The term ‘change’ occupies a remarkably heterogeneous position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as ontological principle, clinical target, linguistic event, and soteriological aspiration. Hellmut Wilhelm’s exposition of the I Ching establishes the most philosophically ambitious register: change (I) names the very power through which heaven and earth remain generative, standing in dialectical tension with the ‘constant’ — the fixed hierarchical order that change paradoxically sustains. This cosmological polarity finds clinical descendants in Motivational Interviewing, where William Miller treats change as a process mediated by language, ambivalence, and motivational readiness, arguing that how clients talk about change is itself constitutive of whether it occurs. The transtheoretical model of Prochaska and DiClemente provides the developmental scaffolding within which MI operates, staging change across precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, and action. Pargament’s psychology of religion introduces a further axis — conservation versus transformation — in which change may be sought not as rupture but as the paradoxical means of preserving significance. Existential perspectives, represented by Yalom, interrogate the mechanism by which insight produces change, finding the causal chain opaque and suggesting that change may precede, rather than follow, self-knowledge. Across all these traditions, ambivalence toward change is recognized not as resistance but as a normative and even necessary moment in the transformation process.
Its power is change. If heaven and earth did not change, this power could penetrate nowhere. The reciprocal influences of the five elements would come to a standstill and the alternations of the four seasons would cease.
Wilhelm identifies change as the fundamental cosmological power whose cessation would dissolve all natural and social order, establishing it as the governing principle of the I Ching’s three-coordinated worldview.
, Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching, 1960thesis
most people who need to make a change are ambivalent about doing so. They see both reasons to change and reasons not to… It is a normal human experience. In fact, it is an ordinary part of the change process, a step along the way.
Miller argues that ambivalence is not an obstacle to change but an intrinsic, normative phase of the change process itself, reframing resistance as developmental progress.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013thesis
How people talk about change matters. Beyond the specific content there are stylistic aspects of communication that have predictable effects on outcome and can promote discord or harmony.
Miller’s MI framework holds that the linguistic and stylistic qualities of conversations about change are themselves causally efficacious in determining whether change occurs.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013thesis
Ironically, it is when people experience acceptance of themselves as they are that change becomes possible. Causing people to feel bad and unacceptable usually entrenches the status quo.
Miller articulates a paradox central to MI: unconditional acceptance, rather than confrontation with discrepancy, is the condition that makes genuine change psychologically available.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013thesis
The history of the world’s religions has been sharply punctuated by periods of conflict between the standard bearers of the status quo and the advocates of profound change.
Pargament situates change within a fundamental religious tension between conservation and transformation of significance, demonstrating that this tension has organized both personal coping and civilizational history.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001thesis
Improvement, growth, and development are terms that do not capture the fundamental change the individual seeks. Transformation comes closer.
Pargament distinguishes incremental change from radical transformation in the context of religious conversion, arguing that the deepest personal change involves a wholesale reconstitution of identity and significance rather than mere behavioral adjustment.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001thesis
One is often unable to perceive truths about oneself only after taking some stand toward change. Once having made a decision, once having put oneself on record to oneself, then one has constituted one’s world differently.
Yalom challenges the classical insight-leads-to-change sequence, proposing that decisional commitment can itself restructure perception, making change a precondition of, rather than a consequence of, self-knowledge.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
Ambivalence, the simultaneous presence of conflicting motivations, is a normal human process on the path to change… Preparatory change talk tends to precede mobilizing change talk.
Miller maps the internal structure of the change process as a progression from ambivalent preparatory language toward committed mobilizing language, providing a psycholinguistic architecture for understanding motivational movement.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
Change tends to occur when a person perceives a significant discrepancy between i[deal and current behavior]… Part of the spirit of acceptance is acknowledging that ultimately it is the person’s decision what, if anything, to change.
Miller establishes perceived discrepancy and honored autonomy as the twin conditions for change, insisting that the practitioner cannot impose change but can only cultivate the conditions under which the client chooses it.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
Could counselors influence the amount of change talk that their clients voiced? The result is shown in Box 13.2. Change talk clearly increased.
Experimental evidence from Glynn and Moyers demonstrates that counselor behavior directly modulates the frequency of client change talk, establishing the therapeutic relationship as a causal factor in the change process.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
Beneath the surface, seeds are germinating. Preparatory change talk itself can predict change whether commitment is actually voiced.
Miller argues that overt commitment language is not a prerequisite for change; covert motivational processes, reflected in preparatory talk, can themselves predict behavioral change independent of explicit declarations.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
When people’s motivation reaches a threshold of readiness, the balance tips and they begin thinking and talking more about when and how to change and less about whether and why.
Miller describes a threshold model of motivational readiness in which the shift from contemplating reasons for change to planning its implementation marks a qualitative transition in the change process.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
Change, then, is not at all foreign to the religious world. It is in fact regularly encouraged and practiced… the ultimate goal of the change in reconstructive coping is to conserve significance.
Pargament demonstrates that religious traditions actively institutionalize change through ritual and switching mechanisms, yet paradoxically employ change as a means of conserving, rather than abandoning, core significances.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
Responding well to sustain talk and discord is a key to successful treatment if you can recognize it for what it is: an opportunity.
Miller reframes resistance to change — sustain talk and discord — as diagnostic information and therapeutic opportunity rather than obstacle, reflecting MI’s broader orientation toward change as emergent rather than imposed.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
Change sometimes must happen, as all managers well know, but like MI it is something best done with and for people, not on or to them.
Miller applies MI’s collaborative philosophy of change to organizational implementation itself, insisting that the ethics of the method require that change at every level be participatory rather than imposed.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
Ambivalence involves simultaneous conflicting motivations and can thus be an uncomfortable place to be… The sheer discomfort of being suspended in such tension can itself be enough to propel one into change.
Miller identifies motivational discomfort — the affective burden of sustained ambivalence — as itself a potential driver of change, suggesting that the tension of unresolved conflict has its own propulsive force.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
if you try to develop a change plan before the client is sufficiently ready you may undo whatever progress you have made through engaging, focusing, and evoking.
Miller warns that premature movement to planning can disrupt the motivational trajectory, underscoring the importance of sequencing therapeutic interventions according to the client’s actual readiness for change.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
transformation remains a necessary part of coping, for at times the only way to maximize significance may be to transform it.
Pargament argues that when conservation of existing significance structures is no longer viable, radical transformation of what one holds significant becomes the only functional coping path, positioning transformative change as a last-resort necessity.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
The now-familiar TTM stages of change in psychotherapy highlighted the need for clinicians to be flexibly using methods appropriate to the client’s current level of readiness for change.
Miller situates MI within the transtheoretical model’s developmental staging of change, explaining how MI was conceptualized specifically for clients at pre-action stages where readiness for change is low.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
a strong realization that the past cannot be changed is enough to propel the survivor to focus his or her mental energy on the present, and in adaptive planning for the future.
Van der Hart locates an important catalyst for therapeutic change in the traumatized individual’s acceptance of the immutability of the past, suggesting that the recognition of what cannot be changed paradoxically enables movement toward what can.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting
change talk is a bit like walking up one side of a hill and down the other. The uphill side represents preparatory change talk… and the downhill side is mobilizing change talk.
Miller’s hill metaphor formalizes the phenomenology of motivational movement, distinguishing the laborious cultivation of desire and reasons from the momentum-generating quality of commitment and activation.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
CHAPTER 13 Emotion, the Body and Change. If your everyday practice is to open to your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down.
Levine frames somatic and emotional openness — the capacity to remain non-defensively present — as the embodied precondition for therapeutic change, situating change within body-oriented psychotherapy’s broader agenda.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010aside
any approach to coping involves conservation or transformation of both means and ends.
Pargament’s matrix of coping options establishes change as always occurring on two axes — transformation of pathways and transformation of goals — providing a structural grammar for understanding the scope of any given act of change.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001aside