Can People Change?
A few years ago, I was playing in an over-40 basketball league when I encountered the schoolyard bully who’d terrorized me throughout my childhood. I recognized him right away though it was clear he didn’t recognize me. As fate would have it, I was assigned to guard him. Immediately, he thrust a sharp elbow into my ribs and said, “Get out of my face, punk.” For the next hour, I was subject to a flurry of punches, kicks and kidney shots. I wanted to fight back, but something inside me froze as if I’d regressed to my ten-year old self.
After the game, I looked on as the man exited the gym with his wife and two young kids. He resembled a normal adult living a normal life. But I knew better. He was still a bully. And I still played the role of victim. This got me thinking. Are we all wedded to the same basic personality and character traits we exhibited as children? Is personal change possible?
In his last major work, Book Of Friends, writer Henry Miller came to the conclusion that “People do not change.” Miller was a literary hero of mine and reading his words shook me deeply. If people cannot change in this life, what’s the point? Why are we all here?
Modern psychotherapy is based on the promise of change. Freud viewed therapy as an effort to transform “hysterical misery” into “common unhappiness.” Carl Jung believed change was possible only when a person…
