Why Humans Don’t Change, And Scrooge Is The Santa I Still Believe In.

Do you believe that magic happens every Christmas Eve? Do you trust that there’s an old man who rewards your belief?

Well I’m 48, and I do.

My Father Christmas doesn’t live at the North Pole though. He’s from Victorian London and comes to life every Christmas on page, screen and stage around the Western world.

Yes, Scrooge is my Santa.

I’ve known I wanted to be a psychotherapist since around the time I first saw the Muppet Christmas Carol at the cinema. I was 16, taking my little sister along. We both loved it.

As my first Ebenezer, Michael Caine’s overnight transformation transfixed me. I still get goosebumps as Christmas morning dawns. 

There’s still time! It’s not too late!

And that’s the best Christmas present a pale weedy teen worried about the world could wish for.

I’d learned at school the difference between a tragedy and a comedy – in both the hero realises they’ve messed up, but in the comedy it’s not too late to change. In the tragedy they run out of time.

I wanted to believe people can change, that it’s not too late. So I set my sights on psychotherapy as a career.

Every Christmas since 1993 I have watched or read some version of this story.

Do you want to know something though? A secret I’ve learned from 20 years as a therapist?

People don’t change.

Don’t get me wrong – Therapy is the best medical treatment I know. I’ve helped ease more suffering through listening and talking to people in a room with a chair and a sofa than I ever have with a script pad or in a hospital.

But not by changing anyone. Not even by helping them to change.

Because we humans don’t change.

We adapt.

This is why New Year’s Resolutions and most self-help books don’t work. You’re trying to change, but the environment around you is the same. No nervous system on earth, from worms to birds to humans will change if nothing around it seems different.

Your nervous system needs to believe something around it has changed, to which it needs to adapt.

It needs a profound experience. A haunting, for example, although it doesn’t have to be that theatrical. Just powerful.

The powerful change most likely to get your brain and body to adapt – and therefore grow and heal – is relational. We’re social creatures, it’s all about who. Change the who, and we adapt.

Scrooge is haunted by people, not things; everything that hits home about A Christmas Carol is relational. He is pulled here and there across the night by his longings, regrets, desires and ultimately his hopes for love. The spirits change the who.

In one night, though? Really?

I’m often ask how long good therapy takes. I use a music lesson analogy, thinking of the nervous system as an instrument.

In a few hours online you can learn some facts about the instrument and how music works.

But to play music yourself, you need time in a room with another human.

And that is what my patients do weekly or fortnightly or monthly. They bring their instrument, we tune up and play together.

That is also what Scrooge’s three spirits do. In their presence he begins to practice an old instrument he’s kept locked away for most of his life. His body remembers how to love again.

Most adults regard Scrooge as a character of fantasy. That’s one heck of a haunting, that can get an old dog to learn new tricks in one night.

But I believe in the old dog. The ghosts just help him remember some old tricks he learned long ago.

He was loved well enough to begin with, such that he could finish school, work hard and well, and fall in love as a young man.

Such old tricks mean he still has a community to rekindle. His nephew and his clerk haven’t given up on him.

Some of my patients never got a chance to learn these tricks. They’ve never felt love, they have no community. Everyone has given up on them.

Well, not everyone.

These people need longer than a winter’s night. But my hope for them is real, because they have answered the door, and let the spirits in.

My patients are generally ready to leave therapy when they can conjure the therapy room with us both in it as needed, asking themselves “how would we approach this together?” and finding they can conjure a helpful answer.

I have then done myself out of a job, for now at least. They know they can come back for a tune-up any time they need to.

Of course, the job of getting better at life never ends for any of us. Tune-ups are usually needed.

But that is why after two decades as a therapist I can believe in a man who wakes up to himself on Christmas Day and every day after. Because Scrooge can always conjure that night and those spirits again.

I can believe they keep on haunting him in the best way, so he keeps on adapting, growing, healing.

Another Christmas, another Christmas Carol, another in-the-flesh sighting of the Father Christmas I’ll believe in for as many Christmases as I get.

There’s still time. It’s not too late.

#psychiatrying