🌿 Day 4: Why Control, Willpower, and “Trying Harder” Don’t Heal
A Shift from Force to Capacity
In Day Three you learned about how acceptance—without giving up—can free you from old patterns and emotional stuckness. In Day four of our free 6-day holiday series learn why effort, control, and willpower don’t create emotional change—and how understanding capacity, not character, opens the door to healing.
After recognizing emotional immaturity and letting go of the hope that certain family members will meet you emotionally, many people ask a quiet question:
So what am I supposed to do now?
Often, the instinct is to try harder in different ways:
Explaining yourself more clearly
Setting firmer boundaries
Withdrawing to protect yourself
Managing others’ emotions
Or attempting to “stay calm” at all costs
While these strategies may help you survive family gatherings, they rarely lead to meaningful change. In fact, they often reinforce the very dynamics you’re trying to heal.
This is where Change-able by Dr. J. Stuart Ablon offers a powerful reframe—one that aligns with acceptance rather than contradicting it.
A Core Reframe: “People Do Well If They Can”
At the heart of Change-able is a deceptively simple idea:
People don’t do better because they want to.
They do better because they can.
When someone struggles in relationships—through shutdowns, defensiveness, rigidity, or volatility—it’s usually not a matter of bad intentions. It’s a matter of limited capacity.
This includes skills like:
Emotional regulation
Flexibility
Perspective-taking
Communication
Tolerance for discomfort
When these skills are underdeveloped, no amount of arguing, reasoning, or emotional effort will reliably create change.
This insight is especially important in families, where nervous systems are old, patterned, and easily triggered.
Why Traditional Strategies Backfire
When we rely on control-based strategies—lecturing, correcting, withdrawing, or “holding the line”—we often unintentionally:
Increase nervous system threat
Trigger power struggles
Reinforce old family roles
Miss the underlying skill gap
For adult children of emotionally immature parents, this can feel painfully familiar. You may notice yourself slipping back into the role-self we explored yesterday.
These roles formed early as survival strategies. Under stress—especially during the holidays—everyone’s nervous system defaults back to them.
Seen through the lens of Change-able, these moments aren’t moral failures. They’re signals that someone has hit a limit.
Acceptance First, Then Capacity
This is a crucial distinction:
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents teaches us to stop trying to get emotional connection where it isn’t possible.
Change-able helps us understand why force doesn’t work—and when collaboration might.
Acceptance comes first.
You don’t collaborate to create emotional depth that isn’t there.
But once expectations are realistic, you may find there is room for improvement in how recurring issues are handled—logistics, boundaries, routines, or shared spaces.
This is not about changing who someone is.
It’s about working with what they can do.
A New Question to Ask Yourself
Instead of:
“Why won’t they just change?”
Try asking:
“Is this a capacity issue—and if so, is collaboration possible here?”
Sometimes the answer is no.
And recognizing that is an act of self-respect.
Sometimes, though, the answer is maybe.
That’s where Day 5 begins.
Coming Up Next
🌿 Day 5: Plan B for the Holidays
In the final article of this series, we’ll explore Plan B, a practical, collaborative tool for navigating recurring family challenges when change is possible.
We’ll also name when collaboration isn’t realistic—and how to step back with clarity, boundaries, and self-respect.
Sometimes healing looks like problem-solving together.
Sometimes it looks like letting go.
Both are acts of emotional maturity.
