Change isn’t something that happens instantly without going through the change process. Here are the steps that we have to go through to make changes in our attitudes, actions, and reactions:

1. Change begins with the awareness that you are doing something that isn’t good. Unless you know you are doing something wrong, you won’t recognize that it needs to be changed.

2. Change requires the willingness to do something different. We often know what we do isn’t good or healthy, but for many reasons we want to keep doing it and aren’t willing to work on changing it. Change involves risk and even bad behavior has pay-offs. Many of our dysfunctional patterns are entrenched in us, and the result of old coping skills and complex relationship dynamics. You have to “hit a bottom” where you are truly sick and tired of being sick and tired and willing to do anything to change.

3. Change requires the ability to make the change. You have to have the emotional, relational, and spiritual maturity that is needed. If you don’t have what you need, you have to work on getting it. This may necessitate getting outside help through a support group, a mentor, a counselor, or books.

4. Change involves two steps forward and one step back. You don’t decide you want to change and then you instantly change and never fall back into the old behavior again; instead, you will find yourself doing the thing you don’t want to do, but recognizing it. The next time, you may do it but stop sooner. The next time, you will catch yourself before doing it, but it takes a whole lot of effort not to do it. The next time, you don’t do it and it takes less effort. This happens again and again until you have a new habitual or automatic response.

Entrenched behaviors will take longer to change, and the more the behavior is linked to dysfunctional relationship dynamics, the harder it will be to change. Don’t be hard on yourself when something happens and your old behavior resurfaces. Relationships trigger lots of reactions in us that we need to work on continuously and it takes time and practice to automatically react differently.

By Karla Downing

Relationship Devotional Prayer

 
God,

Make me aware of the attitudes, actions, and reactions that I need to change. Make me willing to change them. Give me the ability to change what I need to change and help me offer myself grace when I slip.

Relationship Devotional Challenge

• Identify an attitude, action, or reaction that you need to change.
• Ask yourself if you are willing to make a change. If you aren’t, ask God to make you willing to be willing.
• Ask God to help you make the changes you need to make and give yourself grace as you are learning a new habitual response.

Scripture Meditation

 
Romans 7:18-8:4

“For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. Although I desire to do what is right, I can’t do it. For I don’t do the good I want to do, but instead do the evil that I don’t want to do. But if I do what I don’t want to do, I am no longer the one who is doing it, but the sin that lives in me is doing it. So I find this to be a law: even when I want to do what is good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the Law of God in my inner being, but I see in my body a different law waging war with the law in my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin that exists in my body. What a miserable person I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So with my mind I serve the Law of God, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. So now there is no condemnation for those who are in union with Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the Law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: He sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to deal with sin. He condemned sin in the flesh so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not live by our flesh but by the Spirit” (International Standard Version).