Every January, we make promises to become someone else.
We will exercise more. Drink less. Stop procrastinating. Leave the relationship. Save the relationship. Be more patient. Stop raising our voice with the people we love.
The track record is humbling. In one of the better-known longitudinal studies of New Year’s resolutions, fewer than half of participants were still succeeding six months later (Norcross et al., 2002).
The usual explanation is a failure of willpower.
We did not want it badly enough.
We lacked discipline.
We were not sufficiently motivated.
I would offer a different possibility, one that deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as consolation:
If willpower were enough, you probably would have changed long ago.
The more interesting question is not why you lack discipline.
It is why some part of you, year after year, declines to cooperate.
The Symptom Is Saying Something
Psychoanalytic work begins with a deceptively simple premise:
Nothing in our inner lives is entirely meaningless.
The habit you promise to stop every January is not merely a malfunction in the machinery. It is doing something. In many cases, it has been doing that job faithfully for years.
Late-night eating may be the only tenderness in a day that offers none.
Procrastination may protect you from a verdict. As long as the work remains unfinished, no one, including you, can determine whether your best was good enough.
Anger may be the only route through which aggression is permitted to leave a person who learned early that expressing anger carried too great a cost.
Excessive drinking may quiet a mind that never feels safe enough to rest.
Staying in a painful relationship may protect against the terror of being alone.
Seen in this way, the behavior is not simply a bad habit.
It is also a solution.
Often, it is an old solution, developed long ago by someone much younger who was doing the best they could with the emotional resources available to them.
A resolution declares war on the solution while leaving the need it serves untouched.
The need does not disappear because we made a promise.
It waits.
Then life applies pressure: an ordinary disappointment, a stressful week, an argument, a feeling of rejection, or a face that somehow resembles another face from long ago.
The old solution returns because nothing else has yet taken its place.
The Part of Us That Does Not Want to Change
There is another truth inside a failed resolution, and it can be harder to acknowledge:
We are rarely of one mind.
Consciously, we want to change.
Another part of us remains deeply attached to the pattern.
This is not perversity or self-sabotage in the simplistic sense. It is ambivalence, and ambivalence is a normal condition of human life.
The drink is also comfort.
The procrastination is also protection from judgment.
The anger is also, for one intense moment, a feeling of power or importance.
The unhealthy relationship is also familiarity, identity, or refuge from uncertainty.
The overwork is also a defense against loneliness.
Resolutions often fail because they are made by only one of our minds.
The January self who writes the list does not consult the self who will be alone with the refrigerator in March, terrified before a deadline in June, or reaching for a familiar coping strategy after an argument in October.
Real change becomes possible when both sides of the conflict are understood.
One part wants freedom.
Another part fears what freedom will require.
One part wants intimacy.
Another expects closeness to end in disappointment.
One part wants success.
Another fears exposure, envy, or the possibility of discovering one’s limitations.
The contradiction is not evidence of weakness.
It is the conflict itself.
Why Giving Up a Symptom Can Feel Like a Loss
Freud observed that people often resist the very changes they consciously seek.
This resistance is not necessarily stubbornness. A symptom may also be an attachment.
It may be linked to comfort, safety, loyalty, rebellion, identity, or protection. Giving it up can therefore involve more than stopping a behavior. It may require relinquishing something emotionally important.
That is why genuine change often includes grief.
To stop living in a familiar way is to say goodbye to it.
Even painful patterns can feel known and predictable. They may connect us to old relationships or preserve an early understanding of who we are.
The person who has always been the responsible one may not know who they are without being needed.
The person who avoids finishing may not know how to tolerate being evaluated.
The person who responds to hurt with anger may not yet know how to feel vulnerable without feeling humiliated.
A behavior cannot simply be removed when it is holding together an entire psychological arrangement.
Something else must become possible in its place.
Why Insight Alone Is Often Not Enough
It is tempting to conclude that change requires only insight:
Understand why you do it, and then stop.
Insight matters. Naming a pattern can create relief and choice.
But the deepest psychological arrangements were not formed alone, and they are rarely transformed through solitary understanding alone.
They developed within relationships.
They took shape through what could and could not be expressed in a particular family. Through which emotions were welcomed, which were ignored, and which were punished. Through the ways a child learned to secure love, avoid rejection, manage need, and protect against shame.
What forms in relationship tends to reveal itself in relationship.
This is why the therapeutic relationship is not merely the setting in which treatment occurs. In depth-oriented therapy, it becomes part of the treatment itself.
The expectations a person carries into relationships eventually emerge in the therapy.
A patient may expect criticism and hear it where none was intended.
They may minimize their needs while silently hoping the therapist will notice them.
They may fear dependency and withdraw precisely when the relationship begins to feel meaningful.
They may become angry when the therapist cannot perfectly understand them, then feel ashamed of needing to be understood at all.
These patterns are not interruptions to the work.
They are the work.
For once, they can be experienced, examined, and understood rather than automatically repeated.
Behavioral Change and Structural Change
There is a difference between changing a behavior and changing the internal structure that continually produces it.
Behavioral strategies can be useful. Planners, reminders, routines, accountability, and environmental changes often help. There is no virtue in ignoring practical tools.
But when the same pattern repeatedly returns despite sincere effort, the problem may be occurring at a deeper level.
Structural change involves a shift in the person’s internal world.
The inner critic becomes less absolute.
Feelings become more tolerable.
Needs can be acknowledged without shame.
Conflict no longer automatically signals abandonment.
Anger can be experienced without becoming destructive.
A person becomes less governed by expectations formed in relationships that ended years ago.
This kind of change is slower, but it tends to be more durable because the symptom is no longer being asked to perform the same psychological function.
There is meaningful evidence for this kind of treatment. In a review of the outcome literature, Shedler (2010) concluded that the effects of psychodynamic psychotherapy were comparable in magnitude to those of other established treatments and often continued to increase after therapy ended.
The internal work continues even after the appointments stop.
Change that lasts does not occur simply because someone grips the wheel more tightly.
It occurs because the frightened hand underneath has begun to relax.
A Better Question for January
Instead of asking:
What will I stop doing this year?
It may be more useful to ask:
What is this pattern doing for me?
What would I have to feel if I could no longer rely on it?
When does it appear?
What usually happens immediately before it?
Whom am I angry with, afraid of, or longing for in that moment?
What does this behavior help me avoid knowing?
Some answers may be immediately recognizable.
Others will be difficult to find alone.
That is not a failure of introspection. We all have blind spots, particularly around the defenses that have protected us for years.
Sometimes a second mind is needed: one trained to listen not only to what is said, but also to what is repeated, avoided, contradicted, or left out.
You Are Not Failing. The Pattern Has Not Yet Been Understood.
If you have made the same resolution for three years in a row, that is not proof of weakness.
It may be evidence that the pattern carries a message that has not yet been read.
Depth-oriented psychotherapy is the slow and careful reading of those messages: what the pattern protects, why it repeats, what it costs, and what it may be asking of you.
The goal is not to excuse the behavior or surrender to it.
The goal is to understand it well enough that it is no longer your only available solution.
If this is the year you would rather understand the pattern than fight it again, you can schedule a consultation.
References
Norcross, J. C., Mrykalo, M. S., & Blagys, M. D. (2002). Auld lang syne: Success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year’s resolvers and nonresolvers. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58(4), 397–405.
Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65(2), 98–109.