What Really Motivates Us to Change (expanded version)
As I was writing a short blog post called: What really motivates people to change for our therapy website, I found that I had a lot more to say than the space to take up. So, I figured I would elaborate further on this motivators of change that I have experienced in my life so far. So here it is:
Almost nobody walks into a therapist's office believing they are the problem. This is especially true of couples. They come because something is broken, but the implicit assumption for most of them is that their partner is the one who needs fixing. "How willing to change are you?" I ask. They say yes. Of course, yes. But what they mean, more often than not, is: I am willing for my partner to change. The real work of therapy begins when that stops being enough, when a person has to confront the possibility that they are the thing standing in their own way. What moves someone across that line? I believe there are five motivations worth examining.
The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living
The first motivation to consider is insight. Insight comes from making the unconscious conscious, from arriving at an unexpected truth about oneself. When we examine our thoughts, feelings and actions on this deep level, we can measure them against our values and determine whether they line up with what we say matters to us or go against it.
Let me give a quick example to illustrate. Fernando comes to therapy, and through the therapeutic process we are able to link the pain of his childhood to his current relationship. He realizes that he is withdrawing in his marriage today as a way of taking back control that he didn't have when he was a child. Arriving at this insight, Fernando now has an opportunity to decide whether his desire for a better marriage (his stated value) is more important to him than the perceived benefit of his coping mechanism: withdrawal. Juxtaposed like that, the answer seems obvious. To see that my actions are out of step with my values helps motivate me to change my behaviors. When values and behaviors align, we call this ego-syntonic. When they don't, we feel a friction that can become the beginning of movement.
Therapy is all about insight. It is about trying to collaboratively arrive at the very deepest understanding of ourselves. In ancient Greek philosophy, this pursuit was referred to as noesis, the understanding of that which is, at its essence, true or real. Therapy attempts to act as a mirror where we can examine ourselves as we actually are, without the biased filters we generally see ourselves through. Of course therapy isn't necessary to arrive at genuine insight, but it certainly helps facilitate that process through techniques like the Socratic Method, which favors the careful asking of questions that lead a person to their own conclusions rather than handing them answers.
There are times, like the above example, where insight might be all that is needed to motivate a person toward change. Unfortunately, while this might work for some, insight alone is often not a powerful enough motivator to produce lasting change. Why? Because humans learned at their inception to take the path of least resistance in order to survive. Changing ingrained patterns takes real energy, and our brains are wired to conserve it. Insight can open the door without ever walking us through it.
Love
The second motivator is love. I don't mean love as an abstraction or a greeting card sentiment. I mean the kind of love that is experienced between people who have built something together, who share a life and a history, and who recognize that what they have is worth protecting.
I have observed in my work with couples that love, when it is felt and not merely remembered, can motivate people to do things they would never do for themselves alone. A man who has spent years avoiding vulnerability will sit on my couch and say something honest to his wife for the first time in a decade. He doesn't do it because he suddenly discovered the value of emotional openness. He does it because losing her became more real to him than the discomfort of being seen.
This isn't limited to romantic relationships either. Think of a parent who recognizes that their anger is shaping their child's sense of safety, or a friend who realizes that their unreliability has cost someone who matters to them. Love for another person creates a kind of accountability that self-interest alone cannot always produce. It introduces someone else's well-being into the equation, and when we care about another person's flourishing, we become willing to tolerate the difficulty of change in ways we might not tolerate for ourselves.
But love as a motivator has a condition: it has to be active. What I mean by that is it has to be something you are still in contact with, something you aren't just recalling from the past. I have sat with couples who can tell me in great detail about the love they once felt, but who have not experienced that love as a living thing in years. Remembered love is different from felt love. Felt love creates urgency because it says: this person in front of me matters, and I am willing to be uncomfortable in order not to lose them.
The limitation of love as a motivator is that it depends on the relationship being alive enough for the person to still feel the pull. When resentment has built up for too long, or when emotional distance has calcified, love can become buried under layers of hurt. It may still exist somewhere underneath, but it is no longer accessible enough to drive the hard work of change. And in some cases, honestly, love isn't mutual, or the other person has already moved on. Love motivates powerfully, but only when it is still something the person can touch.
Fear
The third motivator is fear, and I think it deserves its own category because it operates differently from the others. Fear doesn't require understanding (which is what insight asks of you) and it doesn't require connection (which is what love asks of you). Fear is anticipatory. It is the emotional response to a future that has not yet arrived but feels inevitable.
From a psychological standpoint, fear activates our threat detection system. The amygdala fires and cortisol rises as the body prepares to act. This is the same system that kept our ancestors alive when they heard a branch snap in the dark, except that in the context of personal change, the threat is a projected outcome rather than a predator. It might be a marriage ending, or a child pulling away for good, or a diagnosis getting worse.
In practical terms, I see fear show up in therapy as a turning point, and sometimes as the turning point. A husband who has been dragging his feet on addressing his drinking comes to a session looking different. Something about him has shifted since the last time I saw him. When I ask what happened, the answer is often something like: "She told me she's done." Or: "My son said he doesn't want to be around me anymore." The actual consequences have not fully materialized yet, but the possibility has become vivid enough that it functions like a wall at the end of a hallway. If you keep walking this direction, here is where you end up.
What makes fear distinct from the other motivators is its relationship to time. Fear deals in projection and imagination. A man doesn't have to lose his family to be afraid of losing his family. A woman doesn't have to receive a terminal diagnosis to be terrified by what the doctor said could happen if she doesn't change her habits. The consequences haven't landed, but the fear of their arrival can be enough to shift behavior.
I want to be honest about the limitations here, though. Fear-based motivation tends to spike and fade. Think of the person who, after a health scare, eats well and exercises for three weeks, then slowly drifts back to old patterns once the scare feels distant and daily life crowds it out. Fear can get someone moving, but it often needs to be replaced by something deeper in order to hold. It is a catalyst more than a foundation.
There's also the matter of avoidance. Some people respond to fear by shutting down altogether. They stop going to the doctor. They stop answering the phone. They numb out. In my observation, the people for whom fear actually produces change are the ones who can sit with the discomfort of what they're afraid of long enough to let it inform their next move rather than simply running from it.
God's Direct Intervention
The fourth motivator is one I have observed but cannot clinically explain, and I want to be upfront about that. It is what I would call God's direct intervention: a moment or experience where a person encounters something that feels unmistakably outside of themselves, and it changes them.
I am not writing this as a theological argument. I am writing it as an observation from sitting across from people for years and listening to their stories. There are clients I have worked with who hit a wall that insight couldn't penetrate, whose relationships were too damaged for love to reach them, and whose fear had become so chronic it was just background noise. By every clinical measure, they were stuck. And then something happened that they could only describe in spiritual terms. A moment of clarity in the middle of the night. A conversation with a stranger that landed like a message meant specifically for them. An inexplicable shift in perspective that they did not arrive at through any process I could trace.
What I can say from observation is that these moments tend to share a few characteristics. They are usually uninvited, meaning the person was not seeking a spiritual experience when it found them. They often come at a point of total exhaustion or surrender, when the person has run out of their own strategies. And they produce a kind of change that is qualitatively different from what I see with the other motivators, something sudden and complete in a way that I cannot account for through psychological frameworks alone.
I realize that including this will be uncomfortable for some readers, and I understand that. But I would be dishonest if I left it out. I have watched it happen too many times to pretend it doesn't exist. Whether you frame it as divine intervention or as a spiritual awakening or as something else entirely, the observable reality is that some people change in ways that exceed what their circumstances and psychological profile would predict. I don't have a clinical explanation for it. I just have what I've seen.
The Great Equalizer
The fifth and final motivator, and in many ways the most reliable one, is pain.
When insight has not been enough. When love has faded or is not present. When fear has come and gone without producing movement. When no transcendent moment has arrived. There is still pain. Pain is the natural consequence of not doing the work, and unlike the other motivators, it does not politely wait for you to be ready.
The real question is not whether pain motivates change (it does). The question is: how much pain must a person endure before they finally change? And the answer is complicated because it depends on the individual, the way they interact with anticipated versus actualized pain, and their own tolerance for suffering.
Let me unpack that. Anticipated pain is the projection of a negative future outcome. If you are eating in ways that aren't healthy for you, your body will eventually break down in some way. If you go to the doctor and she warns you that continuing on this path could lead to diabetes, that warning is anticipated pain. You have not yet developed diabetes. You are not yet suffering the consequences. But you are engaging with the idea of that suffering, and for some people, that is enough.
Actualized pain is different. Actualized pain is the diagnosis, not the warning. It is the spouse who has filed the papers, not the one who said she was thinking about it. It is the overdose, not the close call. Actualized pain removes all ambiguity because there is no longer a question of whether consequences will come. They are here.
What I have observed is that anticipated pain motivates people who are still capable of honest self-reflection. It requires a person to project themselves into a future they don't want and to take that projection seriously enough to act now. Not everyone can do that. Some people have spent so long avoiding discomfort that their capacity for honest future-casting has atrophied. They hear the doctor's warning and think: that won't happen to me. They hear their spouse's frustration and think: she's overreacting. For these people, only actualized pain will move the needle, the kind that is undeniable and present and no longer theoretical.
Then there is the matter of pain tolerance, which varies enormously from person to person. Every one of us has a reservoir of resilience built up from previous difficulties. Resilience is what allows us to recover from hardship, and it is shaped by our history. A person who has endured significant adversity may have a very high pain tolerance, which sounds like a good thing and in many ways it is, but it also means they may need to endure more intense suffering before change feels necessary. They have learned to absorb and keep going, which served them well in survival mode but can work against them when the situation calls for adaptation rather than endurance.
Some people have small pain tolerances. Communication difficulties in their marriage, or anxiety that prevents them from focusing on their work. For those people, that level of discomfort is enough to seek change. Others have far greater tolerances and therefore need to endure something more severe, like an affair, an impending divorce, or a near-death experience, before the cost of staying the same finally exceeds the cost of doing something different.
Pain is the great equalizer because it does not require insight or connection or belief. It simply requires that a person reach their limit. And every person, no matter how resilient, has one.
Where Therapy Fits
If you have read this far, you might be wondering: so where does therapy actually fit into all of this?
Therapy sits at the intersection of all five motivators. It is the space where insight can be pursued intentionally, where love can be reconnected to and strengthened, where fear can be examined honestly rather than avoided, where spiritual experiences can be integrated, and where pain can be processed rather than merely endured.
What therapy does at its best is help a person figure out which of these motivators is most alive for them right now, and then work with it. For some clients, that means doing the careful, patient work of insight, peeling back layers and examining patterns and connecting past to present. For others, it means helping them reconnect with the love that brought them to therapy in the first place, before resentment buried it. For others still, it means sitting with them in their pain and helping them understand what it is asking of them.
The reason I believe in therapy is that it offers something most people do not have access to on their own: a relationship where someone is paying close attention to you, asking the right questions, and helping you see what you might not be able to see by yourself. In my experience, that is often the difference between a person who knows they need to change and a person who actually does.
As I mentioned in my original post: we must change, or we will die. That sounds dramatic, but it is also just true. If we are eating things that aren't healthy for us, it will eventually break down our bodies. If we don't examine our attitudes and behaviors, we will end up alone. Whether it is an intimate relationship that is failing or a growing depression creating significant distress, in order to improve the current situation, something must change. The only real question is what it will take to get there, and whether you will seek help along the way.
