Wanting to change someone

Nobody can completely match the ideal picture of your personality. Of course your personality then has come up with some solutions to deal with that, and a very popular one is: trying to change the other person in such a way that he now meets your desired criteria.

Now what happens when this idea comes to mind? It all begins with your personality judging or interpreting a situation, choice, expression - or lack of it. The result of this is a label: unwanted, inappropriate, or whatever rejection label you come up with. Now in itself this would not even be so bad, but this judgment is accompanied by a feeling as a result from it, and this feeling is a somehow unpleasant form of tension. The logic of your personality is: what is unwanted has to go, should change or in any other way be gotten rid of - otherwise the judgment 'unwanted' would be an empty shell in the first place! So your personality will continue to deal with this situation, now in a way to get rid of - or at least diminish - the tension he himself introduced. His preferred solution is likely to be the other person changing, since that would allow him to continue his judgment and uphold its own standards and values, only then the outcome is no longer unpleasant to him. The ways in which he will try to make the other person change, will vary from a thought only to looking, making a remark, a gesture or even fighting over it. Usually this does not really solve anything for him, or only so little. And this is the basis of the endless stream of judgments and expectations you instantly repeat whenever you meet this person or even think of him or hear or read about him, thus limiting yourself and this person to the sum of these interpretations and accompanying feelings.

What you see here, is that the judgment of your personality is the beginning of the tension you introduce within yourself. Next you want to get rid of this tension, and since it came about while you judged another person, your personality reasons that the solution should be found in changing the other person in such a way that your judgment can be pleasant again and you no longer have to face unpleasant feelings. Now when you read it spelled out like this, you can hardly overlook the fact that this is a rather weird concept. You have completely forgotten that other people are not in your life to meet your expectations, but to be them Selves, just like you. And it is through this being different that the other person can help you to trigger awareness of the underlying judging principles which are so characteristic to your personality, thus helping you to practice awareness and letting go.

Your alternative is to simply stop judging. And as long as you are not completely ready for that, you use the judgments your personality comes up with to become aware again and again of the above, until you notice that it starts to make sense to you and you can let go easily. On the site you can find a lot of columns that can help you with this process, and a convenient reminder for literally every situation is: I can see that my personality is judging here, however, I do not know what it really means.