The Psychology of Change: Relaxation and Contact

Lloyd Lalande, PhD

Psychological change requires contact with experience, but contact is not always easy. Much of what we experience is filtered, inhibited or held at a distance through ways of responding that have developed over time. We may know something intellectually while remaining largely disconnected from it experientially. We can talk about ourselves, understand our history and recognise our patterns, yet still find that something deeper remains untouched.

One of the conditions that makes contact possible is relaxation. Not relaxation as simply becoming calm or reducing arousal, but a letting go of the effort involved in maintaining our usual ways of holding experience at bay. As that effort softens, experience can become more available. Sensations, emotions, impulses and meanings that were previously difficult to approach can begin to emerge into awareness.

This helps explain something important about the therapeutic process. Change does not necessarily occur because we deliberately try to change ourselves. Often, change begins when we become sufficiently able to experience what is already there. In this sense, relaxation is not an escape from difficult experience. It can be the condition that allows us to remain in contact with it without immediately defending against it, controlling it or moving away from it.

This is consistent with Carl Rogers’ understanding of psychological development. When people experience sufficient acceptance and safety, they can become increasingly open to their own experience. What was previously defended against can become more fully experienced, differentiated and integrated. Change can then emerge from the person’s increasing capacity to be in contact with themselves, rather than being imposed from outside.

In GRMT, this principle is approached through what can be described as radical relaxation. The intention is not simply to relax the body or produce a pleasant state. It is to progressively release the inhibition that can prevent direct contact with experience. Breathing may increase activation rather than reduce it, but the person is encouraged to relax into what arises rather than resist, suppress or act it out. In this way, relaxation and activation are not opposites. Relaxation makes it possible to remain present with activation.

The significance of radical relaxation, therefore, is not that it makes change happen directly. Rather, it creates conditions in which contact becomes possible. And when experience can be contacted more fully, something that was previously held outside awareness can begin to be experienced differently. Psychological change can then emerge not from forcing something to happen, but from allowing what is already present to become more fully known.