Why is Change So Frightening?
Change is constant, layered, and always moving—held within the stillness of One Substance. Will we allow for it all to move?
By Jennifer Finch, M.A., LPC, SEP, NCC
July 31, 2025
Change is a weird phenomenon. What is it, exactly? We often say we want it, in the form of growth, transformation, progress, but when it arrives, it rarely matches the vision we had in mind. Changes come in all forms, big and small. Sometimes it’s too fast, too slow, too subtle, too severe. We often miss it until it is blatantly in front of us. We do all sorts of things in the namesake of change: we resist it, we grieve it, or we pretend it is not happening at all.
So, what are we actually looking for when we say we want things to change? If the majority of the time we don’t recognize it, or we are so preoccupied with what it should look like from only our point of view, what are we missing?
One thing is for certain, and that is that change is the only constant in life. We know that to be true. So why are we so concerned and threatened by it?
I have a hunch. Or maybe, a few.
In my decades as a therapist, spiritual teacher, and human-in-progress, I’ve come to understand that most change happens in the in-between, in the invisible, in the places where no one applauds. It arrives quietly through a shift in tone, a softening of the jaw, a breath held a moment longer before the reply.
It is rarely something you can point to, or pin down, but it’s something you begin to sense, in how you carry pain, in how you let go, or hold on, in how you stay, or how you run.
It is fleeting, impermanent, and always advancing in a forward direction, even if it is barely detectable in microscopic increments. It is often not even something we can visually see. So, if you are looking for a beautiful and brightly colored butterfly that was once a green and fuzzy caterpillar, you may be missing the real mystery of change.
It is the single absolute amid all of our uncertainties. It is an inescapable and powerful force that touches everything, an unstoppable flow that shapes everything—our bodies, our relationships, our understanding of our very selves, and our world around us. This is one hunch in why it frightens us, because change is closely interconnected with fear.
In fact, fear and change are old companions. They travel together often because change threatens the known self, the version of us we’ve spent years, maybe decades, carefully constructing. Even when that version has grown tight and airless, even if it’s suffocating, and it no longer fits, it’s familiar. And familiarity, no matter how constricting, feels safer than the great unknown.
Change moves only in one direction—forward. And yet, we cling to the past with a devotion so fierce, it rivals anything else alive. We wrap ourselves in old identities, old roles, old dynamics, convinced they are what make us real. Even when it hurts, even when it causes others pain.
What we fear is maybe not change, and the movement forward, but what we might have to leave behind to allow it all to change and move the way it is intended to. There is a cost to changing. We have to give up what we know.
Nearly thirty years of studying change, building a life, and developing a practice around cultivating stillness within myself, I started to notice even subtle changes. Sometimes they are beautiful; often, they are painful, and they indeed can be frightening. But what I most often observe in others is a resistance to change, especially when it goes against one’s plan, hopes, or desires.
I see this everywhere, and it is the one thing I deal with most readily in one-on-one psychotherapy sessions. People will avoid, resist, and deny at all costs the changes that are observable around them. They won’t look, won’t see, or flat out deny they are there. Or, worse, they will try to stop things from changing, which are, of course, futile attempts to try and hold time still, holding others hostage in a perfect moment. For the sake of “tradition” or a family photo. To recreate a scene, a snapshot in time that has been gone for a long, long while.
Perhaps the urge to resist change is not just a survival instinct, but a yearning for certainty, for something to grip onto while the rest of the world spins dizzy around us. Maybe, deep down, what we really crave is assurance that our favorite people, our best versions of ourselves, the pieces of the world that mean the most, will stay just the way we love them, at least long enough for us to make sense of it all.
Yet, this is as impossible as trying to keep the tide from rushing in. It is as impossible as convincing the moon to stop pulling at the ocean or the sun to shine less brightly. Still, we try, often with well-meaning desperation. We freeze moments in our mind, inscribe memories into journals, cling to rituals, morning coffees, bedtime stories, the same songs on the car ride to work as if repetition or tradition can somehow preserve the essence of now, and keep things from changing. Not too much, not too fast, not too far in the other direction away from our own agendas.
As much as we don’t want some things, or some people, to change, they always will. And I don’t use the word “always” lightly. Just to note, the old adage that “people don’t change” goes against the grain here. It will collapse under scrutiny when you stand in complete stillness long enough to see from that vantage point.
Everything is changing. Everyone is changing. All the time. What we’re often grieving is not that they haven’t changed, but from a still point, we see, clearly, achingly, they are changing. Just not in the direction we hoped. This is another hunch on why change frightens us. Because this single-handedly is one of the big heartbreaks of being human: watching someone change in ways that pull them further from the version we loved, or the one we still long to reach. To witness a loved one move in a direction that feels like loss, drifting further from a once cherished connection, is one of the most devastating and painful things we can bear.
Sometimes that change takes the shape of hardening, of closing in on oneself, like forgetting, or shrinking into a smaller version of oneself. Other times, it can look like expansion, but not the kind we long for. A swelling into defensiveness, aggression, distortion. A becoming that feels more like grief than change. Either way, they are no longer who they were, or who we believed them to be, or perhaps more truthfully, who we wanted and needed them to be.
And while we may ache to interrupt the spiral, to pull them back to some previous iteration we loved, we can’t. We can only witness the shift, name what it stirs in us, and keep choosing the integrity of our own path.
When we try to hold someone else still, freeze them in the version we once loved, or needed, we block movement not just in them, but in ourselves. When we resist seeing what is unfolding, we begin to thwart our own becoming. The act of clamping down on them, on time, on change itself, cuts us off from the fluidity and movement we so desperately need. We are more like the ocean than we think, and can we even comprehend trying to stop the ocean from moving? This is the same idea: we cannot welcome transformation while trying to arrest it in others.
It leaves us with a choiceless choice to allow everything to move. Everything. Because staying the same, or trying to keep everyone else in the same position, comes at a cost we don’t tally until later: unlived lives, unexplored possibilities, stagnation giving the illusion of a falsely perceived sense of safety.
And, it is all already moving anyway.
Another hunch is that we only embrace change when it conveniently aligns with our ideals, when it fits the vision we’ve carefully drawn for our lives. But all other forms of change terrify us. Why?
Because they confront us with an unbearable truth that we are not in control. It strips us of our comforting fictions, that if we plan well enough, work hard enough, care deeply enough, we can keep the people we love from slipping away, the systems we’ve built from unraveling, or the life we’ve curated from drifting off-course. It exposes, often cruelly, that the only real control we have is over how we meet the moment, not what the moment brings.
Recognizing that we were never steering the ship terrifies us, but that is also where the real work begins. We can surrender to movement. To allow everything to move through, to loosen our grip in reverence. Because when we stop fighting what is, we begin to discover something sturdier than control—an inner ground that does not flinch when the winds of change arrive.
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WE NEED CHANGE, EVEN WHEN IT TERRIFIES US
Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment: imagine a life with no change. This is immediately absurd, right? We soon recognize that, despite our dislike for certain changes, we cannot live without them. Those changes are what allow humans to evolve, to learn, to grow, to get through hard things, to become better, or not.
Imagine an unchanging world, how our days would become monotonous, blurring everything into sameness. How mundane, gray, predictable, joyless, and hallowed of meaning, our lives would be. Routine can be organizing, but it can also be a low creep into numbness that is not grounding. And so, we are called to welcome change; all of it, not just the kind we are rooting for. Of course, we can hope for the kind that excites or uplifts, the kind that asks something of us, but this will not always be the case.
To truly evolve, we must let go of the illusion that we can keep anyone from changing in a direction we don’t like. We must open our eyes, even when it stings. Only when we loosen our grip on the past, on how things should be, or who we think others ought to become, do we make room for our own form to soften, to stretch, to move as a unified whole, to reshape itself into something healthy, vibrant, and new, to change. Change works by yielding, by allowing movement, both within and without us.
Change doesn’t guarantee progress or comfort. In fact, the only thing it guarantees is movement. And motion, while inevitable, is not always upward or luminous, despite it still being change.
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TOO FAST, TOO SLOW, AND THE ILLUSION OF JUST RIGHT
So, by now, we should be getting the point that everything shifts and moves. And changes. Everything. Our blood. Our cells. Our life circumstances. Often in ways that leave us feeling like we are scrambling to catch up. When we try to halt movement, that’s when we suffer most—through broken connections, dissonance in the body, and an unraveling of what once held us together.
The way to repair and heal from suffering caused by resisting change is to attune to the one substance that remains constant through it all—what the Realization Process calls Fundamental Consciousness, what Quantum Physics calls the One Substance, but you may know it by another name.
Everything changes—our bodies, our relationships, our roles, our stories—but this one ineffable presence remains. It is an indescribable, immeasurable expanse of stillness—a spacious ground of being that holds all change, and yet itself is unchanged. It does not resist. It does not grip. It simply allows.
When we rest into that stillness, we gain a vantage point that can bear witness to the entire spectrum of movement. We begin to observe change with more clarity, even the parts we wish we could unsee. From here, we see that our discomfort isn’t only about the fact that things shift—but about how they shift, and how quickly.
In the ground of Fundamental Consciousness, we are not overwhelmed by change—we are held within it. We no longer scramble to catch up or control its pace. We begin to soften our resistance, to meet life as it is, and to be moved by it without losing ourselves.
To put this in context, let’s look at what happens when we’re not anchored in that still ground. When we’re caught in the turbulence without the stillness beneath us, change can feel violent. Personal.
We become frightened of change when it moves too fast, when it leaves a permanent mark we didn’t ask for, when it upends a story we were still trying to live inside, when it rewrites people we love into strangers.
That’s when we try to outrun it. When we resist, negotiate, or numb, we grab onto external hope and scramble for footholds—self-help books, podcasts, spiritual tools borrowed from someone else’s certainty—anything that might delay the reckoning. We train our brains to look away, to deny what is unfolding right in front of us, even when the signs are obvious to everyone else.
We age, moving through decades like they are fast blinks of our eyes. Our bodies transform; our skin wrinkles into stories, telling tales of laughter and sorrow. Our eyes deepen with wisdom gained, and innocence lost.
And all around us, seasons change, as Joni Mitchell once sang, and go round and round, on a carousel of time. Beginning and ending with little consultation and indifferent to our readiness. Summer gives way to winter. Leaves fall into crisp heaps, and trees stand barren and exposed, and so, too, must we.
Most of us are too busy to notice change. If we are moving at the same velocity, changes would be imperceivable. That feels comfortable, because we don’t have to bear witness to all that we don’t like. But, all of a sudden, when we do attune to stillness, and stop to look up, things feel dramatic. I started to notice this phenomenon when I was caretaking for my mother, who died from ovarian cancer. I was with her every day, so day-to-day changes didn’t appear dramatic or were barely noticeable to me. But when family and friends came to visit from out of town, they were stunned to notice how different she looked, how frail she had become. And I would respond with, “Today is actually a good day.” And others couldn’t see how that was possible.
We also notice change rushing in when Google Photos decides to send us a flash of pictures taken five or ten years ago. It is stunning how time flies, how young, skinny, and unwrinkled we looked.
So here we are in this conundrum. Change too slow feels like slow erosion, and change too fast feels like whiplash.
When it is too slow, it can feel maddening, as if nothing is happening at all. It can feel stagnant, heavy, and stuck. We are aware of time passing, because our calendar is taped to our brains, but we are unsure if we are actually moving. It can feel like we are shouting into the Grand Canyon and waiting years to hear our own echo.
But when change is fast, it unmoors us. It can overwhelm our system, and feel like the floor vanished mid-step. Our life story is burning through us before we’ve even learned the plot. And there are no handrails; we are just relying on our instincts to fire and hoping for them to have a place to land. Depending on whether this is the type of change we wanted or not, it can feel exhilarating or downright terrifying. Either way, it is a free fall into forward motion, ready or not.
So, we sit between the two. Too fast and too slow. And after years of studying change, professionally, spiritually, and through my own weather systems of loss, illness, marriage, and motherhood, I’ve discovered that both frighten us. We are creatures caught in this peculiar limbo: craving progress, but not speediness into chaos; craving stability, but not slow stagnation. We want metamorphosis with a user’s manual, and preferably one we wrote ourselves.
Nothing unnerves us more than watching someone change in a direction we wouldn’t have chosen for them. So, we try to curate transformation, not just ours, but theirs. We try to choreograph the speed of change, to keep change on a leash.
And honestly, how is that going for us? Can we laugh at that now? The sheer absurdity of trying to control a force as primal and ungovernable as change? We behave as if life were a group project, and we’re the only one who read the instructions and have skin in the game.
We are trying to say to Change: “Keep it quick enough to feel alive, but slow enough to stay intact.”
But real change isn’t consulting with us, taking our notes, and staying within the margins. Change ignores our preferences. Most change is on its own timeline, which unfortunately is not ours. It shows up in every moment, big or small. Grief, diagnosis, natural disasters, boredom, divorce, a stranger’s kindness, a song we forgot we loved. Sometimes it trickles in quietly like a gentle stream, other times it kicks the door off its hinges. Either way, it doesn’t flow with our agenda of how life is “supposed” to go, and it certainly doesn’t wait until we feel ready.
It moves, as it will. The only choice we really have is whether to brace against it or allow it to move through us, around us, maybe even in spite of us. But we can stand right in the middle of it, attuning to the stillness of Fundamental Consciousness—the spacious ground of our being, and not be shaken. That’s what we can get better at. No matter how things are changing, we are not raging against it; we are softening to it. Adapting, not controlling. Bending, not breaking.
To surrender to change is to admit we are not exempt from its reach, that we, too, are porous, spacious, in flux, moving through that one still substance holding it all. And that is what makes it so hard, and perhaps, at least to me, so holy.
Everything that I once thought would last forever, jobs, friendships, loved ones, carefully curated definitions of who I am, fell away anyway. Sometimes slowly, with gentle erosion. Sometimes overnight, with the violence of a car crash. I have sat in empty kitchens, stunned and adrift, as the life I had built dissolved around me. I have watched people I thought I could not live without become strangers, or more painfully, become strangers beside me, sharing the same moment in time but little else.
This is a final hunch on why change provokes fear. I have learned that all I hold dear and everyone I love will undoubtedly change. It is the nature of all things to change. And, there is no way to escape being separated from them.
There was a time when that reality made me rage and wilt and eventually collapse. Now, I have learned to watch these endings—and these beginnings—with an awe that sits somewhere between heartbreak and humility. Even the pain of it is proof that I am alive, dynamic, in motion.
To surrender to change, to allow for movement, is to begin to understand the lesson of impermanence. And the lesson of impermanence teaches us to embrace the forward motion of all things, including beginnings and endings. Including the slow fade of what once felt eternal. Including aging. Including death.
To move toward life is also to move toward loss, ill health, growing old, toward vulnerability, toward death, and toward the eventual letting go of everything we hold dear. These are not separate roads. The impermanent nature of change ensures they travel together, always.
We cannot escape growing old. We cannot escape moments of illness. We cannot escape death. And we cannot escape being separated from the ones we love. We must let it all move and change.
But we are not without ground.
When we attune to the unshakable stillness of the One Substance, of Fundamental Consciousness, we discover a stability that does not resist change but rests beneath it. A constancy that holds us even as everything shifts. In that depth, we’re not tossed by each wave—we’re anchored. So, we can let it all move and change. We can allow it, because we are connected to something that does not come and go. Something that’s never lost.
With stability within us and all around us, we can walk steadily with death, because death walks beside life, reminding us that every breath we take is borrowed, and further from our first one taken at birth. Every sunrise is both a beginning and a vanishing. The people we love, the stories we cling to, even the version of ourselves we woke up with this morning, all are already in motion, already changing, already slipping into the past.
When we understand the movement of change from a vantage point of stillness, we come to see that every scene of our life is a chance to create a different version than the days that came before. And that is anything but dull. It is a blank canvas, and you are the bright colors to brush onto it.
I want to be clear here that to allow change is not to passively accept every turn of fate. To attune to Fundamental Consciousness is not to adopt a Pollyanna attitude. It is to participate with life as it unfolds, awake, attuned, and willing to be remade. We say yes, not in blind surrender, but in conscious partnership. Even when it is the change we didn’t choose. Even when it breaks us open in the wrong places. Because something essential begins the moment we stop trying to hold everything still.
What I am stating quite bluntly at this point, is that we must allow everything to shift, to move, to change, even the kind we disagree with, because resisting it will slowly corrode us from the inside. Refusing it only deepens the fractures within us. Resistance calcifies and deadens the parts of us designed for movement, for growth, for breath, for ease in our joints, for response.
This is what I have witnessed in decades of frontline care, and these are my hunches on why change frightens us. Of course it will, but we have to go with the movement of life anyway.
So, I encourage you to say yes to change, even when it unsettles every part of you. Not because it is easy, kind, or always benevolent. And not only when it is aligned with the vision you cling to in how you wish your life to unfold.
Train in attuning to stillness, and let the mess and the mystery wash through us without clinging to any of it. That is when we become something different, something truer. Not better, but more fully formed, more whole. The self that emerges from that kind of surrender, the kind that bravely allows everything to move, isn’t diminished at all; it is clarified, coherent, and more whole. It is no longer trying to preserve an outdated shape.
This is not easy work. In fact, it is a quiet labor. We are not just enduring change of all things, we are shaping it, by allowing ourselves to move with it all. Not as victims of circumstance, but as authors of our own unfolding. And in that movement, we begin to glimpse a deeper freedom: the ability and power to evolve without losing any essential part of who we are.
This is the wisdom, allowing movement of everything requires softening, and opening. We cannot clamp down, brace ourselves, or grip others too tightly and still expect things to move. So, as we allow for change, as we let life flow through us without resistance, we cultivate the courage to love this world, while simultaneously, also letting it go.
That is as real as it gets. And that is downright terrifying. But it is also worth it, because that is where aliveness is.
To learn more about Fundamental Consciousness and how to attune to it, Check out my courses in the Realization Process—a map created by Dr. Judith Blackstone in nondual embodied wholeness. www.beherenowmindfulness.com Then go to: EVENTS
