ILike billions of other parents around the world, I have a baby who doesn’t like to sleep. Which explains why, among other downright insane attempts, I recently stood over her crib, rhythmically clapping my hands and clicking my fingers as I sang, “Moses supposes his toes are roses, but Moses supposes wrong.”
When I first imagined motherhood, this was not how I imagined it. I spent many dark hours wishing I had a baby who would just sleep; wishing she would change. And it got me thinking.
It is an old therapeutic saying that many patients come for treatment because they want change – but they don’t necessarily want change. Unpleasant change. It is a crucial distinction: wanting our children to change, wanting our relationships to change, wanting our workplace to change, wanting society to change – all of this is, to a large extent, placing the responsibility for change outside of ourselves.
It is a very human reaction to want to hold on to ourselves and shut out change; to dig our pink toes in and cling desperately to the wallpaper of our minds that we have always known, the psychological furniture and the locked doors that we unconsciously believe protect us from the terror of the new.
But if we want to build a better life, for ourselves and others, we have to allow change to start with us. It won’t be as simple as waking up earlier, or changing our exercise routine, or reading this column. To have any hope of deeper, lasting change, we have to acknowledge that as much as we want change, a part of us is terrified of it and will fight against it, because we also want things to stay the same. A part of us chooses a safer life over a better one.
I had this dream once. I was trying to cross a highway on foot, but speeding cars were stopping me from getting to the other side. I got halfway across, but I was stuck in—wait for it—the median strip. With this dream, my subconscious created a beautiful visual pun to communicate my ambivalence about change: my own median strip, where change feels dangerous and risky, but staying safe means being stuck where you are, unable to move forward.
To change, we have to face the parts of ourselves we pretend we don’t know, the parts we don’t like, and understand our own responsibility for our part in our circumstances. It’s much more painful than blaming all our problems on the people around us. I can tell you, as a patient in therapy and as a therapist of patients, it doesn’t feel good. It really hurts. If I didn’t have to pay the royalties, I’d quote you the chorus of Just by Radiohead. Instead, I’ll quote the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion for free: “Of all the hateful possibilities, growth and maturation are the most often feared and detested.” To change means to acknowledge what we’ve all been wrong about—to acknowledge that our toes are not pretty roses, but ordinary, human, fallible toes.
To some, this may feel like victim blaming. So let me be clear: I am in no way minimizing the terrible impact that society and its ills, from poverty to racism to misogyny and the rest, as well as abusive institutions and families and individuals, can have on a person’s life.
What I’m saying is that those “out there” ailments, over which we as individuals have little control, make it even more important to exercise the agency we do have in our own lives. To do that, we need to acknowledge and understand our own contributions to our stuckness: the relationship patterns we repeat over and over; the evenings we spend scrolling through social media instead of actually living; keeping things the way they are because it feels easier than making real, deep change.
What’s also been crucial for me is recognizing where all of these social ills out there begin: with each and every one of us. In order to build not just a better life, but a better world, we have to understand that society wouldn’t be as discriminatory, misogynistic, abusive, and all the rest of it if these tendencies didn’t exist in all of us in some form or another — a sense of specialness and superiority over others, or a lack of respect for anything feminine or maternal, or a sneering disregard for emotional vulnerability, our own and others.
It can be terrifying to acknowledge how these unconscious beliefs and patterns keep us and our loved ones trapped and from growing—but it is also liberating. Such self-insight can be life-changing. For example, it allows us to realize that we may be unconsciously drawn into neglectful, “hard to get” relationship dynamics that feel exciting but are also damaging.
By understanding our own role in the situations and relationships we find ourselves in, we can begin to experience aspects of life as something we choose, rather than something that just happens to us. We can learn and grow from our experiences—even from the sleep deprivation of parenthood.
So don’t be like Moses, “For no man’s toes are roses or bouquets, as Moses supposes his toes to be.” Except my beautiful babe, whose toes really are roses and who is delightful in every way. Especially when she sleeps.