Want to change the world? Start by changing yourself – however terrifying it might be

Like billions of other parents around the world, I have a baby who does not like to go to sleep. Which explains why, among other frankly unhinged attempts, I recently found myself standing over her cot, rhythmically alternating between clapping my hands and clicking my fingers while chanting: “Moses supposes his toeses are roses, but Moses supposes erroneously.”

When I imagined motherhood, this was not how I pictured it. I have spent many dark hours wishing I had a baby who would just sleep; wishing that she would change. And it got me thinking.

It is an old therapy adage that many patients come for treatment because they want change – but they don’t necessarily want to 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 – this is all, to a large degree, placing the onus of change outside ourselves.

It is a very human reaction to wish to hold on to our selves and shut the change out; to dig our rosey toeses in and cling desperately to the wallpaper of our minds we have always known, the psychological furniture and bolted doors we unconsciously believe can 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 begin with us. It won’t be as simple as getting up earlier, or changing our exercise routine, or reading this column. To have any hope of experiencing a deeper, lasting shift, we must recognise 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. Part of us is choosing a safer life over a better life.

I once had a dream about this. I was trying to cross a motorway on foot, but speeding cars were preventing me from getting to the other side. I’d made it halfway, but I was stuck on – wait for it – the central reservation. With this dream, my unconscious came up with a beautiful visual pun to communicate my ambivalence about change: my own central reservation, where change feels dangerous, risky, but staying safe means staying stuck where you are, unable to move forward.

In order to change, we have to face up to the parts of ourselves we pretend not to know about, that we do not like, and understand our own responsibility for our part in our circumstances. It is much more painful than situating all our problems in the people around us. I can tell you, as a patient in therapy and as a therapist to patients, it does not feel good. It really hurts. If I didn’t have to pay the royalties, I would quote you the chorus of Radiohead’s Just. Instead, I will quote the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion for free: “Of all the hateful possibilities, growth and maturation are feared and detested most frequently.” Changing means recognising that we have all been supposing erroneously – acknowledging that our toeses are not beautiful roses, but ordinary, human, fallible toeses.

To some, this can feel like victim-blaming. So let me be clear: I am in no way minimising the terrible impact that society and its evils, from poverty to racism and misogyny and the rest, as well as abusive institutions and families and individuals, can have on a person’s life.

What I am saying is that those evils “out there”, over which we as individuals have little control, make it even more important for us to make use of the agency we do have in our own lives. To do that, we need to recognise and understand our own contribution to our stuckness: the relationship patterns we repeat time after time; the evenings spent scrolling on social media instead of really living; the keeping things as they are because it feels easier than making a real, profound change.

What has also been crucial for me is acknowledging where all those social evils out there begin: with each of us. In order to build not just a better life but a better world, we need to understand that society would not be this discriminatory, misogynistic, abusive and the rest, if these tendencies did not exist inside all of us in some form – a feeling of being special and superior to others, or a disrespect for anything feminine or maternal, or a mocking neglect of emotional vulnerability, our own and in others.

It can be horrifying to recognise how these unconscious beliefs and patterns have been trapping us and our loved ones, preventing us from developing – but it is also a liberation. Such self-understanding can be life-changing. It allows us to realise, for example, that we might be unconsciously drawn towards a neglecting, “hard to get” relationship dynamic that feels exciting but is also harmful.

By understanding our own role in the situations and relationships in which we find ourselves, we can then begin to experience aspects of life as something we choose, rather than only as something that 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 nobody’s toeses are roses or posies, as Moses supposes his toeses to be.” Except for my beautiful babe, whose toeses really are roses and who is delightful in every way. Especially when she’s asleep.

• Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood