Dragons, Change & Receiving Love…But in a Nut-Shell
The truest cliché for psychotherapists “you have to want to change”, is true because unless a patient wants to change, the therapists job is rather difficult – to exert an ego on the patient to make them change against their will. It is necessary to change the patient because the patient is not mentally healthy. Mental health is the modern term for what in old money would have been called spiritual growth. It’s the same thing. Spiritual growth is what occurs when one’s spirit becomes more closely in touch with the universe (which is reality) which is the same as when a psychotherapist tries to cure a patient of delusions – excessive detachment from reality, (or the universe). To be mentally or spiritually healthy one must also be a loving person, for an unloving, selfish or cruel person is a person with the mental illness personality disorder. (In old terminology this may have been described as evil.) This illness is difficult to treat unless the patient wants to change. To become mentally and spiritually healthy one must perceive reality accurately and also be a loving person. One must change. (There are many people, of course, who are by and large healthy : loving people. Such people do not need to panic and make drastic changes, but there is certainly scope for improvement in all of us.)
So change is growth. It is the same thing. When a person says they don’t want to change, what they are actually saying is that they don’t want to grow. To say one does not wish to change shows that one wants to cling on to one’s old mental illnesses – delusion, and un-lovingness. Deluded and un-loving people are cause themselves to be weak. They will cause suffering to themselves and to others. Deluded people cannot accurately navigate life, as their perception does not show them the correct course of action for particular circumstances. So their lives are filled with many unnecessary problems – staying deluded means staying weak. Unloving people (with personality disorder) create problems for other people. They pass responsibility and blame on to others when they should not – and good people like Christ or Gandhi become persecuted by those with personality disorder. But unpleasant people are also hurting themselves. They fail repeatedly in relationships when their partners eventually get out – when they realise they are being abused. So the people with personality disorder bite the hands which feed them, until the hand is withdrawn. Nasty people lose repeatedly. So to succeed in love one has to be a loving healthy person.
Love is that which is given by one soul to another to create spiritual growth (mental health), and to create happiness; and love helps another soul to reach their full potential in life. But to say one does not wish to change means that one does not wish to grow, which means one cannot possibly receive love – as the purpose of love is to generate that growth. Therefore to receive love one has to want to change (/grow).