Psychology of Change: From Contact to Change

Lloyd Lalande, PhD

What actually happens when a person changes—and why can change be so difficult?

Carl Rogers offered an influential answer. For Rogers, psychological change does not begin with being told what to think or how to behave. It begins when a person can safely come into greater contact with their own experience.

Rogers described this process within a therapeutic relationship characterised by empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard. When a person feels genuinely received, something begins to loosen. Experiences that have been distant, denied or held outside awareness can gradually come closer. Feelings become more immediate, personal meanings become clearer, and previously unquestioned ways of understanding oneself can begin to be recognised as constructions rather than facts.

But this movement toward experience is not necessarily easy. What has been kept out of awareness may have been kept there for a reason. Contact with inner experience can threaten established ways of understanding oneself, bringing feelings or conflicts that have previously been difficult to tolerate. Rogers described the early stages of change as a gradual movement from this distance toward increasingly immediate experiencing.

At the heart of this process is contact. When contact with inner experience is restricted, a person can become organised around established ways of thinking, feeling and responding. The past continues to shape the present, while experiences that might challenge that organisation remain difficult to reach. Change therefore involves more than acquiring new knowledge about oneself. It involves becoming able to experience something that could previously only be avoided, defended against or understood from a distance.

Something important happens when that contact becomes sufficiently direct. Rogers described a previously “stuck” feeling becoming immediate and flowing through its process. The person is no longer standing outside the experience, thinking about it or struggling against it. They are living it. He associated this with physiological loosening and with the disappearance of the incongruence between experience and awareness.

This suggests that psychological change is not simply a matter of gaining insight. Something can change because it is experienced differently. What was previously defended against can become contactable. What seemed to be a fixed truth about the self can become something that is recognised, felt and reconsidered. The person does not necessarily have to replace one idea of themselves with another. The old organisation can begin to loosen as experience becomes more directly available.

Rogers’ later stages describe this movement with increasing clarity. The person becomes more able to experience feelings in the present, to recognise and own them, and to hold personal constructs more loosely. Eventually, the self is experienced less as a fixed object and more as something lived in process.

This offers a useful way of thinking about psychological change: from defended distance toward contact, from fixed interpretation toward direct experience, and from a self organised around established patterns toward a greater capacity to meet experience as it unfolds.

An embodied understanding of change adds another dimension. Much of what is difficult to acknowledge psychologically may first be experienced through the body—as sensation, tension, inhibition, activation or a felt sense that is not yet fully understood. When experience can be approached directly rather than immediately defended against, it may no longer need to remain organised in the same way.

For GRMT, this provides an important foundation. The aim is not simply to help a person understand themselves differently, but to create conditions in which previously restricted experience can be contacted and experienced directly. Through respiration, mindfulness and sustained attention to present-moment experience, psychological change can become an embodied process.

In this sense, change is not something added to a person from outside. It can emerge when something that has been held away becomes available to experience—and can finally be met.