Helping People Cope With Change

Life is, by definition, equal to change.
Human beings are quite complex organisms and, as such, they change a lot, they grow and develop a lot, even though they don’t go through the same metamorphosis as a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Yet, as people grow and change, they need to retain their sense of identity, they need to be able to still recognize themselves in a mirror, even though they have grown a moustache, changed their hair colour, or both.
If people change too much, to the point of not recognizing themselves, physically and mentally, then we say they “go crazy” or “loose their mind”. We are all a bit afraid of “going crazy” when we experience too much change in our lives. We all need to maintain a balance between remaining the same, keeping our identity, and turning into someone completely different, losing our identity. Not changing at all, means death. Changing all means madness. We need to grow AND keep our identity, maintaining that dynamic balance.
Learning is change (a form of change). Not all change is learning, but all learning is change. Whenever we learn something, we become a little bit different from who we were before learning what we did. Yet we can still recognize ourselves as being the same person. We also need to maintain our balance in terms of learning, avoiding the loss of identity. We all have a certain fear of learning, as we have a fair of changing (too much). Keeping that balance is key.
When we look around at the world in 2011, we can see that a lot is changing everywhere. All that change requires a lot of learning, just to keep up, and all of this is very threatening (to our identities). The more changes, the more threatened people feel. The paradox, then, is that change can trigger a conservative reaction. The more a person is exposed to change, the more this person feels threatened, and the more this person turns to conservatism in order to avoid change and maintain a sense of identity.
The more we challenge people to change, the more threatened they feel and the more defensive they become, fleeing from change towards the certainty of continuity. The best approach is to provide support for such people, strengthening their sense of identity. The paradox here is that people who have a strong sense of identity are actually more open to change. They are capable of managing change in their lives without losing their identity of feeling afraid to lose it.
We cannot stop change from happening and most of the time we cannot even slow it down. What we can do is help people strengthen their sense of identity by making them aware of their core values (which tend not to change). The better you know who you are, what you stand for, what do you want, the better you will be able to cope with changes around you without losing your identity.

Fear Of Change
The biggest obstacle in all this is balancing support and challenge, balancing the need for continuity to maintain identity and the need for change to adapt to new realities. On one side of the spectrum you have “progressives” who push for change, on the opposite you have “conservatives” who resist change.
This is a different dimension from being “right wing” or “left wing”. Conservatives are basically fundamentalists, and the “clash of civilizations” between “West” and “East” is actually a misnomer… In reality it is a clash between conservative Christians and conservative Muslims.
Progressives have nothing to do with that. Progressives are about integrating religions and values to build a better future. Conservatives are about fearing the future and thinking that the past was better, therefore we should preserve it and try to return to it. Progressives are about “up, up and away”; conservatives are about “back, back and stay”.
We need both identity AND change. We need to balance both in order to move forward without loosing our minds and going crazy.
In that sense, the craziness of Oklahoma and Oslo are a signal that, for some people, progress is going too far, too fast, too soon. That doesn’t mean we should stop social progress. It does not mean we should stop immigration and miscegenation, it does not mean we should go back to the notions of apartheid, “pure” races and Nazism.
It does mean that we must address the social discontents and misfits who turn to violence. We must manage social change in such a way as to avoid that the Geert Wilders of today turn into the Adolf Hitlers of tomorrow. We need to acknowledge that the “Tea Party” movements all over the world are expressions of the fear of progress, and these movements, when not addressed, may spin out of control (even out of control of their own creators and leaders) and generate mass murder, genocide and even destruction of the whole planet.
Sarah Palin did not order the Tucson shootings, but the rhetoric she uses gives crazy people justification for doing crazy things. Nobody told the Oslo attacker to go out and murder 76 people, but the rhetoric of extremist right-wing parties in Europe gives a crazy mind reinforcement to go out and do crazy things.
In the US and UK media people talk about avoiding that “rogue governments” or “terrorists” (as in Muslim terrorists) gain access to nuclear weapons or chemical weapons and wreak havoc and destruction among millions. I am equally concerned that some crazy Christian fundamentalist in Utah may do the same thing!
People who are afraid of social progress can be very dangerous, whether they pray in a mosque, in a synagogue, or in a cathedral. To avoid the madness we must turn to acknowledging it, recognizing it, understanding it and treating it. It’s no use trying to control it by force, by imposing an Orwellian police state. We do need to address it through education (and I mean radically changing traditional education practices), through social and political debate, through innovative approaches and policies.
If we ignore the craziness next door, we run the risk of becoming their next victim, or worse: we run the risk that our children become the victims of the social craziness we did not address.