Meeting Fear of Change This Fall
Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so's you're sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you're well.
— Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters
I can't recall when I first read Bambara's words from The Salt Eaters, published in 1980. Yet, there are quotes that never leave me. In preparing for this topic, I remembered these words and wanted to start here first. I'm curious. How do you interpret Minnie Ransom's words, the healer, who asks this question?
For me, it might be seen in an exchange with my mother. I was crying in my room after virtually attending Kazu Haga's Gift Economy workshop held at the East Bay Meditation Center. There was a moment, or multiple moments, where he described his "village." In my bed I was grieving about the village I lost over the pandemic. The third spaces that permanently closed. The people I would see, laugh with, dance with, talk into the late nights with, look at the stars with. So many factors led to not having my "village" anymore.
My mom came… I might not have said this yet, but I'm a child of immigrants. My mom's from Mexico and while my mom has a softness about her, she also has a lot of fire. I essentially told my mom I miss community. Not the lip service, idealized, PC, purity/ideology-based, dogmatic, and cliché shit people are talking about these days. I miss my community. The ones who could be with the real, messy, time, effort, patience, risks, non-conforming nature of humans and encouraged individuality while being within the collective. My mother’s response without missing a beat: "Are you fighting for it?! Are you fighting for your community?!"
I had no answer. Because I wasn't.
It might’ve been that exact evening. All I knew was I felt called to be in Kazu Haga's next workshop Fierce Vulnerability: Healing, Spirit, and Action in Times of Collapse, in-person, in Oakland.
I wonder if there was learned helplessness, especially from these last couple of years. It's not possible, I told myself. I romanticized a past that wasn't always so romantic. So that evening I booked a flight and a hotel with points I didn't realize I had, probably sitting there for years.
This is what learned helplessness can look like. When we've experienced enough situations where our efforts didn't matter, where doors stayed closed no matter how hard we knocked, where change felt impossible, we stopped trying. We tell ourselves stories: It's not realistic. I can't afford it. It won't work out anyway. These aren't lazy thoughts. They're survival responses from a nervous system that learned, often correctly, that hoping hurt too much. That imagining, being creative, dreaming, trying and failing were more painful than not trying at all.
But here's what my mother understood that I had forgotten: learned helplessness isn't permanent truth. It's a pattern. And patterns can change.
I share this because we throw the word healing out a lot these days. I have to ask what does it mean to you? Not what a spiritual-artist-social justice-wellness-activist-therapist-influencer told you. What. Does. It. Mean. For…You?
I ask that because healing and change require much from us. Require effort from us. Require courage from us. Require discomfort from us. How can we not be uncomfortable? We're in our stretch zone! Shit is scary!
Nature as Teacher and Companion
Who knows what change you’re facing in this moment. Maybe you might be feeling like you're ready to sit with childhood wounds when previously you weren't, but now you're seeing them show up in all your relationships, in how you move through your life. There's something about the seasons, about fall, that asks us to reckon with change. The light shifts earlier each evening. Routines that felt fluid all summer suddenly require structure again. The air itself seems to whisper that nothing stays the same: not the leaves, not the temperature, not us.
I love this quote from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished."
We need not rush change nor healing. When change arrives, whether it's the predictable rhythm of seasonal transitions or the unexpected ruptures in our relationships, careers, or sense of self, many of us freeze, panic, withdraw. We know intellectually that change is constant. We might even believe it's necessary. But somewhere in our bodies, in the tightness of our chest or the knot in our stomach, we resist.
If you've been feeling that resistance lately, I'm right there with you. Fall often amplifies what's already stirring beneath the surface: the awareness that something needs to shift, coupled with the fear of what that shift might cost us. But, can we remember that we're not alone? That not only are other humans going through this too, but nature can be our teacher and companion.
Change Can Feel So Hard
Predictability and familiarity can make us feel safe. This is why you might find yourself staying in patterns that no longer serve you. It's not weakness. It's your brain trying to protect you from perceived threat that comes with change. The familiar, even when painful, can feel safer than the uncertain.
I'm in my lifelong journey of healing, just a different chapter, I’m in the process of reclaiming my attention. Reading helps motivate me and so far I've finished Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. I'm just getting started as I'm mainly curious and trying to change some of my behaviors and relationship to technology while still keeping its benefits, such as the opportunity to connect with you in internet land. I know this is all imperfect. So, I look forward to sharing about this journey in my field notes.
But for now, I brought this up because this chapter on reclaiming my attention, as I struggle with some obsessions and compulsions of my own, has been painful, extremely uncomfortable, and unearthed a lot around feelings associated with loneliness, pain, boredom, misplaced curiosity, anxiety, hypervigilance, and other experiences of the human existence. So, yea…you’re not alone.
When We Forget Our Own Agency
There's a concept in psychology called learned helplessness, a term I used earlier. It describes what happens when we experience repeated situations where our actions didn’t seem to matter, where no matter what we did, the outcome stayed the same. Eventually, we stopped trying. Even when circumstances changed. Even when we actually do have power.
This can show up in subtle ways during times of transition:
Waiting for permission or the "right time" instead of choosing
Believing change requires perfection or certainty before beginning
Telling ourselves "it's just how I am" about patterns we actually can shift
Romanticizing the past while dismissing the possibility of a different future
The cruelest part of learned helplessness is that it often outlives the circumstances that created it. You might have genuinely been powerless as a child, for instance. You might’ve tried everything to make a relationship work and nothing changed. You might’ve applied for opportunities that never materialized. Those experiences were real.
And the past doesn't have to dictate the present. My mother's question, "Are you fighting for it?" wasn't dismissive of my grief. It was a reminder that I had more agency than I was claiming. That my powerlessness wasn't a permanent condition but a temporary forgetting.
And here's something else I've learned, particularly working with first-generation clients who carry the weight of migration stories, displacement, and survival: we also inherit agency, fight, and heart. Not just trauma. Not just wounds. But strength, creativity, tenacity, dreams. The same lineages that carry pain also carry profound gifts that help us see through the caves and tunnels of life.
Possible Signs of Fear of Change
Fear of change doesn't always announce itself clearly. Sometimes it shows up as:
Procrastination and avoidance: That difficult conversation you keep postponing. The career decision you're "not quite ready" to make. The therapy you know you need but haven't scheduled yet.
Ruminating without action: Analyzing the situation from every angle, researching endlessly, planning meticulously, but never actually taking the first step. The thinking becomes a way to stay suspended between the old and the new.
Fear of losing community you've outgrown: The terror of releasing relationships or spaces that no longer fit who you're becoming. The grief of growing beyond what once sustained you.
Fear of judgment: will I be accepted? The vulnerability of showing who you really are when you've spent years performing a version of yourself that felt safer.
Fawning patterns formulated from childhood wounds: If you didn't have a voice, if you witnessed and/or experienced abuse, silencing yourself and conforming became how you survived your environment. Being different, being who you are. You learned that was dangerous.
Alice Walker captures the tumultuous journey change can bring in the following passage from Living by the Word:
In fact some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize that growth is what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled upon a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before…often the feeling is anything but pleasant.
So yes, it makes sense that there’s fear. Here's what's important to understand: just like I mentioned in part 1 of my burnout series, these responses aren't personal failures. They're intelligent attempts by our system to manage overwhelm. The question isn't whether you're "strong enough" to handle change. It's whether you have the support and tools to move through it in a way that feels sustainable.
Practical Strategies for being with Transitions
Practice naming and being with what you're feeling: This might sound simple, but it can be illuminating. Most of us move through transitions so quickly that we never actually process them. Taking moments throughout our day to pause and ask: What am I actually feeling right now? Not what you think you should feel, but what's actually present in your body can help us get curious about our internal experiences, and therefore respond with what we may need.
Experiment with practices that help support your nervous system: spending time in nature, playing, connecting with trusted and supportive loved ones, watching a comfort show. These aren't distractions. They're ways of creating enough safety and capacity for your system to tolerate uncertainty and be present with life.
Connect with the parts of you that are scared: Often, our resistance to change comes from younger parts of ourselves that learned change meant danger, loss, or abandonment. Rather than pushing through that fear, can you turn toward it with curiosity? What does this scared part need to feel safe enough to take this next step?
Find the continuity within the change. While everything shifts, something essential in you remains. Your values, your capacity for love, your creativity. These don't disappear when circumstances change. Connecting with what endures can help you tolerate with what's transforming.
Recognize the differences between coping and transforming: Coping strategies help you manage symptoms. Transformation addresses the deeper patterns. Both have their place, but if you find yourself relying only on coping mechanisms, if you're white-knuckling your way through transitions without actually integrating them, it might be time to go deeper.
How Therapy Can Help
Therapeutic work during times of change isn't solely about developing better coping strategies (though those can be useful). It's about creating a space where you can actually be with the fear, the grief, the uncertainty, and discover that you not only have the capacity to hold it, but also experience creativity, openness, strength, and more.
In depth-oriented therapy, we don't just talk about your patterns. We explore them in real-time. We track what happens in your body when you imagine the change you're avoiding. We connect with the parts of you that learned to resist transformation as a way of staying safe. We process the childhood experiences that taught you change meant loss.
We explore: Where did you learn that your voice doesn't matter? When did you decide that trying was more dangerous than staying stuck? What would it mean to discover you have more agency and power than you've been allowing yourself to believe?
This isn't about positive thinking or willing yourself to change. It's about updating old survival strategies that once protected you but now keep you small.
And here's where the work gets really interesting, and deeply personal. Because I practice spiritually integrated psychotherapy when aligned, we don't just focus on what's “broken.” We bring in the whole of who you are: your culture, your lineage, your ancestral wisdom…the spiritual resources you might’ve forgotten when things feel overwhelming and scary.
I work with many clients who carry the weight of living in bodies, identities, and lineages this world has tried to diminish and/or eliminate: first-generation immigrants and first-generation Americans, Black and Indigenous communities, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latine, multiracial folks, queer and trans people, neurodivergent kin, those whose ancestors navigated impossible circumstances and survived whether through stories, presence, art, resistance, language, creativity, culture, food, joy, pain, laughter…they survived through you. Because you are here reading this.
So yes, we absolutely acknowledge intergenerational trauma and systemic violence and harm. And we also honor intergenerational gifts. The immense strength that allowed your mother and father to cross borders, your uncle to protect his queerness. The creativity that helped your parents build something from nothing. The tenacity that runs through your bloodline. The dreams that were passed down even when circumstances tried to crush them.
Throughout our work together, I'm listening for your values, your beliefs, your strengths, even when you don't name them directly. I check in. I reflect back what I'm hearing. I remind you of what you might’ve forgotten about yourself. Because sometimes we need someone to bear witness to our power, our aliveness, our brilliance before we can see it ourselves.
We don't have to fear the dark, which we might equate to change. We can see it as an opportunity. We can learn how to see and move through darkness as those who came before us did. Many of our ancestors navigated uncertainty. They survived what felt unsurvivable. They adapted when adaptation seemed impossible.
That capacity lives in you, too.
This work is experiential, not just intellectual. It's about fundamentally shifting your relationship with uncertainty, so that change feels less like a threat and more like an invitation to become more fully yourself. It's about discovering that you're not starting from scratch.
You're building on foundations laid by generations of survivors, dreamers, and revolutionaries.
For many people navigating transitions, whether seasonal, relational, professional, or existential, therapy can become one of many containers that makes transformation possible. Not because a therapist has all the answers, but because having a grounded, authentic presence bearing witness to your process can create a safe enough container your nervous system needs to take risks beyond the therapeutic room. And sometimes, because that presence can help you remember the gifts and strengths you've been carrying all along.
An Invitation
If you're reading this and recognizing yourself, if you're tired of managing your life and ready to actually live it, if you sense that your old patterns aren't working anymore but you don't know how to change them, if you're standing on the edge of a transition that terrifies and compels you in equal measure, know that you don't have to navigate this alone.
Change asks something of us. It asks us to release our grip on who we've been in order to become who we're growing into. It asks us to trust the uncertainty, to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing, to believe that wholeness is worth its weight.
This fall, as the world around you demonstrates that transformation is possible, what if you allowed yourself to change too? Not because you have to. Not because you should. But because you can. Because you have agency and power you might’ve forgotten or lost touch with. Because wholeness, for all its weight, is also being beautifully, excruciatingly, and wonderfully…alive…
P.S.
I wanted to include an image of my mom in this post so her essence could be present here. Instead, I asked her about her favorite song. She shared "A Mi Manera" sung by Kalimba, a song about living life on your own terms, embracing both the laughter and tears, the victories and losses, and continuing forward in your own way.
Tal vez lloré o tal vez reí/ Tal vez gané o tal vez perdí/ Ahora sé que fui feliz/ Que si lloré, también amé/ Puedo seguir hasta el final/ A mi manera. (Maybe I cried or maybe I laughed/ Maybe I won or maybe I lost/ Now I know I was happy/ That if I cried, I also loved/ I can keep going until the end/ In my own way.) There's something about that spirit, the courage to keep going a mi manera, in my own way, that feels like the heart of what I'm inviting us toward.
Well dear reader, we’ve landed. Ready to explore how therapy can support you through this transition? I usually say I work with artists, creative professionals, deep thinkers, and emotionally sensitive people who want to discover who they are, with the fear, with the uncertainty, with all of it, and learn how to live in their own way.
What I mean by that is anyone who has a humble devotion to what matters, a heart that feels everything and feels deeply, people who find meaning in craft and beauty, and a courage that lives in tenderness.
If that’s you and you're curious about working together, schedule a consultation and let's talk about what becomes possible when you move from resisting change to meeting change...with presence.
Please take care. :)
