The Psychology of Change: Understanding Activation

Lloyd Lalande, PhD

Activation is a familiar part of psychological life. We become activated when we feel criticised, rejected, threatened, ashamed, frustrated or misunderstood. Relationships can activate us. Memories can activate us. Sometimes a seemingly small event can produce a surprisingly strong response. We may become anxious, angry, distressed, defensive or withdrawn without fully understanding why.

Activation is often experienced as something that needs to be stopped. We want to calm down, feel better, solve the problem or move on. And naturally, much of what we do in everyday life is organised around reducing experiences that are uncomfortable. We distract ourselves, explain what happened, blame someone, seek reassurance, become busy, withdraw or try simply not to think about it.

Yet activation may have another significance. It can be understood as a form of psychological feedback. Something has been touched. The event itself may be important, but our response can also tell us something about what the event has encountered within us. In this sense, activation may be the beginning of contact with an experience, conflict or vulnerability that has not previously been fully accessible.

Activation Is Not Something Therapy Creates

Activation does not begin in therapy. It is already part of ordinary human experience. We encounter it in our relationships, our work, our families and our everyday interactions. We become activated because something matters to us, because something feels threatening, or because an experience encounters something unresolved within us.

Therapy may sometimes make activation more noticeable, but this is different from creating it. When the usual distractions and ways of avoiding experience are reduced, what is already present can become easier to recognise.

This distinction is important. Psychological change does not necessarily begin by producing something new. It may begin by becoming more aware of something that has been occurring all along.

Activation as Information

When we become activated, our first impulse is often to look outward. What did the other person do? Who was wrong? What needs to be fixed? These questions can be important. But there is another question that can sometimes be equally important: what has this experience touched in me?

The answer is not always immediately available. Activation can precede understanding. We may know that we are upset long before we know why we are so upset.

This is one reason activation can be psychologically valuable. It provides information about where our experience has become disturbed. A strong reaction may indicate that something more than the immediate situation is involved. The present event may have encountered an older expectation, fear, shame, unmet need or conflict.

Activation therefore does not necessarily tell us what another person has done. It can tell us that something within ourselves has been engaged.

Why Do We Move Away From It?

If activation can lead toward something psychologically important, why do we so often move away from it?

The answer may be quite simple: activation is uncomfortable. When an experience becomes difficult to tolerate, the natural response is often to seek relief. We do this in many ways, often without consciously deciding to do so. We suppress, distract, intellectualise, control, withdraw, become defensive or shift our attention elsewhere.

These responses are not necessarily pathological. They can be useful forms of self-protection. Problems can arise when avoiding an experience becomes the only way we know how to manage it.

The paradox is that the very strategies that protect us from difficult experience can also prevent us from discovering what the experience contains.

Protection and Psychological Organisation

Over time, people develop ways of managing experiences that have been difficult, threatening or unacceptable. We learn how to behave, what to show and what not to show. We learn how close to become to others, when to speak, when to remain silent and how to maintain a sense of safety.

These patterns can become deeply familiar. They may eventually feel less like strategies and more like who we are.

Yet underneath them there may remain experiences that have never been fully encountered. The person may know themselves primarily through the ways they have learned to manage activation rather than through direct contact with what is actually happening within them.

This creates an important distinction between managing experience and experiencing it. Psychological change may require both, but they are not the same thing.

Activation Is Not Necessarily the Problem

If activation is part of our psychological feedback system, then the goal cannot simply be to eliminate it.

To become less reactive can certainly be helpful. But there is a difference between becoming less overwhelmed by activation and becoming unable to experience it. If every uncomfortable feeling is immediately removed, suppressed or regulated away, something important may also be lost: the opportunity to discover what the experience is telling us.

This suggests a different way of thinking about psychological difficulty. The problem may not always be that we become activated. It may be that we cannot remain sufficiently present when activation occurs.

Change therefore does not necessarily require us to produce more activation, nor to get rid of it. It may require developing the capacity to remain with what is already there.

Turning Toward Experience

This principle has a long history in contemplative psychology. In the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, difficult experience is not simply something to be pushed away. Suffering can be approached with awareness and compassion rather than immediately resisted or escaped.

The point is not to seek suffering or deliberately make ourselves distressed. It is to develop a different relationship with experiences that are already present.

Instead of asking only, How can I make this feeling stop?, we can sometimes ask, Can I stay close enough to this experience to understand it?

That shift may be small, but psychologically it can be significant. Avoidance begins to give way to contact.

The Role of Relaxation

This is where relaxation has a deeper psychological significance.

Relaxation is often understood simply as the opposite of activation: if we are activated, we should become calm. But psychologically, relaxation can serve another function. It can reduce the urgency to escape from what is being experienced.

In this sense, relaxation does not necessarily mean that activation disappears. It can mean that we become sufficiently settled to experience activation without immediately acting on it, suppressing it or being overwhelmed by it.

Relaxation can therefore create the conditions for contact.

This is an important distinction. The purpose of relaxation is not always to make us feel good. Sometimes its value lies in making it possible to remain present with what does not yet feel good.

From Activation to Contact

Activation can be thought of as the beginning of a process rather than the end of one.

Something happens. We become activated. We notice that something is happening within us. If we can remain sufficiently present, awareness can deepen into contact. Through contact, an experience can become more fully felt and understood. And when an experience can be experienced differently, there may be an opportunity for something to change.

In this sense, the process might be understood simply as:

Activation → Awareness → Contact → Experience → Integration → Change

This is not a fixed sequence, nor does every activation lead to psychological change. But it provides a useful way of understanding why contact matters. Activation may bring us to the edge of an experience, while the capacity to remain present allows us to move further into it.

Activation as a Doorway

We often regard activation as evidence that something has gone wrong. Sometimes it is. But activation can also be understood as evidence that something has been touched.

What disturbs us can sometimes show us where we have something unresolved. What we repeatedly avoid may point toward something that has not yet been fully experienced. And what initially feels like an obstacle to psychological change may sometimes be the doorway through which change becomes possible.

The task, then, is not necessarily to increase activation or to eliminate it. It is to develop the capacity to meet it.

When we can approach activation with sufficient awareness, relaxation and openness, experience can become something other than a problem to escape. It can become an opportunity for contact.

And perhaps this is one of the fundamental conditions of psychological change: not that we learn how never to become activated, but that we gradually become more able to remain present when we are.