A faith-forward guide to change.

Chances are, there’s something you’d like to change in your life. That’s why you’re here. 

Maybe that change has to do with growth or healing. Maybe it’s about perspective or motivation. Whatever it is, it’s about moving forward. Progress. So let’s pause for a second. Think about that change; hold it in your mind. Tune into it. You can even jot it down. 

I am not going to tell you what goal you should pursue – that’s up to you. What we are going to do is unpack the psychology that aids and hinders the progress you desire. 

Why is change so hard? Why do so many attempts at moving forward falter? 

We often look for momentum in the wrong places. We try to address behavior while ignoring the causes. When we change our perspective, however, it gets easier. That goal – your goal – becomes achievable.

Change becomes possible when we recognize our shortcomings.

What’s holding you back? What’s keeping you stuck? What, in a word, is preventing change?

The answer is simple: you. 

Not because you want to hold yourself back or remain stuck. No – the problem is that you, like everyone else, see yourself from the inside out rather than the outside in. 

That’s part and parcel of being human. We have an uncanny ability to think of ourselves as being better than we really are. Call it the better-than-average effect. 

There are countless social experiments in which folks are asked to rate themselves on a scale compared to their peers. Whether you ask people to assess their physical fitness or money management or any other aspect of their lives, a majority will say they’re better than average. Mathematically, that doesn’t stack up: we can’t all be above average. Someone has to fall below the mean. But we find it difficult to acknowledge that we might be that someone.

In short, we view ourselves through distorted lenses. Jesus identifies this common failing when he asks, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?” First take the plank out of your eye, he instructs us, and then you will learn how to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. In other words: look to your own failings before you criticize others. 

This scriptural message is echoed by psychologists. As any counselor, therapist, or behavioral specialist will tell you, healing begins when we acknowledge the need for change. To see that need, we must view ourselves from the outside in: objectively, with all our flaws, hang-ups, and shortcomings, not through the flattering inside-out lens we’re used to. 

We are urged to take up this perspective in James 5:16, which calls on us to make honest inventories of ourselves and confess our sins “to each other.” This idea builds on what Jesus says about removing the plank from your own eye first: yes, we must work on ourselves, but we are not alone. Dialogue – with other people and with God – can help us achieve clarity. 

The concept of confession can actually be a bridge between Scripture and therapy. Think, for example, about twelve-step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Celebrate Recovery. Confession – or, to put it in more humdrum terms, owning your junk – plays a central role in their work. The path to healing and recovery starts when someone publicly admits that they cannot control their addiction and that their life has become unmanageable as a result. It is a confession of weakness which kickstarts the process of regaining power over one’s life. 

Of course, taking stock of who you are isn’t a one-time thing – it’s an ongoing commitment. Really, it’s a good habit – something beneficial you do each day. There are many ways to practice this habit, but we can wrap things up by looking at a simple exercise you can integrate into your daily routine. The good news is that you’ll only need around ten minutes a day to start gaining powerful insights. Here’s how it works. 

For around eight minutes, you’re going to stop what you were doing, find somewhere quiet, and sit down. Now imagine your life is a movie that you’re watching in your mind’s eye. You're the main character in this drama. Sweep the camera through the scenes and events of a typical day. Pay close attention to routines, interactions, and behaviors. How do you start the day? How do you end it? What do you do when you’re feeling happy, sad, or stressed? What are your conversations like? How’s your body language? What tasks and activities claim the largest share of your time? Most importantly, looking at yourself through this objective lens, what would you advise this person to change? What do they need to work on? What habits need adjusting? Could they improve their relationships? If so, how? What could they do to improve their health – mentally, spiritually, and physically? 

Finally, take a couple more minutes to choose one thing you want to change. Write it down. Say it aloud a few times, too. This is your acknowledgement. Your confession. Your first step.

To change problematic behavior, you have to address the thoughts that trigger it.

Lose weight. Save more money. Drink less. Argue less. Read more. Run more. Spend more time with family and friends. Stop wasting time. 

Millions of us create lists like these every New Year – lists of all the changes which will make us healthier, fitter, richer, better, and happier. Some folks pull it off, too – they cut out trans fats, never touch a cigarette again, learn languages, and master taekwondo. Most of us, though, don’t. Motivation starts to fizzle out; bad habits reappear. We remain where we were. Stuck. What went wrong? Why is change so hard? 

Here, too, there’s a simple answer: we approach things the wrong way round. We put the metaphorical cart in front of the horse. More precisely, we spend a lot of time and effort tweaking external behaviors – how many calories we consume, say, or what time we get up. What we often ignore is the cause of behaviors we don’t like. Thing is, it really is hard to set boundaries if you don’t have a clue why you say yes to everyone and everything. Same goes for calorie-counting when you don’t understand your emotional eating or getting up early when you don’t look at your stress-induced sleeplessness. 

The point, here, is that behavior is an outcome. It’s the cart, not the horse; the thing that’s being pulled, not the thing doing the driving. So what is the cause? 

The short answer is that how we think determines how we feel and how we feel determines how we behave. The longer version goes like this. 

Psychologists sometimes refer to the ABCs of therapy. Think of it as a model which explains how thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors interact, with each letter standing for one link in the causal change. A, for example, stands for activating event. That’s basically an experience which triggers powerful negative, harmful, and/or irrational thoughts. 

The event itself is usually pretty much neutral. It could be your boss asking if you’ve finished the complicated assignment you’ve been working on for the last two months. Or your wife worrying about being late for dinner and telling you to hurry up. Or a friend mentioning an outing with a second group of friends you didn’t know about. There’s nothing inherently bad or upsetting going on here. But activating events nonetheless trigger flurries of negative thinking. These thoughts bring us to the B, which stands for beliefs. 

Beliefs in this context are clusters of negative thoughts which form the distorted lenses through which we sometimes view situations like the ones we’ve just mentioned. For instance, take that question from your boss. It might send you into a spiral of anxiety. Maybe she’s subtly indicating that I’m taking far too long, you think, and maybe she sees me as a useless slacker. Your conclusion: I’m definitely going to lose my job. In short, you’ve formed a highly negative belief about the world around you. Innocuous remarks from a wife or friend can have the same effect: no one who appreciated how much you do would chide you for taking too long to get ready, you think, and your friend is clearly only pretending to like you. 

These negative beliefs have consequences – that’s the C. What kind? In a word, feelings. Your beliefs about situations, events, and people make you feel a certain way – you might be sad or frustrated, angry or embarrassed, or anything in between. Point is, when we feel sad or frustrated, angry or embarrassed, we behave a certain way. Most often, we engage in problematic or even downright toxic behaviors. That’s when we shut down, isolate, get defensive, or shift the blame; that’s when we gossip, demean, shout, overeat, drink too much, binge-shop, or…. Well, you can fill in the rest of the sentence yourself – you know what you do when you experience these emotions, after all. 

So where does all that leave us? We’ve actually come a long way. If behavior is determined by feelings and these feelings can in turn be traced back to our thoughts about the world around us, we’ve reached the end of the causal chain. We now know that we have to address our thinking if we want to change our behavior.

Recognition is the first step to changing negative thinking.

Let’s recap briefly. In the model we just explored, thoughts caused negative behaviors. What’s interesting, though, is that we would prefer to avoid these behaviors. 

Mostly, we don’t like overeating, yelling, demeaning, shutting down, and so on, and yet we do so anyway. Why, though? 

Let’s start unpacking that by noting that the human brain follows the path of least resistance. If it has two options and one is hard and the other easy, it’ll choose the easy option. For this reason, the brain often functions on autopilot. Inputs trigger instantaneous and automatic responses that bypass conscious thought and desire. 

What the brain is really good at, in other words, is default thought processes. These automatic responses to inputs (or triggers) follow well-worn paths. But, like every path through the maze of synapses that constitutes a brain, those paths have to first be trodden in. When does that happen – when are these default thought processes first established? 

The answer, unsurprisingly, can be found in our childhoods. 

Default processes are accumulations of formative experiences – all the pivotal events we lived through and all the responses to life situations we saw modeled by adults. All our childhood interactions with parents and carers, siblings and teachers, grandparents and aunts and uncles went into laying those paths. This is how incredibly powerful unconscious ideas about who we are, how we should live, and what we do and don’t deserve are established. Ideas like I have to be good to be loved or I have to care for others more than I do for myself or showing my true feelings is a form of weakness. Ideas, in short, which continue to shape the way we think about the situations and events we experience after childhood. 

These ideas can undermine our wellbeing. If you have to be good to be loved, for example, you’ll strive to be moral and altruistic in everything you do. But what happens when you’re down and depressed and can’t live up to the demanding standards you set yourself? For many people, the answer is that they begin doubting their worth and come to believe that they don’t deserve love. From these beliefs, it’s a short step to destructive and self-destructive behaviors.  

The power such ideas have over us has to do with them being unconscious – they’re hidden away in our blind spots. Because they’re unconscious and hidden, we often struggle to understand our own behavior. This uncanny feeling is described by the apostle Paul, who said, “I don’t understand what I do; for I don’t do what I’d like to do, but instead I do what I hate.” It’s as though we weren’t really in control – as though unknown forces were driving us. 

Scripture shows us a way out of this slavery to the things we hate. Second Corinthians 10:5 urges us “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” It calls us, in short, to catch our thoughts and recognize their true nature. To do that is to subdue them. To own them. 

This idea is echoed by therapists who try to help their clients understand the default thought processes wreaking havoc in their lives. In this context, too, pinning such thoughts down and recognizing them is the key to regaining power – to leading, rather than being led. 

Which brings us to a simple yet effective exercise you can incorporate into your daily life. All you need is a small notebook or the notes app on your phone. Write “default thinking” at the top of the page and then jot down every negative thought that pops into your mind over the rest of the day. Do this often enough and you’ll begin to learn how to identify those processes.

Cognitive distortions falsify our view of the world.

John 8:44 calls Satan the “father of lies.” He pulls you from God’s truth into his false reality – a world in which you are powerless and unworthy, unloved and unwanted, and far from God. Satan’s lies are effective because they are so subtle that we hardly notice them. They are hidden from view and that makes them powerful. 

Psychologists also have a concept of subtle yet effective lies that operate in the background: they call them cognitive distortions. 

A cognitive distortion is a warped lens. Picture a pair of cracked and foggy glasses. Now imagine they aren’t the right prescription for you. When you put them on, you can still see – just about. Your field of vision, though, contains more distortion than truth. But the brain is good at making do. It recalibrates. Slowly but surely, you get used to the smudges and streaks clouding your vision. You begin to see through the dirt; eventually, you forget it’s even there.  

We all own our own pair of distorted glasses. No surprises there: we’ve all been through hard things. We’ve been hurt and rejected, shamed and abused, neglected and used. All those traumas add cracks, smears, and smudges to our glasses. But we learn to see through them. We forget they’re there. We see the world – and ourselves – through those lenses.

If we want change, we need clarity. And if we want clarity, we need to learn how to recognize these distortions for what they are. We’ll wrap up this content with an exercise that’ll help you do just that. First, though, let’s have a look at some of the most common cognitive distortions. 

We can start with black-and-white thinking – the tendency to see extremes rather than taking a more balanced view. For example, the idea that you can be a dazzling success or an abject failure in what you do. Overgeneralization describes the habit of taking one negative experience and unfairly applying it to other situations. One bad relationship means every new relationship is bound to end the same way. Then there’s catastrophizing or expecting the worst in every situation. If your boss asks you how your project is coming along, it’s because she thinks you’re taking too long and plans on firing you. 

When you discount the positive, you’re refusing to take credit: you landed your dream job because the HR department made a mistake, not because you’re talented and hard-working. Mind reading, meanwhile, is what you do when you assume what someone’s thinking, even if they’re saying something else. Emotional reasoning is what happens when you believe what you feel and disregard the facts: you’re a bad parent, say, because that’s how you feel, even if everyone else is telling you that your child is happy and well-adjusted. 

The question for you now is this: which pair of these smudged and cracked lenses do you wear when you look at the world and the people around you? Here’s the exercise to help you answer that question – and develop clearer vision. 

Think back to those distortions we just talked about. (You can also look up a list of common cognitive distortions for easy reference.) Pick a couple that you relate to most. Now jot down some specific examples of the ways in which you’ve applied these distortions to events in your life. As you do this, try to identify the subtle truth in that distortion and separate it from the larger falsehood you might be believing. For instance, yes, sometimes good things happen to us because we’re lucky. Maybe a stronger candidate dropped out of the interview process just before you applied for your job. But we make our own luck. You still had to go to the interview and prove that you’re capable and hard-working and intelligent. 

Once you’ve done that, keep those distortions in mind as you go through the rest of your day. Simply naming them when they pop up can be enough to stop those lies in their tracks.

When we strive to bring about change in our lives, we often hone in on behaviors – the habits we’d like to leave behind and the practices we’d like to adopt. Behavior, though, is an outcome. It’s the last link in the causal chain. That’s why tweaking behaviors is rarely a path to sustainable change and healing. If we want to address our shortcomings, we need to look at the source of our behavior: the way we think about the world and our unconscious beliefs.