We recognize psychological change only after it has already occurred. This causes us to search retrospectively for the moment we “became different”. Perhaps that moment never existed, and the beginning of change might be a lie that we convinced ourselves to believe in.
Photo by T. Selin Erkan
There is rarely a clear moment when someone becomes more independent, develops new values, or shifts towards greater emotion regulation. Psychological change is often retrospectively attributed to a particular point in time, such as a major life event, a realization, a decision, a relationship, or a loss. However, this attribution may reflect change blindness rather than the actual onset of change (Greer, 2004). Psychological changes could take place for much longer than we were aware of. The moment we identify as the beginning may be the moment we noticed a difference, rather than the moment the change first emerged.
What exactly is psychological change? The psychological self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic system encompassing patterns of thoughts, emotions, self-perception, and interpretations of the world. This dynamic system develops through multiple iterative layers of experience (McAdams, 2013). Our assumptions change, our identity can develop, and our goals and priorities can shift based on our experiences. Even the way we conceptualize our relationship with ourselves can be revised over time. None of this necessarily means that a person becomes an entirely different individual following a particular event, like the ship of Theseus; our wholes are greater than the mere sum of our parts. Think of the story: when each part of the ship gets replaced over time, does that mean that it is not the ship anymore? The same applies to ourselves: do these small changes over time make us a different person? Psychological changes aren’t a dramatic transformation, but rather they’re much more subtle. These changes can be intuitively understood as the process of an infant learning how to walk and talk. Development does not occur through a single transformative moment. Small changes accumulate through repeated experience until they produce abilities that were previously absent.
Psychological transitions become particularly apparent during periods of development. During adolescence, for instance, people begin to develop self-awareness, more abstract ways of thinking, and the ability to understand other people’s perspectives. They also begin questioning beliefs and values that were previously indisputable; people can question why they hold such beliefs, examine their origins, assess their origin, and evaluate whether they still hold their relevance. A belief could be learned and acquired on your own, or picked up and mirrored from someone else. Similarly to how personalities can be temperamental and altered by social reinforcement, values and beliefs can also be adopted, evaluated, and rejected through analogous social mechanisms (Gallios, 2026). Similarly, an individual may internalize negative beliefs about their own abilities and later question whether those beliefs accurately reflect their capacities (DeMarree et al., 2011). These are the two processes through which a person can slowly build their identity up from outside forces and, from this outside feedback, doubt their own identity. They can learn to separate their own values from those of their parents, peers, and wider environment. Psychological development therefore involves both the self’s construction of an identity and the recognition of aspects of that identity that have been shaped by others (Cooley, 2017). Importantly, there is no obvious moment when this process begins. A child does not wake up and decide to be capable of abstract thinking. A teenager does not choose to question their values spontaneously on one given day. And a young adult may gradually become independent without being able to identify the first moment that their independence emerged. But psychological changes also do not stop once we become adults; relationships, university, independence, career, success, failure, loss, and many other ordinary experiences can continue to shape how we think, feel, and understand ourselves and the world we live in. Like the ceaseless nature of ecological evolution, the self does not develop to reach a finished state; growth has no ultimate goal to strive for (McAdams & Olson, 2009). As long as we continue to experience the world, the self continues to change from the new material that confronts it.
“On the other hand, stopping at this conclusion that awareness can only follow change can make it into a mere passive observation, while awareness can be much more than that.”
If psychological change is continuous, identifying when any particular transformation begins can become impossible. This difficulty may arise because psychological change begins before it is consciously accessible. We experience something, learn from it, adapt to it, and then become different because of it. A person might notice they’re no longer reacting as angrily to minor inconveniences as they used to. They might realize that they’re more comfortable with being on their own. They might realize that a goal they previously sought after doesn’t seem as important anymore. The realization can feel sudden, but the underlying process was not. Change processes can be interpreted like learning a skill: expertise emerges by repeated practice, feedback, and correction rather than through a simple moment of mastery. Similarly, psychological changes may involve gradually accumulating experiences and adaptations that eventually become noticeable to the individual (O’Brien, 2019; Jackson & Wright, 2024). We only recognize change by looking backwards. Thus, change and the awareness of change are distinct. We often recognize psychological change retrospectively: “I used to think this way, now I don’t”. The statement identifies a difference between two points in time, but it doesn’t identify the process that produced said difference. If awareness occurs only after some change has taken place, then awareness cannot be the beginning of that initial change. At most, it is the point at which the change becomes available to conscious reflection.
On the other hand, stopping at this conclusion that awareness can only follow change can make it into a mere passive observation, while awareness can be much more than that. When you realize that one of your core values is no longer that important, it can make you rethink your entire value set. Similarly, recognizing that we respond differently to situations can change the way we process our own emotional patterns. Awareness does not just reveal information about the self, it provides knowledge that guides subsequent changes in beliefs, behavior, and understanding (Hennessy et al., 2019). This creates a feedback loop between the self and its own awareness. We can observe ourselves, interpret what we observed, and use those interpretations to influence what happens next. Our observation of ourselves can be interpreted in many different ways to push our growth. This makes it difficult to draw a clean line between change and awareness. Change may precede awareness, but awareness can subsequently motivate further change; then awareness is just another step in the changing process.
Perhaps the difficulty lies in the assumption that psychological change is an event rather than a process. We tend to try to draw a border between the old self and the new self. This tendency may partly reflect the just-noticeable-difference concept (Bullough et al., 2023). Small changes may occur below the threshold at which they can be consciously detected. Only after sufficient change has crossed the threshold to become noticeable. Under this assumption, psychological changes are better represented as a shift in states, whereby each state is influenced by what came before it, without a necessary boundary distinguishing between the beginning of one self and the end of the other. No individual change needs to be dramatic for the accumulated result to be substantial. This accumulation explains why psychological change is so much easier to recognize retrospectively than while it’s happening. Individual changes may be too small to distinguish from the ordinary variation of everyday life. Only after enough accumulation do the differences become obvious.
“Awareness does not just reveal information about the self, it provides knowledge that guides subsequent changes in beliefs, behavior, and understanding.”
The idea of updating your beliefs about yourself based on the accumulation of experiential knowledge parallels the familiar statistical concept of Bayesian inferences. This theory involves updating beliefs as new evidence is incorporated alongside prior information (van de Schoot, 2021). As a child, you were exposed to feedback from people around you and how they perceived you. This can be understood as your baseline to compare any future experiences against. Later on in your life, as you change, the experiences pile up, and some can be aligned with what people thought about you as a child. But there can also be things that contradict the baseline information. As evidence accumulates, it can therefore lead to revisions in beliefs about the self. We don’t necessarily change our conclusion because of one single observation, but many pieces of evidence slowly accumulate and tip the scales on how strongly we believe something. One important point is not just that these experiences can accumulate, but they can change how you interpret the experiences that follow. Bayesian reasoning therefore depicts how our understanding of ourselves can change without a single experience being responsible for that change. Therefore, a realization about the self represents not the beginning of change, but the point at which accumulated evidence becomes sufficient to make that change consciously detectable. Consequently, our conscious understanding of ourselves can lag behind the psychological processes that are actually changing us.
There is no more obvious starting point in this cycle. Change can occur before awareness, and awareness can trigger further change. That can continue to create new experiences, which generate more evidence and eventually produce new awareness. Rather than a straight line, psychological development can be better represented by closer to a continuous feedback loop. The self is both the thing being changed and the thing observing the change. Maybe we don’t become a completely different person at all. We have just continuously, gradually become an updated version of ourselves day by day. The instant we change may not be hidden in the past, but it might not have existed in that sense at all?
