Mr. Denizet-Lewis is the author of "You've Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation."
We imagine ourselves conductors of our transformation symphony. With the right mix of effort and instruments -- shadow work, dopamine fasts, guided meditations, psychedelic retreats, A.I. "twins" -- we can become the people our future selves deserve.
Minus the A.I. twin, I've tried all that and more. I attended 12-step programs, checked myself into inpatient addiction treatment in a Philadelphia suburb and a Texas hinterland and became unwittingly conversant in many forms of therapy.
Hoping to break unhealthy patterns and stop armoring up around other people, I worked with an inner-child-focused therapist who encouraged me to tape pictures of my parents to a punching bag and beat it with a baseball bat -- I declined, to her disappointment -- and others who suggested I ease up on the childhood archaeology and take responsibility for my own life. I've faced therapists who spoke freely, barely said a word, hugged me after sessions, declined to hug me and wanted to explore my desire to be hugged.
The message that we should improve ourselves is constant and seductive, delivered by self-described "change agents" of our booming transformation economy -- gifted at eye contact, lighting and monetization -- and echoed, infamously, by Tyra Banks, who scolded a contestant on "America's Next Top Model" for refusing to seize her redemption arc. To be sure, wanting to change matters, and an internal motivation often proves more durable than changing for a spouse or a newly self-actualizing friend, a point echoed in psychological research like self-determination theory.
But after decades of working to change myself, and nearly six years spent talking with changers and would-be changers -- from personality reinventors and esoteric self-actualizers to name-swappers and ideological shape-shifters -- I've come to believe that the "self" in self-transformation is only half the story. Change is less about willpower than we imagine, more shaped by other people than we admit, and far more mysterious than the self-improvement industry can afford to sit with.
The cantankerous psychiatrist Fritz Perls, who co-developed Gestalt therapy and delighted in needling the self-important enlightenment peddlers of the late 1960s, would be spoiled for targets today. We are awash in life coaches and wellness influencers urging us to optimize. Perls saw our grasping for inner change as a kind of self-deception. (He said the same about trying to change others. Long before "let them theory" was a viral sensation, he advocated a kind of psychological libertarianism. "I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine," he wrote in what he dubbed the Gestalt Prayer.)
Our obsession with metrics and self-engineering would most likely strike Perls and a fellow Gestalt therapist, Dr. Arnold Beisser, whose Paradoxical Theory of Change urges us to reject "the role of change agent" in favor of awareness and acceptance, as exquisitely quantified self-avoidance. Instead of connecting with our bodies and staying with our experience, we try to fix or outrun ourselves -- tweaking, upgrading, searching for salvation in the metrics.
A provocateur who once reportedly spanked Natalie Wood at a Hollywood party ("You're nothing but a little spoiled brat who always wants to get her own way," he is said to have told her, not exactly living up to his prayer), Perls might be tempted to swat the rest of us. All this effort to get our own way -- are we even here for it?
He went so far as to suggest that "any intention toward change will achieve the opposite." In some cases, "the person is apparently successful, up to the point where the nervous breakdown occurs."
Even if Perls's and Beisser's ideas can feel a bit too neat or risk inviting inaction, they're right about one thing: Real change is paradoxical, and trying too hard to control the process can get in the way. At a "How We Change and Why We Don't" workshop I attended at the Esalen Institute, the coastal retreat center evoked in the "Mad Men" finale, a clinical psychologist affiliated with research centers devoted to mindfulness and the human imagination tried to help us unlearn our impulse to force change.
On a large screen in our yurt, she projected 33 ways we try to change other people: "reason with them," "nag," "shame," "cry," "threaten" and, finally, "use physical violence." These, she said, are also how we try to change ourselves; we cajole, demand, beat ourselves up. What works better than self-flagellation is creating the right conditions -- feeling seen and valued without being shielded from discomfort, and being in the presence of people and settings that draw out curiosity and awe.
Of course, conditions aren't equally available. The circumstances that make change more likely -- time, stability, decent insurance -- are distributed unevenly.
Where those supports were available, the same logic surfaced in more clinical settings. During a virtual three-month "self-transformation" group for narcissists, borderlines and other challenging personality types that I attended as an observer, a psychologist told his patients that change requires a confounding mix of intention and something like Buddhist surrender -- effort without control. Change also has to register socially: To survive in the world, he said, his patients would have to find a way to be perceived differently.
In other words, we might think of self-transformation as a team sport.
Nowhere are the stakes higher than for men whose freedom depends on being perceived as new people. In South Los Angeles, newly paroled murderers described a gap between the change they experienced and the story they had to tell parole commissioners who favor clear narratives of personal responsibility -- both for the crime and for the change that followed. But many experienced inner transformations as only partly their own. "I changed because my family saw me as good, and because they believed I could," one said. Another, paroled on his 19th try, added that he hadn't changed himself so much as had been changed by a prison visit from his mother and his conversion to Islam.
Only in the past 75 years did psychology and self-help culture elevate authenticity and self-direction into a cultural ideal, teaching us that change must come from within. And only in the last decade or so has the range of what we might change into come to resemble the algorithm's infinite scroll.
In our time of cultural and technological churn, when everything seems to be changing both too fast and not nearly enough, remaking the self can feel like one of the few forms of agency left. But many changers are surprised to learn their transformations aren't so personal after all; refracted through cultural scripts that define what change should look like and by strangers on social media acting as an unruly digital parole board that parses our performances for sincerity, timing and ideological allegiance.
Many changes come booby-trapped with culture war politics, forcing us to downplay our doubts -- any uncertainty seized upon as evidence that our supposed change is illegitimate or temporary -- in favor of stories that declare we've arrived.
The problem is that we're almost comically unreliable narrators. We imagine we're changing when we aren't and fail to recognize it when we are. Take the many ideological shape-shifters and political team-hoppers who insist they haven't changed, from Elon Musk to a yoga teacher turned Capitol rioter who told me he viewed his shift "not so much as me 'changing' but rather experiencing a shift in dominant energy."
Maybe they're right. Many of the biggest identity transformations I've encountered involve a largely unchanged core personality, including a queer activist who became a straight-identified Christian and Ann Coulter enthusiast. The black-and-white thinker remains; just with a new costume and script.
It's not just that we misread how we change; it's that much of our own change is hidden from us. "Most of the changes that people make take place at levels that are beyond their understanding or even awareness," according to psychologist Jeffrey Kottler. He reminds us that even the supposed experts can't agree on what methods best help people transform: "Ask a dozen therapists what they do that best promotes change in their clients, and you'll hear just as many answers."
So, should we throw up our hands and give up? I hope that's not the lesson we take. The paradox is that effort matters but it works best when paired with a bracing dose of humility. Ideally we work on ourselves cultivate better conditions seek wiser company —and in the process discover as Dr.Viktor Frankl did that we change partly by loosening our fixation on ourselves. When “we love other persons or serve causes other than ourselves,” he said in a 1975 lecture,“we actualize ourselves by way of a side effect.”
I'm often reminded of the therapist butterfly in Mort Gerberg's cartoon, who peers down at a caterpillar and, with the easy authority of someone who has only recently become a butterfly, says, "The thing is, you have to really want to change." The cartoon works because we are all that butterfly, dispensing familiar advice: You have to want it. You can't change for other people. Nothing changes if nothing changes. And we are also that anxious caterpillar, wondering if change will happen for us, quick to blame ourselves or others when it doesn't.
But our beliefs about change could use a revision. Too much wanting can backfire. We change in relationship to other people all the time, and that's not a failure of authenticity; it's how change works. And sometimes -- as in those sudden, disorienting experiences we struggle to explain and call by many names, from satori to aha! moment -- everything shifts without our willing it at all.
In the cartoon, the irony is obvious. The caterpillar’s transformation has nothing to do with wanting. The caterpillar will become what it becomes.
Benoit Denizet-Lewis is an associate professor at Emerson College and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of "You've Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation."
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles.