The Paradox of Healing and Why We Resist the Change We Want
Written by Sabio Janiak, Founder of Mastering Harmony
Sabio Janiak is a psycho-sensory specialist and human behaviourist, and founder of Mastering Harmony. He guides individuals to rewire stress-driven neural patterns, resolve trauma, and restore emotional balance using cutting-edge neuroscience and holistic methods, empowering lasting clarity, resilience, and high-performance living.
A person can sincerely want to change and repeatedly return to the very pattern they want to leave. They seek help, understand their difficulties and imagine a different future. Then, when an opportunity appears, they hesitate.
It is tempting to call this a lack of willpower. Yet that explanation leaves an important question unanswered: what makes the familiar pattern so difficult to release?
In my work with people in therapeutic and transformational settings, I have encountered a revealing question: “Who am I going to be without this?”
The person wants relief. At the same time, something about life without the problem feels uncertain. Their difficulty may be entangled with the ways they maintain relationships, avoid conflict or preserve a recognisable identity.
Cybernetics offers a way to examine this tension. In Norbert Wiener’s foundational work, control and communication are connected through feedback: the consequences of an action return as information that influences what happens next. Applied to human behaviour, this directs our attention towards recurring interactions between a person and their surroundings.[1]
We can then ask a more useful question, "What is this pattern helping to keep stable, and at what cost?"
When relief keeps a problem going
Imagine someone who wants a more honest relationship but avoids difficult conversations. When tension rises, they remain silent. The immediate conflict subsides, and they feel relieved. The unresolved issue remains, however, and eventually creates another difficult conversation to avoid. Their silence has an effect. It reduces tension in the moment while contributing to the conditions that make tension return.
This example illustrates a distinction between the stability of a pattern and the quality of the life it produces. A painful arrangement can persist precisely because people repeatedly act to restore it when it is disturbed.
In cybernetics, feedback that counteracts a deviation is called negative feedback. “Negative” describes the direction of the response; it does not mean harmful or undesirable.[1] In our relationship example, silence counteracts an increase in open conflict. It helps restore the familiar arrangement, even though that arrangement leaves important needs unmet.
The difficulty becomes clearer when we consider time. Silence may work within the next five minutes and fail over the next five years. When immediate relief becomes the main measure of success, the longer consequences receive too little attention.
Wanting a better relationship and avoiding a conversation can therefore coexist. The person is caught between outcomes that matter on different timescales.
Understanding this does not remove responsibility. It helps us locate where a different response could make a difference.
What the familiar pattern protects
Polish cyberneticist Marian Mazur defined an autonomous system through its capacity to steer its activity and counteract the loss of that capacity. His account also distinguished the information involved in directing action from the energy needed to carry it out.[2]
This suggests a practical question for personal change: what would help someone retain their ability to act while learning a different way to live?
Consider a person who always makes themselves useful. Being needed may give them a reliable place in a family. They dislike the exhaustion, but stepping back also puts that place in question.
Advice to “stop pleasing everyone” addresses the visible behaviour while leaving the problem of belonging unresolved.
They may need ways to maintain connection that allow for disagreement, rest and mutual responsibility. Those alternatives take more than an instruction to be different.
Knowing what to do also does not guarantee that we have the resources to do it. Time, practical support and financial security can change which choices are available. A person working several jobs may understand the value of rest perfectly well.
An account of change that examines only motivation misses these constraints. Sometimes the next step is to build a skill. Sometimes it is to change the conditions under which that skill must be used.
The pattern extends beyond the person
Suppose one family member has always handled everyone else’s problems. When they begin declining requests, other people may complain, withdraw or become more demanding. If the person gives in, familiar roles are restored.
Looking only at the individual, we might conclude that they failed to maintain a boundary. Looking at the interaction, we can see the sequence that helped undo it.
The family’s arrangement has depended on a particular response. When that response changes, other people must adjust too. Lasting change may therefore involve renegotiating responsibilities and expectations, as well as practising a different personal response.
The person offering help is also part of an interaction. Heinz von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics asks observers to account for their own participation in what they observe.[3]
Applied here, that means a practitioner cannot simply assume that every hesitation belongs to the client. Pressure to improve, an imposed goal or an interpretation delivered as certainty may affect the very response being described as resistance.
This invites a more careful conversation. Does the proposed change make sense to the person? What consequences can they foresee that the helper has missed? How does the way help is offered influence their willingness to engage?
What must end for change to begin
Imagine carrying a heavy suitcase for twenty years. You want to put it down, but it contains more than painful memories. Inside are familiar roles, loyalties and ways of understanding yourself.
Some of its contents still matter to you.
Putting it down may mean deciding what to keep, what to leave and how to carry what remains. This is where change can feel like destruction. A role may end. An expectation may lose its authority. A relationship may have to change because its old terms depended on your silence or constant availability.
There can be real grief in that process, even when the change is welcome.
Yet change and destruction are not interchangeable. Learning can extend an existing capacity without destroying it. A musician who learns to improvise does not have to lose the ability to read a score.
For personal change, a useful distinction concerns what happens to our capacity to live and act. Does the transition give us more workable ways to respond, or does it damage the supports on which we depend?
If something must “die”, it may be an old pattern’s exclusive claim over our choices. Silence can remain an option without being our only response to disagreement. Caring for others can remain a value without requiring permanent self-neglect.
A pattern can lose its authority without the person losing their worth.
This is why compassion matters. We can acknowledge what an old arrangement provided while taking responsibility for its consequences. We can also approach the transition with enough care to build alternatives as we release what no longer serves us.
Love, understood in this practical sense, includes respect for the person’s dignity and participation in the change. It gives us reason to ask how they will be supported through the ending.
Change requires usable alternatives
W. Ross Ashby’s law of requisite variety concerns the relationship between the disturbances a system faces and the responses available to regulate their effects. Effective regulation requires sufficient relevant variety in those responses.[4]
Applied as a lens to everyday life, this suggests that change depends partly on having usable alternatives.
Someone whose only response to disagreement is withdrawal has limited room to manoeuvre. They may benefit from learning to ask for clarification, express a preference, negotiate or pause a conversation and return to it. Each option serves a different situation.
The point is to develop responses that fit what is actually happening. A familiar response may remain useful in some circumstances while becoming less automatic in others.
We should also examine the demands themselves. An impossible workload will not necessarily become manageable because someone learns another coping technique. Reducing demands or finding support can be as consequential as expanding personal skills.
A useful measure of change is whether we have more workable choices when life becomes difficult.
Understanding becomes useful through practice
We can understand a pattern’s history and still repeat it. An explanation may help us recognise what is happening, but recognition leaves a practical question: what will we do when the situation appears again?
Music offers a familiar example. A musician plays a phrase, hears what happened and adjusts. Their intention matters, but the sound gives them information they could not obtain by imagining the performance alone.
Something similar can happen when we practise a different response in everyday life. A person who habitually agrees to every request might begin by saying, “Let me check what I can manage before I answer.”
That small change creates an opportunity to observe. How does the other person respond? What happens to the discomfort? Does the pause make a more considered decision possible? What support would make the next attempt easier?
The result may challenge an expectation, or it may reveal a real obstacle. Either way, it gives the person something specific to work with. We learn little if we interpret every difficulty as proof that we are incapable of change, or every attempt as proof that our approach must be correct.
This also changes how we assess progress. If someone practises expressing a preference, immediate comfort may be an incomplete measure of success. They might also consider whether they communicated clearly, respected their limits and learnt something about the relationship.
Experiments should fit the person’s circumstances. In a coercive or unsafe relationship, a different conversational technique may offer little protection; practical safety and outside support matter.
Illness, trauma and severe distress may require professional care alongside changes in everyday behaviour.
Within those limits, practice offers a way to begin before every uncertainty has disappeared. We can make a manageable change, observe its consequences and use what we learn to decide what comes next.
Becoming able to live differently
The paradox of healing becomes less mysterious when we examine what keeps a pattern going. A person can want relief while depending on an arrangement that provides immediate reassurance, belonging or predictability. Leaving it may require new skills, different relationships or resources they do not yet have.
Calling that person unwilling tells us very little about how to help.
A cybernetic perspective invites us to investigate the recurring interactions, the outcomes being protected and the alternatives available. It also asks us to notice whether our attempts to help make change more possible.
We may still have to grieve an identity, surrender an expectation or accept responsibility we once avoided. But we can approach those endings with a clearer purpose: developing a way of living that can accommodate both our needs and the realities around us.
Perhaps healing becomes more tangible when an old difficulty no longer determines every response. We can recognise it, draw on support and act with greater freedom.
The question is no longer only, “How do I stop being this way?” It becomes, “What would make another way of living possible?”
Read more from Sabio Janiak
Sabio Janiak, Founder of Mastering Harmony
Sabio Janiak is a psycho-sensory specialist and human behaviourist, and the founder of Mastering Harmony. Over the past two decades, he has worked in 88 countries as a therapist, musician, and workshop facilitator, exploring the connections between sound, art, the nervous system, and human behaviour. He specialises in trauma resolution and nervous system regulation, helping individuals rewire stress-driven neural patterns and restore emotional balance. Using holistic modalities and applied neuroscience, Sabio empowers people to cultivate resilience, emotional clarity, and self-regulation. He continues to evolve the Mastering Harmony Method through individual sessions, group workshops, and practical training programs.
