Want to Change? Maybe Stop Trying So Hard.

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Guest Essay

Want to Change? Maybe Stop Trying So Hard.

April 5, 2026,

6:00 a.m. ET

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Kimberly Elliott

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By

Benoit Denizet-Lewis

Mr. Denizet-Lewis is the author of “You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation.”

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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.)

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