When I think about making a big change in life, I try to imagine what things will be like afterwards. Will I be happier in a different job? What would it be like to become a parent? Would life be better if I approached my relationships differently?
I can think carefully about these questions, seek advice from others and weigh up the possibilities. But there is something I can never quite account for: the experience itself might change me in ways we couldn't have imagined beforehand.
The philosopher L. A. Paul explores this idea in her book Transformative Experience. She suggests that some experiences do more than change our circumstances. They can also change how we understand ourselves, what matters to us and what we want from life.
This is an interesting idea when we think about psychological therapy. People often begin therapy with a particular difficulty they want to address, but the process can lead to discoveries and changes that weren't part of the original plan.
Some things can only be understood through experience
Paul uses the example of becoming a parent.
Someone who has never had children can learn a great deal about parenthood. They can speak to friends, read books and observe other families. They can anticipate the sleepless nights, the responsibilities and the changes to their daily routine.
But none of this can fully prepare them for what it will actually be like to have a child.
This isn't simply a matter of not having enough information. There are aspects of the experience that can only be understood by living through it. Becoming a parent might change more than someone's daily life. It may also change their priorities, their relationships and even how they understand themselves.
Things that once seemed terribly important might become less so. Other things, which had previously received little attention, might take on a completely different meaning.
Paul calls experiences like these transformative experiences. They can teach us something we couldn't have known beforehand, while also changing the person we are.
This creates an interesting difficulty. When making decisions about our future, we usually rely on what matters to us now. But what happens when the experience we're considering changes what matters to us?
We might end up wanting something quite different from what we originally set out to achieve.
When what matters to us changes
Consider someone who has spent much of their adult life pursuing professional success.
They have worked hard, made sacrifices and organised their life around the next achievement. Perhaps they have reached many of the goals they once set themselves, yet find that the satisfaction they expected never quite arrives.
They might initially understand the problem as needing a better job, a different career, or a healthier balance between work and the rest of their life.
But a significant experience could lead them to question something more fundamental: why has achievement become so important to them in the first place?
Perhaps success has come to provide a sense of worth or security. Perhaps the prospect of not achieving has always been accompanied by an uncomfortable sense of failure.
As their understanding changes, so might their priorities. The things they previously worked so hard to attain may no longer seem quite as necessary.
This doesn't mean their earlier ambitions were mistaken, or that changing priorities is always a good thing. But it illustrates something important about personal change.
Sometimes change involves more than finding a better way to get what we want. It can involve discovering that what we want, or why we want it, is different from what we had assumed.
What does this have to do with psychological therapy?
People usually begin therapy because something in their life isn't going as they would like.
There might be difficulties in relationships, problems with anxiety or self-confidence, or patterns of behaviour that seem to keep repeating despite efforts to change them.
Often, there is a fairly clear idea of what improvement would look like. Someone who struggles with perfectionism, for example, might want to become less self-critical, feel more confident or find ways to manage the pressure they place on themselves.
These are understandable goals, and therapy may help with them. But sometimes, as the work develops, a different set of questions begins to emerge.
Rather than simply trying to become less self-critical, the person might begin to wonder why they have come to expect so much of themselves.
Perhaps they discover that their sense of worth has long depended on being capable, successful or useful to others. Perhaps they begin to recognise how difficult it has been to allow themselves to make mistakes, disappoint people or need help.
What began as an attempt to manage perfectionism might gradually become an exploration of how the person has come to understand their own worth.
The original difficulty hasn't necessarily disappeared. But the way it is understood has changed.
This is something that interests me about psychodynamic therapy. Rather than focusing exclusively on resolving a particular symptom or problem, there is room to explore the experiences, relationships, and expectations that have shaped how someone relates to themselves and others.
Sometimes the connections that emerge are surprising. A way of responding to others that seems unhelpful in the present might once have served an important purpose. Something that has always seemed to be a fixed part of someone's personality might gradually come to be understood differently.
These discoveries aren't always immediate, and understanding something intellectually doesn't necessarily change how we experience it. Therapy can involve returning to familiar difficulties many times, gradually noticing things that had previously escaped our attention.
Over time, this can create opportunities for change that would have been difficult to imagine at the outset.
Becoming someone different, or understanding ourselves differently?
Most of us have a reasonably familiar idea of who we are.
We might think of ourselves as independent, responsible, sensitive, ambitious or reserved. We have explanations for why we behave as we do, what we're good at and what we find difficult.
These ideas provide a sense of continuity, but they can also limit how we see ourselves.
Consider someone who has always taken pride in being independent. They are accustomed to managing difficulties alone and rarely ask others for help.
Over time, they might begin to recognise that their independence comes with certain costs. Perhaps relying on another person has always seemed uncomfortable, or they've learned to associate needing help with weakness.
This doesn't mean that independence is a problem, or that the person needs to become dependent on others. But recognising something about the origins and consequences of their independence may allow them to relate to others differently.
What initially seemed like an unchangeable personality trait becomes something they can understand, reflect on and approach with greater freedom.
Change, in this sense, doesn't necessarily mean becoming an entirely different person. It might mean developing a different relationship with parts of ourselves that have always been there.
The possibility of unexpected change
One of the interesting things about Paul's ideas is the suggestion that we cannot always know in advance what an experience will mean to us.
We tend to imagine change in terms of the person we already understand ourselves to be. We picture becoming more confident, less anxious, more successful or better able to manage our difficulties.
But some experiences can change the very things we consider important, including the ways we think about ourselves and the problems we want to solve.
Psychological therapy can sometimes be one of those experiences.
This doesn't mean that therapy will necessarily transform someone's life, or that every discovery will be unexpected. Often, the work is gradual, difficult and concerned with problems that remain familiar for a long time.
But it does suggest that there is value in approaching therapy with some openness to what might emerge, rather than knowing precisely what the outcome should be.
Sometimes the most significant change isn't finding the answer to the question we started with. It's discovering that there is another question worth asking.