#27. (im)Possible-Changes

This essay will take you 6 minutes to read

What can you change about yourself, and what can you not? Can you earn x10 of your current income? Can you survive a break-up? Can you find a better partner, or build a better relationship with the one you have? Can you read 50 books a year? How about a 100? It’s important to ask oneself these questions, and it’s even more important to answer them. To make a plan for your life, to set expectations, to make sure you aren’t wasting time trying to achieve the impossible, while not wasting time being content with a fraction of what you’re capable of. Today we’re going to focus on the latter possibility: on the situation in which a person denies themself a certain aspiration, believing it to be impossible, while being wrong about it. And we’re going to see that “I can’t do that” has not one, but two distinct meanings, which you ought to discern. But first, let’s start with the principle of it.

What do we even mean when we say “I can do that”? Or, even more general question: when we say “A can do X”? When I utter the words “Bugatti Veyron can reach 300kph,”—what reality am I describing? Note that I’m speaking in the present tense, the “can” implies the phenomenon in question—some potential for achieving speed—exists already. It’s not “could”, or “could’ve”, nor is it “will”, or “is going to”. But where does this potential exist? In the engine? Nope, you take the engine out of the car—and it doesn’t go 300kph. In the wheels? In the salon? Where can I find it, and how do I measure it in the present time? There’s no way to do so. And when something can’t be measured or registered, materialists like myself say that it just doesn’t exist. But if the potential for reaching insane speeds is a mirage, a fantasm, if it doesn’t exist, then what am I describing, talking about the car’s possibilities?

Let’s look at another car—say, Volkswagen Beetle. It “can’t” reach 300kph, whatever that means. So there’s something different between the Beetle and the Veyron that we recognize as the potential for reaching that speed. So let’s try to reach it and see what happens. To reach 300kph in a Bugatti, you need to put a driver in it, have him press the pedal on a long enough street, and keep it pressed for a minute or so. To reach 300kph in the Beetle, you’ll need a somewhat more complex procedure. You’ll need to stick the engine from a Veyron into it; after all, the Veyron is much heavier, so it would push the poor beetle to 300. You might also swap tires, change the gearbox, and maybe just replace the chassis while you’re at it. And then you still need a driver, a road, and some time with the pedal pressed down. But eventually, you can get the Beetle to go 300kph. The only problem is that it’s no longer going to be a Volkswagen Beetle.

So the question of “can A do X” is actually about the way we categorize things. “Can” is often not a property of an object, but a rule of identity: how much may change before we stop calling it the same thing? If A doesn’t have property X, but B does, then “can A do X” really mean “do we see A and B as the same object”? We’re happy to interpret Bugatti Veyron with an empty salon, standing in the garage, and Bugatti Veyron with a driver, pushing the gas pedal, as the same object. But a stock Volkswagen Beetle and a Volkswagen Beetle with an engine from Bugatti, wheels from Lamborghini, chassis from McLaren, and gearbox from Ferrari aren’t seen as the same object. Meaning, when we say “A can’t do X”, be it “Beetle can’t do 300kph”, or “Bob can’t be nice at parties”, we might mean “if you turn A into B, that does X—it will no longer be A”: “a Beetle that’s tuned up to 300kph isn’t a Beetle anymore”, “Bob that stopped using unfunny lewd jokes at every opportunity won’t be Bob anymore”.

Why “might mean”, and not just “that’s what we mean”? Because there is another possibility: maybe the thing we want from an object isn’t just breaking the object’s identity in our eyes, but is physically impossible. No amount of tuning will make a Beetle travel in time, or make Bob resurrect the dead. That’s the second meaning of “can’t”: not “the object will become a different object”, but “nature prevents it”.

Now, we circle back to the beginning, and to questions about you, and your capacities, or lack thereof. When you say “I can’t do X”, what most people intuitively mean is “it’s impossible, can’t be done”. But a lot—and I do mean “a lot” of times this isn’t the case. It’s just a rationalization, not an actual thought process. A person first comes up with “I can’t”, and only then rationalizes the lack of possibility: “it’s impossible”. Whereas it might well be the case, and, as I said, it very often is, that the real reason someone “can’t” do something isn’t that there’s a law of nature in the way. It’s just that to do X, they’d have to become a different person.

Story time: once a female client came to a session (this one is real, not just an example) and, while I was getting ready and pouring myself a cup of tea, mentioned that she had seen a beautiful dress in a shopfront on the way here. “You want to buy it?” I asked, stirring the sugar. “No,” she said, “but I’d like to be the woman who would want it.” That’s it, that’s the gist of what I’m trying to explain. As we are today, we are very limited creatures. We have identity, self-esteem, responsibilities, relationships, and agreements, all of which are gathered under the umbrella term “personality”. But the method I work in isn’t called “personality-reconstructive approach” for nothing. The idea is that you can be, can become a different person. And that person could do things you can’t.

A lighter version of the same explanation is encompassed in an old joke: “I know I’m not good with alcohol, so I only drink one shot, no more. But when I drink the shot, I become a different man, and that guy drinks a lot.” You can harness that power for good, too. Sure, your body, age, sex, health, citizenship, and physical location limit you objectively. So if you’re too frail to climb mountaint Everest—well, tough luck, no amount of counseling, visualisations, emanating signals into the universe or cleaning chakras will fix that. But the stuff that has to do with decisions, rather than muscular strength and biological robustness—having certain types of relationships, not having (getting rid of) certain types of relationships, earning more, spending less (or more), the kind of communication you have on a daily basis, the order of your priorities, your mood and subjective happiness—those things can change a lot. And often their changes lie on the other side of what you, as a person, but not as a biological individual, can do. So what you do is you become another person.

That’s the core idea of psychodynamics; that’s why it takes so much longer than CBT, and why it’s so much more painful (and expensive): the goal isn’t to just improve the quality of your life. The goal is to begin another life, a life as someone who lives differently. You might not see it as a possibility for you to ever set boundaries in relationships, trust, or open up about your feelings, request support, or accept it. But you may become someone who can do it. Your old circles may say, “I don’t recognize you, you used to be so different”—both as a compliment and as an accusation, depending on the nature of your relationships. But that’s not a bug, that’s a feature, that’s the feature. That’s why you come to psychodynamic counseling: to do things that you, as of right now, see as things you can’t do—not because they’re impossible, but because the person who will dare to do them will no longer be you, as you are now.

Until next week,
Konstantin Kunakh

As always, feel free to share your stories by simply replying to this email. From time to time, I share some of them here. Just let me know if you’d like to stay anonymous.