CAN PEOPLE CHANGE? THE THING THAT KEEPS US STUCK IN RELATIONSHIPS

Confronting the logical fallacies that fuel painful emotional patterns and how to end them with dignity, mindfulness, and emotional maturity.

While the death of a loved one can make the idea of moving on unfathomable at first, it also makes letting go inevitable – there is no other recourse as death is unambiguous and irreversible. The five stages of grief, as created by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, describes the stages of what we experience when we experience loss. However, there is a species of grief, spawned by loss that is ambiguous and elastic, that disrupts the notion of moving on into an impassable and disorienting swamp. The cyclical grief of loving someone based on their potential and watching them fall short over and over, in damaging and hurtful ways, which you excuse over and over, because of their impassioned apologies and vows of reform, or because of the partly noble, partly naïve notion that a truly magnanimous person is someone who always forgives. Which is a notion rooted in a basic misinterpretation of what forgiveness really means.

To move on from such relationship is one of life’s most difficult and triumphant feats of maturity. Mostly because we enter them and stay in them for reasons that far predate the particular person or situation, reasons rooted in our earliest attachments, those formative relationships in which perpetual optimism is both part of a child’s natural innocence and a necessary survival strategy for the powerlessness and helplessness of being in the care of a damaged and damaging adult.

Due to our unwillingness to walk away from a hurtful person because of our belief in their ability to change, the predicament chips away at the fundaments of human nature and our ongoing effort to understand what we are made of. Relationships are the most fertile crucible of growth and transformation. Due to decades of research into psychology that have demonstrated that “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love,” we place the prospect of change into optimistic belief. This becomes a dangerous belief, as optimism can transition into willful blindness. (To say nothing of the opposite phenomenon, where across a span of time and unfaced trauma, people can change for the worse, their good qualities eroded, as an example, by the twin metastasis of addiction and unhappiness feeding each other as they destroy their host).

Poet W.H. Auden, who struggled with this paradox himself, oscillated between the aspiration to be “the more loving one,” and the lucid awareness that false enchantment has the power to poison a life with its toxic staying power. This great paradox and great heartbreak of relationships with unhealed people, this false and dangerous optimism that we can ever love someone out of their trauma can be described by Hannah Arendt “you can’t expect somebody who loves you to treat you less cruelly that he would treat himself.” Learning about codependency can help you break free from these types of relationships.