A Better Story Isn't Change

Over the years, I’ve been taught that growing in self-awareness comes down to three things. One is daily journaling, sitting down and bleeding your thoughts onto the page. The second is mindfulness, which I know intuitively works, but I’ve never managed a consistent practice. The third is simply talking to people.

That could be a therapist, a friend, or family. Or mentors, dead writers, poets, philosophers. For me, whenever I feel listless, I hear Hemingway telling me to get off my butt and follow the action. When I feel completely nihilistic, like nothing is worth living for, I hear Rumi singing his poems.

Now for journaling, I’ve been doing this for almost fifteen years, fairly consistently. I try to write down around three pages about both the practical things that happened the day before, but more importantly about what I felt and thought. Like when I came back from a family holiday in the Seychelles, all I could journal about was why I couldn’t be happy while surrounded by magnificent views and the people I love most. It’s like I can only be myself when I am by myself.

I’ve caught this pattern before, mid-dinner, mid-laugh, aware I was performing rather than present, and told myself to just relax into the moment. It didn’t work then either. Fifteen years of near-daily pages and the pattern hasn’t moved. So I keep asking myself: does journaling actually work, or does it just give unhappiness better prose?

There were two points where I sought professional help outright. The first was in my early forties. My business was about to go under, and I was working through personal issues on top of it. I started having panic attacks. I thought they were heart-related until my doctor told me it was my mind, not my heart.

I saw a psychiatrist and agreed to go on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. I took them for twelve months. To be honest, they worked. The attacks stopped. I calmed down. I made a point of coming off them on my own terms, and I did. So in this scenario, where the problem was acute, the treatment worked.

But when there’s something that’s not so acute, something low-key, mild unhappiness, listlessness, unworthiness, does therapy really work? This happened to me in my late forties. I saw a therapist for a couple of years. She unearthed a real truth: when I left the comforts of Ghana as a boy for a new country, England, and got bullied for being foreign, I learned to defend myself by attacking first.

Vulnerability stopped being an option. It was the same instinct that showed up decades later at a villa in the Seychelles, unable to be soft with the people I love most. True, I became more compassionate to myself, but did it change the behaviour? No. I’m still, today, fighting to bring out my softer side into the world.

I do believe that therapy is essential for people carrying real trauma, even though this essay isn’t testing that case. What I’m questioning is something narrower. For chronic, low-grade stuff, does insight-based work actually change behavior? My own fifteen years of evidence says not much.

Recently I came across James Hillman, a psychologist who, with the writer Michael Ventura, wrote a book in 1992 called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. His argument: early in the history of modern psychology, we decided the soul lives inside our skin. Our feelings are ours. Our childhood is ours. Our wounds belong to us privately, inwardly, and the work is always to go in and find them.

But what gets left out of the picture, he says, is the world itself, the actual, physical, civic world we live inside of. He’s saying the buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the streets are sick. We’ve obsessed over the inside and ignored what the outside is doing to us.

I think he’s onto something. Today the noise from outside is incessant. Algorithms on our personalized feeds serve us outrage before we’ve had coffee. That same curation logic extends to our social circles. We end up surrounded by peer groups that reflect our issues back at us rather than challenge them, and by people too invested in their own comfort to hold us accountable for our inaction.

In that serene setting in a therapist’s office or worse on a zoom call, we spend hours identifying how our inner child is sabotaging us, but we walk straight back out to an environment that doesn’t help us see how it’s doing so in the moment.

How can I become more intimate with my family? How can I stop being angry with the world that is hellbent on doing so on a daily basis?

Sometimes all the self-knowledge in the world won’t help me get out of bed and into action. What gets me there is something smaller, and sometimes more stubborn: a simple decision made in advance, with a consequence attached if I don’t follow through.

I think what’s missing from my journalling pages and probably therapy too is when we identify a pattern and understand how the inner child is stopping us from being our true selves, we don’t then ask the next question. What specifically are you willing to commit to doing differently this week? Who is going to know if you didn’t do it? What happens if you don’t?

So for me, I don’t think the fix is complicated, even if it’s uncomfortable. Therapy, coaching, journaling need a goal, not just a discovery. It needs someone or something holding you accountable to a specific action. It shouldn’t only be about another, better story of why we are the way we are.

And it needs to end each time with an accountability plan: here’s what I now understand, and here’s the one thing I want to do about it, before we even talk again, before I even write again in my journal.

Yes, I still journal. I still believe in understanding myself. But I also know now that insight without accountability is just a better story. And if the world outside the room is sick, the way Hillman says, the noise, the feeds, the institutions, that’s a bigger fight than one man with a journal can win. What I can do is smaller.

So here’s what I’m asking myself, and maybe you should ask yourself too: what’s the one thing you understood about yourself this week, and what did you actually do about it before the week was over?