You can’t make people want things.
I wish I’d found a more eloquent way to put this, but my basic point here is that you can’t make anybody want to do anything.
No matter how important, deal-breaking, or serious the consequences for themselves or anybody else, you cannot make somebody want to change. I have lost entire relationships over point-blank refusals to change behaviour that was simply intolerable. You probably have too.
You can ask, draw boundaries, and create consequences, any of which might create a desire in someone to address a behaviour, but as the old cliché goes, change is an inside job.
It took a while to arrive at this truth myself. Like many people who end up in professions like coaching, I’ve always had some trait — interest, empathy or whatever it is — that encourages people to open up, combined with a natural inclination to try to understand human behaviour.
A drawback to this is the frequent feeling I had that I was not much more than a nodding body for someone to vent at, with people much more committed to maintaining their problems than to seeking any solution to them. I’ve witnessed people trot their problems out for a daily walk like a prize pet - and realised that rather than resolution, they were actually invested in the problem itself, as a source of identity, attention or sympathy.
I’m not in that business anymore.
Thankfully, a career as a coach has given me the opportunity to hone those traits into skills that have some use, for the people who want them.
Key point.
I’m now in the still shockingly excellent position of having people turn up, specifically seeking change, and invested in making it real. They show up month after month, making those sometimes awkward or painful steps towards embedding new patterns. And it works. When people truly commit to addressing the challenges in their lives, the progress they can make is breathtaking.
Change is genuinely hard. From what I see, it’s hardest in our closest relationships. We might be able to turn the ship at work, but try spend a weekend with your family without some iteration of your teenage self joining you. Try disrupt an imbalance in a relationship, once the inertia has set in. That’s hard. You can get punished for that. You often do, even when it’s the right decision.
Sometimes the pattern we’re in has to become so unbearable that change feels if not better, then at least no longer avoidable.
However, the point here, once again, is that you can’t make someone want to do any of this, no matter how important it is. It’s easier not to, at least in the short term. You can’t make someone want to address an addiction, or abusive behaviours, or self-sabotage or anything else. You can ask and exert what influence you can, but there’s a limit. If someone decides to change something it’s because they decide to for themselves.
Where does that leave us? With a pretty limited set of choices really. We can ask. We can draw boundaries. We can create consequences. In the end, we only get two real choices: accept things as they are, whatever that looks like, or step away.
The basic point, trite as it is, is that you cannot change anyone else, only yourself (and even then, not always that much, but that’s a separate story). When it comes to other people’s behaviour, you’ve got a short set of options, and that’s it. You don’t get to decide how other people act.
Now while this truth might feel frustrating and limiting in your own relationships, it is also the frayed thread by which my faith in humanity is dangling.
Let me explain.
The reason I haven’t entirely given up hope, witnessing any one of the injustices unfolding in front of our eyes at any moment, is for exactly the same reason: because you can’t make people want things.
Frustrating as that is in our individual lives, in the collective, this means things like:
You can’t make women want to be controlled.
You can’t make any group want to be discriminated against.
You can’t make anybody want war, or genocide, or poverty, or any of the countless atrocities that we witness every time we scan social media.
Basically, you can’t make people ok with things they’re not ok with.
Sure, you can prey on people’s fears, incite mistrust or hatred, fuel division and so on. We see that every day, and it’ll work on some people. But not most.
You can also, with enough illegitimate power, force through unjust and harmful laws or policies.
For a while.
But the clock will always run out on strategies like these, simply because you can’t make people want them. Some people might want those conditions for others, but they don’t want them for themselves. Nobody does. And the people affected don’t stop resisting until things change.
I’ll take the example of women’s equality, as it’s the one most central to my work, though same applies to every group on the lower rungs of the hierarchies we’ve created. If women honestly believed in their hearts that they were inferior to men, then there would be a quiet acceptance of patriarchy. As frightening as the current rollbacks of women’s rights are, from the US to Afghanistan, imagine what it would like if women agreed.
That scenario would be very different.
I’m not denying that there are plenty of women who, consciously or unconsciously, uphold the patriarchy - we’re all raised in it after all. (A recent report from the UN found that a depressing 9 out of 10 people worldwide hold a “fundamental bias” against women.) And yet… things are changing.
The tide has turned, however slowly, in many areas, and while there’s plenty of pushback, it’s not coming from women. Or from the men who have moved forward too, obviously. For the most part, women are not opting out of education, or employment, or leadership or property ownership, or any of the areas they kicked a door in to access. Most women, like everyone else, are doing their best, within the confines of their reality, to build as much security and fulfilment as they can - the basic endeavour we’re all here to undertake.
It’s not women on podcasts urging other women to be “submissive”, as if that’s our natural state. (If you harbour any illusion that women are naturally submissive, spend an afternoon with a female toddler. That’ll cure you). Women are leaving relationships when they have to, and climbing out of the dating pool altogether if they feel they need to for their safety or peace.
My point here again, is you can’t make women want patriarchy. Some do, and I guess good luck to them. But you cannot make most women want to be treated as inferior. Or any other group for that matter.
I come from Ireland, and in my lifetime I’ve watched the all-pervasive power of the Catholic Church crumple in on itself almost overnight, after one scandal too many. I’ve witnessed people here campaign for decades - genuinely decades - for reform of abortion legislation that has literally killed women. I’ve celebrated as we became the first country to legalise marriage equality by popular vote. I’ve watched norms slide, consciousness grow, and tolerance deepen in this once most conservative little island.
This gives me hope.
When it comes to social change, one of my favourite expressions is “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube”. For most people, there’s no going back. There is no argument you could make to persuade a woman who believes in her own equality to want a relationship with a misogynistic man. She’ll choose solitude over that, as many women now do.
There are no arguments that would convince my father that his little grandson is worth more than his granddaughter. There’s nothing you could say to make him want any of his children to stay in an unsafe marriage, or to make him ok with risk to their health or lives from legislation controlling women’s health. There’s no combination of words that would work on him. That ship has sailed.
I’ve asked many Irish people, out of interest, if they’d like to return to the Ireland of the 1980s. I’m usually met with a perplexed look that I’d ask such a stupid question, but in the interest of hearing people's thoughts, I keep asking. I’ve yet to hear a single “yes”, from anyone of any age, or any gender. As Dublin comedian David O’Dogherty says about Christian Nationalism: “We gave it a really good go here in Ireland - we really did, and it was SHITE”.
Hear, hear.
You can impose, or force, or coerce, or control, for a while. There’s no minimising that reality. We are watching that play out in real time, every day. All I’m saying is you can’t make anyone ok with it.
You can’t make people accept something that they fundamentally do not want, and therefore resistance is inevitable. And where there is resistance, there will be breakthrough, no matter how long it takes. Unjust structures are unstable. People cannot ever really accept that which they do not want.
From my understanding, the reason for this is simply that every last one of us has their own soul, or deep self - whatever words you want to put on it. I say this without a shred of religious context - I am lapsed to an extent that only somebody raised Irish catholic can attain. Whatever it is that makes each person sovereign - that part of us knows that we do not deserve to be harmed, controlled or suppressed.
And increasingly, it doesn't sit right with us to watch this happen to others either. Maddeningly, we can influence so little of what happens in the world, but we can start with our own. Much of my work has, at its base, a focus on addressing imbalances in people's lives. My belief is that the more each of us does the heavy lifting to create more internal peace and fairness in our own lives, the greater the outward ripples. We can have some influence in our own spheres, at the very least. At a particular low point recently, I read an unattributed quote that said:
“Do for one what you wish you could do for many.”
Depressing as the current state of the world can be, my sense is that we’re living through a death rattle of forces that can no longer hold. In psychology, the term “extinction burst” refers to a sudden and dramatic increase in an activity that is no longer rewarded. For example, if we swipe a card and it doesn’t work, we’ll swipe it more and more, in a final burst of protest, before giving up and paying another way. My sense is that we’re witnessing this process in the collective, as the agents of failed systems lash out, in backlash against progress. I’m not minimising the danger of the backlash, I’m just saying that you can’t make it stick.
Because you can’t make anyone want to go back.
Maddeningly, and thankfully, you can’t make anyone want anything.
