wanted the skill. I made the choice. And the choice led me somewhere I did not expect.
Two people can carry the same wound. The same origin. The same family system. And one will do the work. The other will not. Not because one is smarter. Not because one is braver. Not because one read the right book.
Most of what gets written about personal transformation treats change as a decision. Wake up. Choose differently. Decide to heal. As if the human being is a machine that simply needs the right instruction.
The esoteric teacher P.D. Ouspensky, a student of G.I. Gurdjieff, described humanity as “mad machines.” Not as an insult. As an observation. We are largely mechanical. Our reactions, our patterns, our defenses. They run on autopilot. We do not choose them. They choose us.
The writer Mitch Horowitz, whose work I hold in high regard, recently put it this way: “humanity is capable of free will—but only from a developed state.”
Sit with that.
Free will is not a birthright. It is a capacity. And capacity has to be built.
I think of this as expanding bandwidth. The nervous system has a bandwidth for how much truth it can tolerate. How much feeling. How much vulnerability. How much reality.
When that bandwidth is narrow, it is not that a person is choosing to stay stuck. The choice is not available to them yet. Their system is doing its job. Protecting them. Keeping the walls up. Running the program that kept them alive when they were small enough to need it.
This is not a moral failure. It is biology doing exactly what biology does. Survival.
But here is what I have also seen, in my own life and in the lives of the people I work with.
At some point, for some people, the bandwidth matures enough that a choice appears. A real one. Not the performative kind. Not the New Year’s resolution kind. The kind where you can feel both options in your body. Stay closed. Or open.
And in that moment, the question is not “do I have the right information.” You have plenty of information. The question is something much simpler and much harder.
Do I love myself enough to look?
That is what happened to me in those twenty hours. Not what I expected. Not what I would have predicted. And that was terrifying.
I had gone in believing I was there to learn a technique. I had gone in believing my own history was handled. I was a licensed clinician. I had read the books. I had years of my own therapy behind me. I was the one who helped other people.
What I found was not a new wound. It was something far more disorienting.
I found that I was loved. That I mattered.
And I had not known it.
I do not mean that I could not have said the words. Of course I mattered. Of course I was loved. I could have told you that at a dinner party and sounded perfectly convincing. But knowing something in your head and knowing it in your body are two different countries. I had citizenship in one and had never set foot in the other.
What surfaced in that work was the recognition that I had spent most of my life proving my worth by giving myself away. Peace Corps. Volunteering. Community mental health. Years of clinical work at rates that did not reflect what I carried into the room. I wrote about this in my last piece, the money wound. But the money wound was not really about money. It was about receiving.
I was very good at giving love. Giving can be a form of control, if you are honest about it. You set the terms. You decide the shape. You stay in the driver’s seat. You can also withdraw or pull away.
Receiving love is the opposite. Receiving requires surrender. It requires believing you deserve it. It requires letting someone else decide you are worth something and allowing that to land.
I could not do it. Not because I was broken. Because my system had never developed the bandwidth to tolerate it.
It is a pattern I can recognize because of my experience. The high-achiever who can run a company but cannot accept a compliment. The giver who will exhaust himself for everyone around him but will not invest in his own healing. The man who has read every book on the shelf but has never once let himself be held.
These are not people who lack insight. They are people whose nervous systems matured in environments where receiving was not safe. Where need was dangerous. Where love, if it came at all, came with conditions that taught them to earn it rather than simply allow it.
And the esoteric traditions confirm what the clinical work reveals. Gurdjieff taught that a human being is divided against himself. “Man is in pieces,” as Horowitz writes. Our thoughts say one thing. Our feelings say another. And the body does what it has always done. The integration of these centers, the moment when thinking and feeling and physical being align, is what Gurdjieff called real consciousness. Everything else is sleep.
That integration does not come standard. But it does come with choice.
The phoenix is an old image. I use it carefully. Not as inspiration. As description.
The burning is the part nobody tells you about. The rising is the result. But first you have to stay in the fire long enough to let the old structure come apart. And everything in your nervous system will tell you to run.
Some people’s systems will not let them anywhere near the fire. And I hold no judgment for that. Their armor is doing what it was built to do.
But for those whose bandwidth has matured enough that they can feel the heat and stay. For those who sense that the thing they have been avoiding is not a wound but a truth. For those who are beginning to suspect that the rear view mirror is not as far away as they thought.
The question is waiting.
Do you love yourself enough to look?
Not to fix yourself. You are not broken. But to receive resolution to what has been trying to reach you for a very long time.
I did not go looking for healing. I went looking for a skill. What I found was that I had been giving myself away for decades because I did not know I was allowed to receive.
That knowing changed me. Not overnight. Not in a single dramatic revelation. Slowly. The way dawn works. You do not see the exact moment it stops being dark. You just realize, at some point, that you can see.
Some people change. Some people don’t. Not because of intelligence or courage or even desire. Because of bandwidth. Because the system has to mature enough to tolerate the truth.
And when it does, the choice is yours.
May you be well.
James O'Neill is a licensed clinical professional counselor with over 20 years of experience, trained at Johns Hopkins, and the founder of Journey Mindfulness. He works with men navigating divorce, identity disruption, high-achiever burnout, and the space between external success and internal truth. He sees clients in person in Columbia, Maryland and virtually anywhere.
If something in this piece resonated, you are welcome to a free 15-minute conversation. No pressure, no pitch, just an honest talk about what is going on and whether this work is the right fit.
