Can I Really Change My Own Mind?
A four-step way to move past old, painful ways of seeing yourself and other people.
I was one heck of a hurting, deeply twisted up and contracted teenager by the time I got to the point of trying to work on my own mind. And it had started sooner than that. So when I talk about changing your mind, I am not talking about it from the outside. I have done a lot of this work on myself, over a long time, and it has been really important to me.
Something surprised me along the way, and it may be the most hopeful thing I have learned. It took me years to really see it.
The old reactions do not necessarily go away.
For years I assumed that “getting better” meant the painful reaction would stop showing up. That the flash of anger, the sense of inadequacy, the old “yes, but” would eventually be gone. That is not usually how it works, at least not at first. What tends to happen instead is that the reaction still arises, based on your history and maybe some trauma, and yet your relationship to that reaction begins to change.
Think of it as a playlist running in the background of your mind. Some old song gets triggered and starts playing. “I’ve been cheated and mistreated. When will I be loved?” A good country western song. And for a long time you believe it. Over time, though, you can turn down the volume. And over time, you do not have to believe that song so much. The reaction is there, but you are increasingly less identified with it, less swept along by it.
That is a fundamentally important point, so let me say it plainly: we can shift our reactions to our reactions.
Why does this matter so much? Because most of the ways we see ourselves and other people were learned. We learned them, often as kids, and often they served a real purpose back then. But a way of seeing that protected you at ten can be like walking around in a suit of armor that is three sizes too small. It did a job once. Today it mostly costs you, often a lot of unnecessary cost.
You do not have to keep wearing it. You can actually shift the internal factors, the stuff inside you that shapes how you react to events and situations and relationships. The causes outside you are what they are. But as you come to understand what is inside you that shapes your reactions, you begin to have more control over it. Be patient with this. It may take years to really shift a longstanding habit of being. It still works. Step by step, bit by bit, drop by drop, we can really change our mind over time. And there is a lot of evidence for it, in the research on personal growth and on formal psychotherapy.
There is a lot of material on how to do this. Just think about those really thick textbooks on cognitive therapy. Ways to change your mind, ways to deal with doubts, the cognitive processes that keep us stuck, the general process of forming wiser views. I have tried to summarize all of it into one user-friendly acronym you can actually remember when you are upset: PASS. Through it, we pass beyond old, limiting, harmful, painful ways of seeing ourselves, other people, the world, the past, and the future.
Let me walk you through all four steps, with the specific questions to ask yourself at each one, so you have something to actually reach for the next time an old reaction gets triggered.
Before we continue, I want you to know that I explain this in depth in my course Change Your Mind. You can save 10% with code substack10.
P: Pause
Something has happened. Maybe you got irritated with somebody. Maybe you have become aware of an attitude, a belief, a should, a doubt, a “yes, but” coming at you. You are aware of something.
The first step is simply to pause.
There is an old first rule of warfare: secure a base of operations. We are not at war here, but we are doing something like that for ourselves. We slow it down. We get a little centered. We recognize what is happening: oh, I’m upset. Oh, I’m so mad. Oh, I think certain things. We observe it rather than getting hijacked by it.
If it helps, physically pause. Step back from the other person or the situation. Buy yourself a little time. “Excuse me, I need to go to the bathroom, I’ll be back in five minutes.” Whatever it takes to get your head together. This step is very, very important, because everything after it depends on you not being swept away.
A: Appreciate What Is Also Okay
This one gets misunderstood, so let me be clear about what it is not. It is not positive thinking. It is not rose colored glasses. We are not overlooking what is genuinely problematic or difficult.
But it really helps, when you are trying to change your mind, to appreciate what is also going okay right now. It leaves you feeling more reassured, and more willing to budge, to shift an old way of looking at things. To afford to let go of armor that did serve a purpose once, it helps to feel resourced enough in the present that you can spare it.
So you appreciate that you are still breathing. Your heart is still beating. You are basically all right, right now. The lights are still working. There is food in the cupboard. The sun is still rising, the flowers are still blooming, you still have some friends. Alongside whatever the hard thing is, certain other things are okay.
As you do this, you start to rest in what I call the Green Zone.
When you have a sense that your needs are met enough in this moment- not perfectly; there are always things to work on, but enough safety, enough satisfaction, and enough connection- you start disengaging from the Red Zone. The Red Zone is fight, flight, freeze. It hijacks us, floods us, immobilizes us, and it makes changing your mind almost impossible, because it has already carried you off. Even if the edges of you are still pretty agitated, see if you can find, in the core of your being, a sense of basic grit and calm strength, a little gratitude, your own warm heart with some caring flowing out and, hopefully, some flowing in. That is what lets the rest of this work happen.
S: Shift Your View
This is the heart of it, and it has three parts. The first two intertwine, and you can take them in either order depending on the situation.
Get objective. See what is actually the case. What are the facts here? What is the history, the context? Is it really that big a deal? I am not minimizing genuine harm. But put it on a scale of zero to ten, where global nuclear war is a ten and a mosquito bite is a one. Where does this actually land? Usually it is lower than it feels in the heat of the moment.
Understand your reactions. What is driving the bus here? A few questions worth sitting with:
How has what happened been turbocharged by your own personal history?
What thoughts are you adding to the situation?
What intentions are you attributing to the other person?
What old script is this getting sucked into, about what you are allowed to say to authority figures, what you are allowed to ask for, or what you are supposed to do when someone acts a certain way?
As you understand your reactions, including the deeper layers of them, something starts to loosen. You realize: oh, I have some choices here. Yes, those ways of being were learned. Yes, they may have served a purpose. And as I understand them, I get a little distance from them, some space between me and the reaction. It is there, but I am less identified with it. This is where you can meet the old reaction with some compassion: of course I feel that way, given how I have been treated. That is understandable. And that is not the whole of me. It is one part of me, and I can increasingly establish myself over here among the flowers and fruit in the garden of my mind, while allowing some of the weeds to be there without being carried away by them.
Think again. It is an old instruction, and a good one. Know your priorities. What is actually most important to you? How do you really want to be? Now that you can see the bigger picture, what is the wiser path, the higher road you actually want to walk? Can you take it a little less personally? Can you decide what meaning you want to give this? Can you find the exceptions to the thing you have been telling yourself? Can you know, deep down, what you want to encourage in yourself?
And do not worry about getting it perfect. We go through these steps again and again, so they get deeply learned inside you.
S: Step Into It
You have made a shift. Now step into this new way of being. Embody it. Live it. Help it actually sink in, so it does not just leave again the moment you get busy.
A big part of this is bodily. When you land on a view you want to hold, notice what it feels like in your body. Antonio Damasio called these somatic markers, the felt sense of a belief or a perspective. What does this new way of looking at yourself or another person actually feel like in your chest, your shoulders, your gut? The more you can tune into that felt sense, the more you can find your way back to it later. It grounds the new view in you.
Then anticipate the rewards. We are all drawn to rewards, so let yourself see the good coming: how will this new way of being help your relationships? How will you feel happier, more effective? When you notice that good things tend to come from a new way of looking at things, that reinforces it and trains your brain to keep coming from there.
And take action. This is not faking it till you make it. You are not faking anything. You are deliberately enacting a new way of thinking that is not yet a habit. So you have to do it on purpose for a while. You prod yourself, you encourage yourself, you speak to yourself in the new way and act from it, and over time, with repetition, it becomes your habit.
Let It Become Who You Are
This last part matters more than people tend to think. Once you have made the shift, marinate in it. Do not rush off. Let it establish itself in you.
What you are doing is converting a state into a trait. A passing moment of seeing yourself more kindly, or seeing another person more clearly, becomes, with enough repetition, a lasting part of how you are. And then, instead of having to work at it, you get increasingly lived by it. Carried along by it.
That old song may still cue up now and then in the background. That is all right. You know it now. You have compassion for it. And you no longer have to believe it. Step by step, bit by bit, drop by drop, you really can change your own mind.
If working with your own mind in this way speaks to you, it is the heart of what I teach in my course, Change Your Mind. We slow down and really practice this, step by step, so that pausing, appreciating, shifting, and stepping into a new way of being start to become second nature, rather than something you only reach for once you are already flooded. As a reader here, you can take 10% off with the code substack10 at checkout. Read more about the course and sign up here.
The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.