Changing People: A Psychological Impossibility - Part 4
The Midkwell Council car park smells of diesel and rain. Angie Thokden, a social worker with seven years' experience, sits in her twelve-year-old Nissan, engine off, hands still gripping the steering wheel. The supervision meeting ended fourteen minutes ago. She can't quite make herself go back inside.
Radio 4 fills the silence: "...the Minister announced today that the government's Transforming Families programme has helped over 15,000 households break cycles of deprivation. The additional £50 million announced today will..."
She switches it off.
Through the windscreen, she can see the third-floor windows of Children's Services. Behind one of them, her team manager Marcus is probably writing up the supervision notes. "Hakdson family: single father excellent progress, transformation achieved through consistent engagement. Brakden family: mother's continued resistance to change, consider escalation."
The physical sensation starts in her chest—that familiar tightness that's become her constant companion. Her jaw aches from unconscious clenching. Her shoulders feel like concrete. This isn't exhaustion. She's had exhaustion—the bone-deep tiredness after consecutive night shifts in her old care assistant job. This is different. This is her body rejecting something fundamental about what she just participated in.
Forty minutes ago, she presented two families side by side. The Hakdsons: Martin, a single father, maintaining routines, back at work, his baby son and 4-year-old thriving. The Brakdens: Katie, mother of three, still paralysed by morning depression, her partner arrested again, their 5-year-old daughter's attendance dropping. The team's response was predictable. The Hakdsons proved change was possible. The Brakdens proved some families choose not to change.
But sitting here, in the grey October drizzle, Angie allows herself the thought she couldn't voice in supervision: I've never changed anyone.
Not in seven years as a social worker. Not the Hakdsons—single father Martin adapted when his brother started helping and spring eased his seasonal depression. Not the Copkdens—they recovered when mother Sophie got private therapy and the grandparents provided financial support. Certainly not the Thomkdens, currently in month eight of care proceedings that everyone knows will fail.
The families that improved found ways to adapt when their environments changed. The families that didn't improve couldn't adapt because their environments—internal and external—remained fixed. She's never transformed anyone. She's occasionally been present when adaptation became possible.
Her phone buzzes. Text from Marcus, her team manager: "Can you get the Hakdson case study written up for Pat? Minister visiting next month, need success stories."
Success stories. Transformation narratives. Change receipts.
She thinks about Katie Brakden this morning, the mother crying in her flat: "I want to change, Angie. I really do. I set five alarms. But when they go off, my body won't move. It's like I'm paralysed. What's wrong with me?"
What's wrong is that everyone—from the Minister on Radio 4 to Marcus in supervision to Katie herself—believes change is possible if you just try hard enough. What's wrong is that Katie's neurological architecture, shaped by generations of trauma and deprivation, can't simply reorganise itself because a support plan says it should. What's wrong is that Angie has to document this as "failure to engage" rather than "biological impossibility."
The rain intensifies. Other workers are starting to leave for lunch, heads down, hurrying to their cars. She recognises Tom Hakdson's purposeful stride—another social worker on the team who'll eat his sandwich at exactly 12:30, return at exactly 1:00, maintain his boundaries that everyone mocks and envies in equal measure. At least Tom has figured out his adaptation: rigid boundaries that prevent the moral injury from deepening.
Angie knows she needs to go back inside. Write up the Hakdson family's "transformation." Document the Brakden mother's "resistance." Prepare for the Thomkden court hearing where she'll argue for the children's removal based on the parents' "failure to change." Produce the receipts that justify the funding that pays her salary that enables the Prime Minister to claim transformation.
But for just these few minutes, in the privacy of her car, she allows herself to know what she knows:
Because what else can she do? The Brakden children—8-year-old son, 5-year-old daughter, and the toddler—need someone to witness their struggle, even if she can't transform it. The Thomkden children need protecting, even if the system won't allow it. The Hakdsons need their adaptation supported, even if it gets mislabelled as transformation.
She turns the key. The engine struggles, then catches. Time to go back inside and launder impossibility into change receipts. Time to participate in the economy of false transformation. Time to deepen the moral injury that's reshaping her from the inside out.
The professional helper's dilemma isn't what the textbooks prepare you for. They teach evidence-based interventions, theories of change, models of transformation. They don't teach what happens when you realise the entire framework is built on biological impossibilities.
Every helping professional knows this moment: sitting across from someone who desperately wants to change, knowing you're supposed to facilitate that change, while simultaneously recognising that everything you're about to do will deepen their shame when change doesn't come. Not because they're not trying. Not because you're not skilled. But because the fundamental premise—that professional intervention creates personal transformation—is a lie we all pretend to believe.
This isn't burnout. Burnout comes from working too hard, carrying too many cases, absorbing too much secondary trauma. Burnout can be fixed with rest, supervision, self-care. What Angie experiences is moral injury—the psychological damage that comes from repeatedly violating your own ethical code through enforced participation in harmful systems.
Every morning, she promises help she knows won't help. Every afternoon, she documents "resistance" when she means "impossibility." Every evening, she carries home the weight of participating in systematic gaslighting of vulnerable families. The injury isn't from failing—it's from being coerced into pretending that failure is the family's choice rather than the intervention's impossibility.
The cruellest part? The most conscientious workers suffer most. Those who care deeply about families experience the greatest injury when forced to harm them through "help." Tom Hakdson the boundary-keeping social worker's rigid boundaries aren't coldness—they're self-preservation against moral injury. Sarah Mitqden, a newer team member, and her job-hunting isn't disloyalty—it's escape from daily ethical violation.
Katie Brakden, the mother of three, sits in her flat, benefits letter crumpled on the coffee table, promising her support worker she'll attend tomorrow's parenting programme. "I want to be better for my kids," she says, and means it with every fibre of her being. "I know I can change."
Angie nods, makes encouraging noises, books the taxi that might get Katie there. But she knows—with the terrible clarity that comes from seven years of watching this pattern—that Katie's brain cannot reorganise itself simply because she wants it to. The neural pathways carved by childhood neglect, reinforced by adult trauma, maintained by chronic stress, won't suddenly reconfigure because a facilitator teaches her about boundaries and routines.
The violence isn't in the failure. It's in the hope. Every programme Katie doesn't complete adds another layer of shame. Every strategy she can't implement confirms her worthlessness. Every failed attempt at transformation deepens her conviction that she's choosing to fail her children.
The professional obligation to "maintain hope" and "believe in change potential" becomes a form of cruelty. Like insisting someone with paralysed legs could walk if they just attended enough physiotherapy sessions, showed sufficient motivation, engaged properly with the intervention. When they remain paralysed, we document their "resistance to treatment" rather than questioning whether we're demanding the impossible.
Kelly Jokden, mother in another of Angie's families, articulates this with characteristic intelligence: "You keep offering me solutions to change who I am. But what if this is who I am? What if my brain works differently? What if I need help existing as I am, not transforming into someone else?"
But Angie can't agree. She's coerced by professional requirements to maintain transformation narratives. The funding requires change outcomes. The professional ethics code insists on "empowering families to achieve positive change." To suggest that Kelly might be neurologically incapable of the changes demanded would be professional heresy.
The Monday team meeting has become predictable theatre. Marcus, the team manager, leads with success stories—always the Hakdsons now, occasionally the Copkdens before they closed. These stories serve a specific purpose: they prove the system works. Therefore, families who don't transform are choosing failure.
"Martin Hakdson, the single father, had severe depression," Marcus reminds them. "Single parent, isolated, house was chaos. Look at him now. Transformation is possible when families genuinely want it."
Around the table, heads nod. The logic feels inescapable. If the Hakdson family could transform, why can't the Brakden family? They're offered the same services, the same support, the same interventions. The difference must be motivation, engagement, choice.
Sarah Mitqden, the newer team member, shifts uncomfortably—she's been doing this long enough to recognise the flaw, but not long enough to have given up fighting it. "Martin's brother started helping with school runs around the same time. And his benefits increased after that review. And the new GP actually prescribed medication that works..."
"All of which he engaged with," Marcus counters. "Katie Brakden could engage with her GP. She could ask family for help. She could take her medication properly. She's choosing not to."
The weaponisation is complete. The Hakdson father's adaptation—enabled by environmental changes, family support, biochemical intervention that happened to work for Martin's particular brain—becomes proof that the Brakden mother is a moral failure. Their success doesn't inspire; it condemns.
Angie watches this happen every Monday. The team needs the Hakdson success to be proof that their work matters. Without transformation stories, what are they doing here? Without change narratives, how do they justify their existence? So Martin's complex adaptation becomes simple transformation, and every family that can't replicate it becomes culpable for their own suffering.
"Some people's brains cannot change in the ways we're demanding."
Angie imagines saying this in supervision. The silence that would follow. The careful concern in Marcus's voice: "Are you saying you've given up on the Brakden family? That you don't believe in recovery?"
She'd try to explain: not giving up, just recognising biological constraints. Not abandoning hope, just redirecting it toward realistic adaptations. Not writing families off, just stopping the pretence that professional intervention creates neurological transformation.
But how would that sound to Pat Thornkden, the Director of Children's Services, fighting for funding? "One of our senior practitioners doesn't believe change is possible." How would it sound to the Minister? "Midkwell Council admits its interventions don't create transformation." How would it sound to Katie Brakden? "Your brain cannot change, so we'll stop trying."
The alternative—maintaining the fiction—means continuing to promise impossible transformations. It means documenting "resistance" when she means "impossibility." It means participating in the systematic gaslighting of families who are told their inability to transform is a choice.
There is no ethical position available within the current framework. Truth is professionally unacceptable; lies are morally unbearable. So Angie, like thousands of professionals across the country, exists in a state of constant moral injury, knowing what she knows but unable to speak it, participating in harm whilst trying to help.
When the Thomkden family care proceedings fail—and they will fail, everyone knows the judge won't make an Order—the blame will cascade downward with predictable precision.
The judge will criticise the local authority for not trying hard enough to support the family. Director Pat Thornkden will demand a case audit (which really means searching for mistakes made by the worker). The audit will find "practice issues" and "missed opportunities." Marcus will have to create an "improvement plan." Angie will attend additional training on "engaging resistant families."
At no point will anyone say: "The Thomkden parents cannot change because father Dean's narcissistic architecture and mother Jade's dissociative patterns are neurologically fixed. No amount of intervention will transform them into safe parents."
The system protects itself by sacrificing its workers and its families. When interventions fail—as they must, being based on impossible premises—the fault must lie with either professional incompetence or family resistance. The possibility that the entire framework is built on biological impossibilities cannot be examined. Too many jobs, too much funding, too much political capital depends on maintaining the fiction.
This protection mechanism ensures the moral injury continues. Workers like Angie absorb the impossibility, internalise the failure, carry the weight of unachievable expectations. They burn out, leave, are replaced by bright-eyed newly-qualifieds who believe, temporarily, that they'll be the ones who create real change. The cycle continues.
Between the morning supervision and the afternoon home visits, Angie sits at her desk, typing up assessment reports. Her fingers automatically produce the required phrases: "capacity for change," "transformation goals," "change-focused intervention." But in her mind, a different vocabulary is forming: adaptation, modification, environmental adjustment, neurological constraint.
She thinks about the Hakdson family. Everyone calls it transformation, but what actually happened? Martin's brother started helping (environmental support). The new medication worked (biochemical adaptation). Spring arrived (seasonal adjustment). The single father didn't change—his circumstances did, allowing his existing patterns to function differently.
But she can't write this. The report requires transformation narratives. So she types: "Through intensive support and consistent engagement, Martin Hakdson has achieved fundamental changes in his parenting capacity..."
The corruption of language makes accurate thinking impossible. When adaptation gets called change, when environmental modification gets credited as personal transformation, when biological constraints get labelled as resistance, how can anyone understand what actually works?
Kelly Jokden, the mother in the Jokden family, has mastered this linguistic game. She speaks fluent "change" whilst adapting nothing. "I'm really committed to changing," she says. "I can see now how my behaviour impacts my children. I'm ready to break the cycle." She completes every programme, signs every agreement, performs transformation perfectly. Nothing shifts in her actual life, but she provides all the change-talk the system requires.
Meanwhile, Katie Brakden, the overwhelmed mother of three, who cannot perform change narratives because she's too overwhelmed by daily survival, gets labelled as "resistant" and "unwilling to engage." Her honesty—"I don't know why I can't do mornings"—becomes evidence of failure to commit to change.
The radio in the staff room is playing the lunchtime news. The Prime Minister is speaking: "Our additional fifty million pounds will transform the lives of troubled families across Britain. This is real change that will break cycles of deprivation."
Jo Flakden, the office administrator, snorts, pouring her third coffee of the day. "Fifty million. Divided by how many councils? How many families? That's about enough for a new photocopier and some biscuits for parenting groups."
But it's not about the actual money. It's about what the money represents—the currency of change that flows through the system. The fifty million carries promises downward: transformation, cycle-breaking, fundamental change. It demands receipts upward: outcome data, success stories, transformation narratives.
Midkwell will receive perhaps two million. Director Pat Thornkden will promise to transform two hundred families. Assistant Director Rick Okonkbo will divide this among his teams. Team manager Marcus will allocate twelve families to each worker. Angie will sit with the Brakden family, the Jokden family, the Brekden family, promising changes she knows won't come, funded by money that demands impossible transformations.
The receipt system is already in place. She'll document every intervention, every programme attended, every slight improvement. Katie Brakden attending one session becomes "engaging with change process." The Brakden 8-year-old arriving at school clean once becomes "improvement in home conditions." These receipts will be aggregated, sanitised, and sent upward.
Marcus will report: "67% of families showing positive change indicators."
Rick will claim: "142 families in active transformation."
Pat will announce: "Midkwell achieving sector-leading outcomes."
The Minister will declare: "Programme successfully transforming troubled families."
The Prime Minister will promise: "Continued investment in what works."
Everyone in this chain knows the receipts are inflated at best, fraudulent at worst. But everyone is coerced into maintaining the fiction. The alternative—admitting that fifty million pounds cannot purchase biological transformation—is politically impossible. So the currency continues to flow, demanding impossible changes, generating false receipts, maintaining the fiction that funds the entire system.
Angie realises, with a clarity that makes her feel sick, that she's essentially laundering fraud. Not by choice, but by coercion. She takes impossible demands from above, converts them into "interventions," transforms family struggles into "outcomes," and produces clean data for upward reporting.
The Hakdson file on her desk needs completing for the Ministerial visit. She knows what's required: a transformation narrative that justifies investment, proves interventions work, and provides political capital. She begins typing:
"The Hakdson family exemplifies the transformative power of intensive support. Through evidence-based interventions and consistent professional input, this single-father family has achieved fundamental change..."
What she doesn't write: Martin's adaptation had little to do with professional intervention and everything to do with environmental changes. The "transformation" is largely coincidental timing. The family would likely have adapted similarly without services, possibly better without the pressure to perform change.
But this truth has no currency in the change economy. It cannot be exchanged for funding. It cannot justify salaries. It cannot satisfy political promises. So she continues laundering, converting messy reality into clean transformation narratives that maintain the system's fiction.
The Jokden family have mastered this economy. They understand that the system wants receipts, not change. Mother Kelly and her partner provide perfect receipts—attendance records, completed worksheets, appropriate change-talk—whilst changing nothing substantial. They've learned to counterfeit the currency of transformation so effectively that everyone pretends not to notice it's fake.
The Brakden family, unable to provide receipts, become bad debt. They've received investment (interventions) but cannot provide returns (transformation evidence). In any other economy, bad debt gets written off. But in the change economy, bad debt justifies either more intensive investment (escalation) or asset seizure (child removal). Both generate receipts: "decisive action taken."
Tom Hakdson, the boundary-keeping social worker, eating his precisely-timed lunch, makes an observation that stops conversation: "It's a Ponzi scheme, isn't it? New political promises fund old failures. Today's transformation agenda pays for yesterday's non-change. We need just enough success stories to attract more investment, even though most of it achieves nothing."
The staff room goes quiet. Everyone knows he's right, but naming it feels dangerous. They're all complicit in this scheme—not by choice but by coercion. From the Prime Minister promising transformation to Angie writing up false receipts, everyone is forced to participate. The fraud is too big, too systemic, too essential to expose.
Like all Ponzi schemes, it requires constant growth. New initiatives to replace failed programmes. New language when old terms become discredited. "Transformation" replaces "change" which replaced "improvement" which replaced "rehabilitation." The vocabulary evolves but the impossibility remains constant.
The scheme persists because everyone is coerced into its continuation:
Nobody is deceiving anyone. Everyone knows it's impossible. But everyone must comply with the narrative or lose their position in the system—whether that's political office, professional employment, or access to support.
Exposing the truth would collapse the entire structure. Who would vote for politicians promising "marginal adaptations for a few"? Who would fund services admitting "we cannot create change"? Who would train for professions acknowledging "intervention rarely transforms"?
It's 5:47 PM. Angie sits in her Nissan again, engine running for warmth, postponing the journey home where she'll pretend today was normal, help with homework, make dinner, not mention that she spent the day laundering impossible promises into fraudulent receipts.
The radio plays without her really listening until a familiar voice cuts through: Katherine Brakden is being interviewed by local news about service cuts. "They promise help but nothing changes," the mother of three says, her voice thick with tears. "I try so hard but it's never enough. They say I'm not engaging properly, but I don't know what else to do."
Angie turns it off, but Katie's words hang in the air. The truth laid bare: they promise help but nothing changes. Not because Katie isn't trying. Not because services aren't available. But because the help promised—transformation—is biologically impossible for most people, including Katie.
The moral injury crystallises with perfect clarity. She's not failing to help; she's being coerced into participating in systematic harm. Every day, she must promise impossible changes, document inevitable failures, and convert biological constraints into moral failings. She's part of a machine that takes vulnerable people's inability to transform and weaponises it against them.
But tomorrow she'll be back. Not because she believes in the system—that faith died sometime between the Thomkden court failure and today's supervision. She'll be back because the Brakden children—the 8-year-old son, 5-year-old daughter, the toddler—need someone to witness their struggle. Because the Thomkden children—their 15-year-old son, their 12-year-old daughter—need protecting, even if the system won't allow it. Because occasionally, rarely, accidentally, the environmental changes align and someone like single father Martin Hakdson finds an adaptation that helps.
She'll continue speaking "change" whilst thinking "adaptation." She'll write transformation narratives whilst knowing they're false. She'll participate in the coerced fraud because the alternative—abandoning families to struggle without even ineffective support—feels worse.
Angie has been reading late at night—research papers on evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, the ancient architecture of human resistance. Part of her knows she's looking for absolution, for scientific validation that her failure to create change isn't personal incompetence but biological reality.
The research is unequivocal. Human brains evolved to resist change because change meant death for most of our evolutionary history. Those who maintained stable patterns survived; those who transformed randomly died. Natural selection didn't create organisms that change easily—it created organisms that resist change fiercely, even when change would benefit them.
The stress response system that keeps mother Katie Brakden paralysed in the mornings? That's millions of years of evolution creating a freeze response to overwhelming threat. The patterns that keep the Jokden parents—mother Kelly and her partner—performing compliance whilst changing nothing? That's evolutionary psychology creating organisms that can appear to adapt whilst maintaining core patterns—survival through deception, bred into our bones.
The Thomkden family's seemingly irrational protection of family dysfunction? That's kin selection, evolutionary algorithms that prioritise family cohesion over individual wellbeing because fragmented families didn't survive the savanna. Even father Dean's narcissistic architecture and mother Jade's dissociation are evolutionary adaptations—psychological patterns that once aided survival now creating dysfunction in modern contexts.
We're asking people to override millions of years of evolution through six-week parenting programmes. We're demanding that brains rewired by trauma simply reorganise themselves because a support plan requires it. We're expecting organisms designed for stability to transform because society has decided they should.
The particular cruelty is that those who most need change—the traumatised, the neglected, the abused—have nervous systems most rigidly locked into protective patterns. Trauma doesn't create flexibility; it creates rigid defences. The very experiences that make change necessary also make it neurobiologically impossible.
Martin Hakdson's adaptation wasn't triumph over evolution—it was evolution working as designed. When his environment changed (brother's support, medication that worked, seasonal shift), his existing patterns could function differently. The single father didn't transform; his context did. His evolutionary resistance to change remained intact—he just needed less protection when threats reduced.
Angie feels it physically—the sensation of being pulled apart. From above, the political weight bears down: ministerial promises, transformation targets, change metrics, outcome frameworks. Every pound of funding carries a ton of impossible expectations. Director Pat needs success stories for the Minister. The Minister needs transformation narratives for the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister needs change victories for the electorate. This pressure crushes downward through every layer until it lands on Angie's shoulders.
From below, the evolutionary reality pushes back: Katie Brakden's paralysed mornings, the Jokden family's performative compliance, the Thomkden parents' dangerous dysfunction. Millions of years of evolution resist every intervention. Trauma-locked nervous systems refuse to budge. Biological impossibility meets political necessity.
She's trapped at the intersection, pulled in opposite directions—forced to promise transformation she knows won't come, forced to witness suffering she can't alleviate. The political system demands she overcome evolution. Evolution refuses to be overcome. She exists in the space between these forces, being slowly torn apart.
The cruellest twist? Both forces increase when things go wrong. When the Brakden family don't transform, political pressure intensifies—more interventions, more monitoring, more documentation of failure. Simultaneously, their evolutionary defences strengthen—more resistance, deeper entrenchment, stronger protective patterns. Angie absorbs both escalations, the pressure above and resistance below increasing in perfect destructive harmony.
Even the Hakdson "success" worsens her position. Politically, it proves transformation is possible, increasing pressure on other families. Evolutionarily, it was mere environmental adaptation, not replicable through intervention. She must pretend the single father's adaptation was transformation, weaponising their story against families whose environments won't shift, whose evolution won't bend.
Tomorrow there'll be another meeting where Director Pat demands evidence of transformation. Tomorrow there'll be another visit where mother Katie cries about her inability to change. Tomorrow Angie will stand at the intersection of political fantasy and evolutionary reality, being pulled apart by forces that predate her profession, will outlast her career, and care nothing for the moral injury they cause.
She's not burning out. She's being crucified—stretched between the political imperative to create change and the evolutionary impossibility of achieving it. Every day the distance between these points increases. Every day the tearing worsens. Every day she must smile, document progress that isn't happening, and pretend the pain isn't reshaping her from the inside out.
The system demands that professionals overcome evolution with interventions, defeat biology with support plans, override millions of years of selection pressure with motivational interviewing. When this fails—as it must—we blame families for being "resistant" rather than recognising they're being human, evolved exactly as nature intended.
Of course, change is not only possible but essential. We change our bed sheets weekly (or claim to). We change the cat's litter tray before visitors arrive. We change our underwear daily—a fundamental transformation that genuinely improves outcomes for everyone involved.
We change jobs when the moral injury becomes unbearable. We change cars when the Nissan finally gives up. We change our minds about what to have for dinner. We change the channel when politicians promise transformation.
Some of us change partners when we realise we're incompatible, though notably this requires two people who've developed separately to recognise they no longer fit, rather than one person transforming the other into someone different. Even Katie Brakden managed this—left her children's father when his drinking got worse, though the system documented this as "chaotic lifestyle" rather than "adaptive decision-making."
We change our passwords every 90 days because IT insists, though everyone knows we just add another "1" to the end. We change our clocks twice yearly and complain about it affecting our sleep patterns for weeks—perhaps the only honest acknowledgement that even small changes to our environment disrupt our biological systems profoundly.
Single father Martin Hakdson changes his baby's nappies with mechanical precision now, every three hours, which everyone calls transformation but is actually just... changing nappies. The profound has become mundane. The mundane has become profound. We've confused basic maintenance with fundamental transformation.
The Jokden family change their story every week, a kind of change the system struggles to document. The Brekden family change crisis type with seasonal reliability—benefits in winter, housing in spring, domestic violence in summer, school attendance in autumn. These changes are real, measurable, consistent. Just not the kind anyone wants to fund.
Angie changes her route home when roadworks block the usual way, adapting efficiently to environmental obstacles. But suggest she could change her fundamental approach to families after seven years of neural pathway development, and suddenly we're in the realm of biological impossibility.
The truth is, we're excellent at change. We change everything that can be changed—clothes, locations, situations, environments, contexts, relationships, jobs, addresses, phone contracts, energy suppliers (following Martin Lewis's advice), and occasionally governments (though they promise change then deliver more of the same).
What we cannot change is our fundamental neurological architecture, our trauma-carved neural pathways, our stress-sculpted limbic systems, our evolutionary inheritance, our biological constraints. We cannot change who we are at the cellular level through professional intervention, government funding, or force of will.
The bitter irony—or perhaps the perfect revelation—is that the system demanding impossible internal transformation cannot even change itself. Children's Services has been "transforming" for thirty years through endless reorganisations that change everything except outcomes. New names, same problems. New structures, same impossibilities. New language, same constraints.
Perhaps the real professional skill isn't distinguishing between what can and cannot change, but recognising that we've been having entirely the wrong conversation. While we debate whether Katie Brakden can transform her parenting capacity, she's wondering if she can change her bedsheets today despite the paralysing depression. While we document resistance to change, the mother of three is changing her toddler's nappy with love despite wanting to die.
The change that matters—clean pants, fresh sheets, fed children, survived days—happens regardless of professional intervention. The change we measure—fundamental transformation of human nature—remains impossible regardless of investment.
Tomorrow, Angie will change her clothes, change her expression to professional concern, change her documentation to satisfy requirements, and continue participating in a system that cannot change despite constantly reorganising itself whilst demanding impossible transformations from families who are already achieving miraculous daily changes like getting dressed, feeding children, and staying alive despite everything.
The emperor has no clothes. But at least he changes his underwear.
© 2025 Steve Young and YoungFamilyLife Ltd. All rights reserved.
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