Changing People: A Psychological Impossibility - Part 2
In Part 1, we witnessed social worker Angie Thokden navigate the reality of six families across two weeks - from the Hakdsons who successfully adapted, to the Thomkdens who remain dangerous despite every intervention. Now we examine the psychological research that explains why these patterns are not failures of practice but reflections of fundamental human psychology.
The social worker sits across from Kelly Jokden, whose household dysfunction has triggered multiple referrals. The children are frequently late for school, 11-year-old Jayden is increasingly violent, 8-year-old Destiny self-harms, and 5-year-old Kenzie remains in nappies. Angie Thokden has attended training on evidence-based parenting programmes and knows exactly what Kelly needs to change. She explains the importance of consistent bedtime routines, structured meal times, and organised morning schedules. Kelly nods, agrees, recites back what she's learned from previous parenting courses. Six weeks later, nothing has changed. Kelly can still perform perfectly in meetings, but the household dysfunction continues. She knows exactly what to say, attends all appointments when on Child Protection plans, yet everyone sees the dysfunction while no one can prove it sufficiently.
Down the corridor in another service, a therapist works with a client experiencing anxiety clearly linked to perfectionist tendencies and rigid thinking patterns. The therapist has identified the cognitive distortions maintaining the client's distress and knows that challenging these thought patterns will reduce symptoms. Session after session, they work through cognitive restructuring exercises. The client understands the logic, completes the homework assignments, and can articulate why their thoughts are unrealistic. Yet the anxiety persists, and they report feeling frustrated with therapy because "knowing it doesn't make sense doesn't make it stop."
Meanwhile, at the policy level, government officials design behaviour change programmes based on solid research evidence. They implement incentive structures to encourage healthier lifestyle choices, create educational campaigns about financial responsibility, and design interventions to reduce antisocial behaviour in communities. The programmes are well-funded, evidence-based, and logically sound. Compliance rates remain disappointingly low, and when changes do occur, they rarely persist beyond the intervention period.
These scenarios share a common feature: well-intentioned professionals armed with evidence-based knowledge attempting to modify human behaviour through direct intervention. They also share a common outcome: consistent difficulty achieving lasting change despite obvious benefits to the individuals concerned and genuine professional competence in other areas.
Professional training across disciplines—social work, psychology, education, medicine, policy development—operates from a fundamental assumption: that people can be changed through appropriate intervention. This assumption underpins therapeutic modalities, educational programmes, policy initiatives, and institutional practices. It suggests that with the right knowledge, techniques, and persistence, external agents can modify internal states, behaviour patterns, and life outcomes in others.
This assumption appears reasonable. After all, people do change. Children develop new skills through education. Clients sometimes experience breakthroughs in therapy. Communities occasionally respond positively to policy initiatives. The existence of change validates the assumption that change can be deliberately induced.
However, the distinction between change occurring and change being directly caused by professional intervention represents a crucial difference that most training programmes fail to address adequately. When positive outcomes happen during professional contact, the assumption is often that the intervention caused the change. When change fails to occur, the assumption is that the intervention was inadequate, poorly implemented, or that the individual is resistant, unmotivated, or suffering from pathology that prevents change.
Rarely questioned is whether the fundamental approach—attempting to directly change others through external intervention—represents the most effective strategy for achieving lasting transformation, or whether professionals might serve clients better by focusing on creating conditions that support natural change processes.
Research in psychological reactance theory provides compelling evidence for why direct attempts to change people consistently fail. Brehm's (1966) foundational work on psychological reactance demonstrates that when individuals perceive their freedom to choose is being threatened, they experience a motivational state directed toward restoring that threatened freedom. This manifests as increased attraction to the forbidden or discouraged option and resistance to the recommended alternative.
Subsequent research by Wortman and Brehm (1975) extended this theory to therapeutic settings, showing that the magnitude of reactance is proportional to the importance of the threatened freedom and the degree of pressure applied. In professional contexts, this creates a paradox: the more important the change appears to the practitioner, and the more pressure they apply to achieve it, the greater the resistance they generate. Miller and Rollnick's (2013) extensive research on motivational interviewing confirms this pattern, demonstrating that directive approaches consistently increase client resistance rather than promoting change.
This resistance is not conscious defiance or deliberate non-compliance. It operates at a psychological level below awareness, creating automatic defensive responses that protect individual autonomy. The person experiencing reactance may genuinely want to change and may intellectually understand the benefits of doing so. Nevertheless, the psychological system generates resistance to preserve freedom of choice.
Consider Kelly Jokden from Part 1. Her household dysfunction represents her adaptation to multiple stressors and learned patterns of gaming systems. Angie's recommendations, however logical, represent external control over aspects of Kelly's life that feel essential to her sense of autonomy. The psychological system responds to this perceived threat by generating resistance. Kelly has learned to perform compliance - she knows exactly what professionals want to hear - while maintaining her actual patterns. She genuinely believes she's a good mother even as 11-year-old Jayden becomes violent and 8-year-old Destiny self-harms.
Similarly, the anxious client's perfectionist patterns, while distressing, provide a sense of control over an unpredictable world. Attempts to modify these patterns trigger resistance designed to maintain psychological safety, regardless of the client's conscious desire for relief.
Self-Determination Theory, developed by Deci and Ryan (2000), provides another lens through which to understand why external change attempts fail. Their research demonstrates that human motivation exists along a continuum from purely external regulation to fully autonomous self-direction. Behaviours sustained by external regulation—rewards, punishments, or social pressure—require ongoing external support and tend to cease when external contingencies are removed.
Ryan and Deci's (2017) comprehensive review of three decades of SDT research confirms that lasting change requires intrinsic motivation—engagement driven by inherent satisfaction, personal values, or autonomous choice. Crucially, Vansteenkiste et al.'s (2006) meta-analysis of motivation research shows that intrinsic motivation cannot be directly installed through external intervention. It emerges from conditions that support three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Professional interventions that focus on changing behaviour, thinking patterns, or lifestyle choices typically employ external regulation. Even when disguised as education or skill-building, they operate by providing reasons why the person should change, techniques for achieving change, and expectations for implementing change. This approach undermines the autonomy necessary for intrinsic motivation to develop.
The therapist working with the anxious client provides evidence for why their thinking is unrealistic and techniques for modifying their thoughts. This positions the client as the recipient of expert knowledge rather than the autonomous agent of their own change process. Self-Determination Theory predicts that this approach will generate controlled rather than autonomous motivation, resulting in temporary compliance at best.
Angie's recommendations to Kelly Jokden similarly position her as the implementer of expert-designed solutions rather than the author of her own family's development. This undermines Kelly's sense of competence and autonomy, making lasting change less likely. Kelly has mastered the performance of compliance - completing parenting courses, attending appointments, saying the right things - without any internal shift. The system recognises this pattern but cannot penetrate it.
Carl Rogers's (1957) seminal paper "The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change" provides additional insight into why directive approaches fail. Rogers identified six conditions that must be present for constructive personality change to occur, including therapist congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding. Crucially, he found that the client must perceive these conditions for change to occur.
Elliott et al.'s (2013) comprehensive meta-analysis of person-centred therapy research demonstrates that Rogers's approach consistently produces superior outcomes compared to directive therapeutic modalities, particularly for complex, persistent problems. The difference lies not in technique but in fundamental assumptions about the change process. Bohart and Tallman (1999) in their extensive review "How Clients Make Therapy Work" confirm that person-centred approaches assume people possess inherent wisdom about their own development and will naturally move toward growth when conditions are supportive, while directive approaches assume that change requires external expertise and implementation of expert-designed solutions.
Professional education across disciplines fails to adequately address this fundamental tension. Lambert's (2013) landmark research on therapeutic outcomes reveals that client factors—including readiness for change, social support, and life circumstances—account for approximately 40% of therapeutic success, while specific therapeutic techniques account for only 15%. Yet professional training focuses overwhelmingly on technique acquisition rather than understanding and working with client factors.
Hubble, Duncan, and Miller's (1999) comprehensive analysis in "The Heart and Soul of Change" demonstrates that relationship factors and client resources consistently outweigh technical interventions in producing lasting change. Miller et al.'s (2013) research specifically shows that therapist directiveness predicts poorer therapeutic outcomes across diverse populations and problem types.
This creates a generation of professionals who experience chronic frustration when their well-intentioned interventions produce minimal lasting impact. They often interpret this difficulty as evidence of client pathology, resistance, or lack of motivation rather than questioning whether the direct change approach itself might be the limiting factor in achieving better outcomes.
The consistent failure across diverse professional contexts suggests underlying patterns that transcend individual technique or practitioner competence. Several threads emerge from examining these failures systematically:
First, research by Brehm and colleagues (Brehm, 1966; Wicklund, 1974) demonstrates that the magnitude of resistance appears proportional to the directness of change attempts. The more explicitly professionals target specific behaviours or attitudes for modification, the greater the psychological reactance they encounter.
Second, Prochaska and DiClemente's (1983) transtheoretical model reveals that temporary compliance often masks deeper resistance. Their research shows that individuals may demonstrate surface-level change during intervention periods while core patterns remain unchanged, leading to predictable relapse cycles when external pressure is removed.
Third, Duncan and Miller's (2000) client-directed therapy research suggests that successful change, when it does occur, often happens tangentially to formal intervention efforts. Their systematic analysis reveals that clients consistently report breakthrough moments that occurred between sessions, in response to incidental comments, or through life experiences unrelated to therapeutic work.
These patterns point toward a hypothesis supported by converging evidence from multiple research domains: human psychological systems may be inherently resistant to externally imposed modification, regardless of the logic, evidence, or good intentions behind change attempts.
Reactance theory (Brehm, 1966), Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), and person-centred research (Rogers, 1957; Elliott et al., 2013) all point toward the same conclusion: this resistance operates automatically, below conscious awareness, suggesting it serves some fundamental protective function. The psychological system appears to treat external change pressure as a threat to autonomy, triggering defensive responses that maintain existing patterns even when those patterns create distress.
Yet something deeper seems to be operating beyond these established psychological theories. Baumeister and Leary's (1995) research on the fundamental need to belong suggests that resistance to change may also serve social functions—maintaining tribal connections and group membership that could be threatened by individual transformation. Cross-cultural research by Hofstede (2001) and Schwartz (2012) demonstrates that this resistance pattern appears across diverse cultural contexts, suggesting it may represent a universal characteristic of human psychology rather than a culturally specific phenomenon.
This convergent evidence raises intriguing questions: Why would psychological systems evolve to resist beneficial change? What adaptive function might this resistance serve in human survival and social cohesion? How do the rare instances of genuine transformation occur, and what conditions make them possible without triggering resistance mechanisms? Most importantly, how might professionals work more effectively with these biological realities rather than against them?
The answers to these questions may require looking beyond traditional psychology to evolutionary biology, anthropology, and neuroscience to understand the deeper purposes that resistance to change might serve in human adaptation and survival.
Throughout Part 1, we witnessed something curious. The Hakdsons thrived not because Martin changed but because he adapted when conditions supported it. The Copkdens recovered not through transformation but through adjusting to new circumstances with their existing resources. Even within the stuck families, small adaptations occasionally emerged - Amit Pakden stepping up when his father was arrested, Ryan Brekden finally asking for help.
What if the distinction between change and adaptation isn't merely semantic? The psychological research suggests adaptation might bypass resistance mechanisms that change attempts trigger. Consider why:
Adaptation preserves autonomy. When Kelly Jokden is told she must change her parenting, her psychological system perceives threat. But if circumstances shift - say, Jayden's school offers an after-school programme he loves - Kelly might adapt by allowing him to attend. She hasn't "changed" her parenting philosophy; she's adjusted to an opportunity. The resistance never activates because her autonomy remains intact.
Adaptation builds on existing patterns rather than replacing them. The anxious client's perfectionism serves protective functions. Asking them to change their thinking threatens those functions. But if their workplace introduces flexible working that reduces perfectionism triggers, they might adapt by working from home on high-stress days. Their anxiety patterns remain available when needed; they've simply found ways to work with them rather than against them.
Adaptation feels reversible. Change implies permanence - "you must become different." Adaptation implies flexibility - "try this adjustment and see what happens." The policy official designing behaviour change programmes might find communities more responsive to "adapting to new opportunities" than "changing behaviours." The psychological system doesn't panic because nothing is being taken away permanently.
This isn't to suggest adaptation as a new intervention technique - that would simply recreate the same dynamic with different language. Rather, it's an observation that humans naturally adapt when conditions support it, without professional intervention. The Hakdsons didn't need Angie to change them; they needed stable housing and Martin's depression treatment to create conditions where their existing capacity could express itself differently.
Perhaps the professional role isn't to change people or even to help them adapt, but to recognise and support the adaptations people are already making, to adjust conditions where possible, and to witness the natural resilience that emerges when resistance isn't triggered by change attempts. This possibility threads through the remaining essays in this series, not as solution but as a different lens through which to view the same reality.
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