Do people change? Or do we just learn how to manage our faults?

By David McElroy · July 1, 2012

When you first meet Jenny, it doesn’t occur to you that this woman could have been in an abusive marriage for years. She’s friendly and pleasant to talk with, and she seems to have a lot of confidence in herself. I had known her for a month or so before she mentioned her past abuse to me. As the story came out, it was disturbing to me.

Jenny is about 60. She’s been divorced for two years, after a decades-long marriage to the man she still calls her soulmate. But her husband was emotionally abusive in ways that left her feeling like a shell of herself. After years of falling apart in ways that I won’t describe, she finally divorced him. She feels emotionally safer now, but she misses the man she considers her soulmate.

I found out Saturday that she talks to her former husband three times each day now. They didn’t talk for awhile, but the divorce hit him hard and forced him to start re-evaluating himself. She said he’s changing. They’re talking seriously about getting back together again.

Do people really change? Or are we just fooling ourselves when we believe we’re changing for the better? And when we trust people who have hurt us before, are we just fooling ourselves?

I was already thinking about this subject when I started having some email correspondence Saturday evening with someone who I once hurt in several ways — all of them unintentional, but all of them my fault. While I had been thinking about Jenny’s story from her point of view — and not wanting to see her get hurt again — I realized uncomfortably that I was the one playing the role of the formerly hurtful partner in those emails. I didn’t like it. And I didn’t like seeing myself that way.

I’ve mentioned this before, but about three and a half years ago, I lost someone who I never should have lost. I don’t know if there’s really such a thing as soulmates, but if they exist, I’d found mine. For better or worse — in both strengths and flaws — we were well-matched in many respects. But I made some decisions that led to me losing her, and I’ve painfully regretted that loss every single day since then.

The positive effect of that painful situation is that I got serious about figuring out why I’d made the decisions I’d made and why I’d treated someone I loved in ways that weren’t loving. I spent a lot of time, effort and money on therapy and contemplation — figuring out why I’d done the things I’d done.

I learned a lot of painful things about myself. I learned painful things about my relationships with my family. I faced ugly things in myself that I didn’t want to face. As a result, I made a lot of changes. I don’t feel like the same person I was then, at least in many ways.

In the email correspondence I was having with someone Saturday evening, she told me that she was afraid to tell me some of what she was doing, because she was afraid of me judging her and disapproving. I understood her fears. I couldn’t do anything other than admit she had been completely right about me doing those things in the past, so she had every reason to fear me doing them again now. I just reassured her — again — that I’ve learned and grown since I did those things. I told her to try and see, if she wanted to.

Has Jenny’s emotionally abusive husband changed? Will he be able to love her and treat her as she deserves if she takes him back? Have I really changed in the ways that I think I’ve changed? Do I really have the insight into certain ugly things about myself to avoid hurting someone I love?

The central question is whether we can really change. Because I like to think I’ve changed — and because I see changes in the ways I treat people these days — I might be biased to claim that we can, but my answer is a bit more nuanced than that. The truth is that the essential part of who we are doesn’t change. Any change that other people see is in how we learn to manage ourselves — how we learn to manage those ugly parts of ourselves that we don’t want to even look at.

When I think seriously about myself, I see a paradox. I’m the same person I was four years ago, but my thoughts and actions are very different. When I look inside my heart and mind and soul, I still see things I hate, things I’m ashamed of. But because I’m now honest with myself about what’s there, I can control and channel that part of me that used to judge and criticize someone I love.

I’m no different inside. I still have the same assets and flaws. But my actions and thoughts are different, because I’ve learned the truth about myself and can better balance the good and the bad.

So have I changed? Am I fooling myself? Am I wrong to ask someone to trust me when I hurt her before?

For the first two questions, I’m confident that my actions have changed and that I know how to deal with the parts of myself that I don’t like. I call that change, because we’re ultimately judged by the ways in which we interact with others. We all have ugly parts inside us that we try not to show other people. More mature people have learned not to let those ugly parts affect the way they act, especially with the people they love.

What about the other question? Am I wrong to ask someone I once hurt to trust me again? And is Jenny wrong to be considering trusting her formerly abusive husband?

I don’t know that I can answer those questions. Jenny’s hurt was for many more years, but she believes he’s changed and she believes she’s changed, too. Is he a good risk? I have no idea. Jenny has to decide for herself. She might put herself into the position to be hurt again or she might be getting the loving soulmate she believes him to be. Only she can decide.

Am I a good risk for someone to trust, even though I hurt her emotionally in the past? I believe so, but it’s not a question I get to decide the answer to.

Change is difficult. It takes work. It takes time. It takes rebuilding of trust. Real change probably doesn’t happen that often. But when it does happen, it can change your world.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts