Conversion & the Psychology of Change

by Art Bennett, Laraine Bennett

The following are all instances of change. What do they have in common?

• A man goes to a psychotherapist hoping to be cured of his depression. The therapist says that he does indeed have a lot to be depressed about; in fact, he should schedule four hours each day to devote just to being sad. The man laughs and says, "Well, it's not that bad."

• A judge travels into the desert to visit a famous hermit. On the way he meets an old man of whom he asks directions. The man tells the judge not to bother going, for the so-called holy monk is a fool, and all the talk of his saintliness is fraudulent The judge returns home, disappointed, but grateful to have saved himself a trip to no purpose. Later he learns that the old man was the hermit he had been seeking. The judge is greatly edified.

• An alcoholic is told that her weakness for drink is an incurable disease, that willpower won't avail her, and that she will be an alcoholic for the rest of her life with no hope of ever being anything else. She never takes another drink.

• A man who yearns for conversion to religious faith and struggles endlessly to believe in God is told to give up the struggle because no one can be converted by his own wish for it but only through the grace of God. This realization initiates the man's conversion.

Shift of viewpoint, mental breakthrough, epiphany, or quantum leap.... What are we to call such events? Perhaps the most accurate and useful conceptualization of such enlightenments is that offered in the book Change (by Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch, 1974), the concept of first-order change versus second-order change. These psychotherapists illustrate the difference with a striking image:

A person having a nightmare can do many things in his dream — run, hide, fight, scream, jump off a cliff, etc. — but no change from any one of these behaviors to another would ever terminate the nightmare. The one way out of a dream involves a change from dreaming to waking. Waking, obviously, is no longer a part of the dream, but a change to an altogether different state.

In all of the stories above there is a change like the change from dreaming to waking, a movement that dissolves the "logic" of the first order and reveals a second order of reality — hence the concept of second-order change. Our mixture of religious and nonreligious vignettes in the examples above is intentional, for our purpose here is to explore the connection between religious conversion and the psychology of change.

Psychology? Psychotherapy? What have they to do with religious conversion, you might ask. Isn't conversion about giving up oneself, looking outside oneself, submitting oneself to God? And isn't modern psychology averitable swamp of self-concern? Aren't psychologists to blame for keeping us stuck on ourselves, telling us endlessly to explore ourselves, express ourselves, and fulfill ourselves, to create our own reality, release our inner child, embrace our shadow?

In fact, there is much we can learn from psychology. Understanding the psychology of change may help us believers to become more effective apostles and to win more souls for Christ. Applying the concept of second-order change, we can see that conversion is itself a second-order change, for the difference between natural life and supernatural life is like the difference between dreaming and being awake. With the aid of this concept, we can grasp that when we speak the language of faith, we are talking the language of second-order change to a world that is usually stuck selecting among various first-order alternatives. And when we look at our Lord and Master, we see that His teaching and conversation exemplified this concept. The world came to Him with first-order dilemmas, and He exploded them with second-order answers. So the paradoxical interventions recounted by psychotherapists like the authors of Change are worth our study if we hope to represent Christ in this world.

Consider the insomniac who seeks psychotherapy. He has "tried everything" to get to sleep — reading, progressive relaxation, pills — but the harder he tries to sleep, the more anxious he becomes. The therapist enjoins him to stop trying to fall asleep: He is to lie in bed and not to close his eyes at all. Struggling to keep his eyes open, the exhausted man falls asleep. Second-order change has been effected.

Or take the man nearly paralyzed by his fear that while driving his car he would run over a pedestrian. He sought psychotherapy to rid himself of this "irrational" fear. The therapist soberly informed him that his fear was quite justified and that what he should do was to pay the strictest attention to it. The man was enjoined to stop his car at each comer and to check thoroughly around and under the car and on the pavement for any injured pedestrians. The patient found this to be "crazy" and shortly abandoned his fear.

Depression, despair, and discouragement frequently bring clients to psychotherapists. The depressed person has been advised by well-meaning people that he has no real reason to be depressed, or that he should find a cheerier outlook, or take more time for himself, or count his blessings, or snap out of it. But all of these are first-order counsels. The psychotherapist may make a refreshingly different response, acknowledging that the client has good reason to be depressed, and may thus initiate a movement toward second-order insight. As novelist Walker Percy remarked acerbically in Lost in the Cosmos, "You'd be deranged if you weren't depressed. Consider the only adults who are never depressed: chuckleheads, California surfers, and fundamentalist Christians who believe they have had a personal encounter with Jesus and are saved once and for all."

Percy is harsh. But who would disagree that one's own notion of a personal encounter with Jesus should be checked against the indubitable personal encounters with Jesus recorded in the Gospels? An encounter with Jesus turns out to be often paradoxical and surprising, uncomfortable in the moment yet ultimately curative. For instance, Simon Peter rebuked Jesus for saying that He must go to Jerusalem and be killed, and Peter began hatching first-order plans to prevent such a thing. Jesus was harsh: "Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do." But in a gentler tone He went on to show that, while He understands the first-order project of saving one's life, there is no first-order way in which to accomplish it. "Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Mt. 16:21-28).

In John 9:1-4 the disciples present first-order logic to Jesus. "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus shows them a second order of reality: "Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him." Then Jesus restores the man's sight. The Pharisees give the cured man a thorough first-order examination in which they exhibit their own blindness to his second-order change. After the Pharisees throw the man out, Jesus finds him and asks, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" The poor fellow replies honestly that he doesn't know who that is. Jesus says, "It is I." The man says, "I do believe." The story ends with the Pharisees still muttering, still justifying themselves. Dismissing the eye-opening divine therapy of Jesus, they are left mulling myopically their first-order alternatives while the man born blind goes off with a new view of reality.

Our Lord, encountering the Samaritan woman at the village well, reframed her mundane need for water as a higher-order search for the Living Water (Jn. 4:7-15). The enmity between Samaritan and Jew was an established and bitter fact of life, a fact of which the woman reminded Jesus rather sharply: "How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?" Jesus does not tell her she is wrong; indeed, in the first order of reality she is correct. Instead he tells her that if she knew who was asking her for a drink, she would ask him for the water that quenches thirst once and for all. She is intrigued, and a conversation develops. Beneath each of her replies and each of her expostulations, Jesus discerns a possibility of second-order change, and He leads the conversation gently but firmly toward it. The woman does become open to Him and His truth, and by the end of the story she is telling her neighbors that she thinks she has met the Messiah.

The Pharisee Nicodemus (Jn. 3:1-10) is a classic instance of someone stuck in the first order, unable (and perhaps unwilling) to see any other options. When Jesus tells him that one must be born anew in order to see the Kingdom of God, Nicodemus replies, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" On the first order, the natural order of common sense, not only is there no way to be born again, but the very notion is absurd. But Jesus describes how rebirth can occur: through water and the Spirit. Puzzled still, Nicodemus asks, "How can this be?" Jesus sounds somewhat exasperated: "Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand this?" How can he be a teacher if he is not aware of the supernatural within the natural —if he is not able to shift from the first order to the second order? He — and we — must learn to live sacramentally, to experience the world as infused with grace, with the life-giving breath of the Holy Spirit. But Nicodemus at that moment cannot transcend the first order — he "hears the sound of" the Spirit but does not know whence it comes or whither it goes.

Jesus the healer and teacher saw what lay beneath the surface of the problems presented to Him. In the same way, a psychotherapist must go past first-order problems to stimulate second-order change. In the same way, a preacher of Christianity must see past surface disagreements or difficulties in order to guide a possible convert to the second-order change to a life of faith.

Rational apologetics can be useful in effecting conversion. But it will be useful only with someone whose rational arguments express his true motivations, not with someone whose reasoned pronouncements do not express his real situation. Most of us can employ reason and logic, can debate and rebut, can ask questions that seem to us penetrating or even unanswerable. But even while debating competently we may be far from revealing our true internal situation; we may be avoiding some deeper issue — whether from guile or fear or in simple unawareness. We once spent many hours arguing the necessity and importance of the Magisterium of the Church with a man who was a doctoral student of theology. No progress was made until at last the conversation brought out that the man's true difficulty was not with the existence of the Magisterium but with the divinity of Christ. We had been trying to effect a first-order change with first-order means — more and better arguments for the Magisterium, more clinching quotations from Scripture — when the real need was for a second-order change: He needed to see Christ as God.

People are quite capable of providing reasons for an unwillingness to change. But their claim that they are open-minded and willing to consider arguments may amount only to a pretense (conscious or unconscious). In Mark's eleventh chapter Jesus was causing a ruckus in Jerusalem: Welcomed with Hosannas by the crowd. He went about blasting fig trees and thrashing moneychangers out of the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the elders asked Him by what authority He did these things. Jesus replied that He would answer their question if they would answer His. "Was John's baptism of heavenly or of human origin?" They mulled the unpalatable alternatives of answering yea or nay, and answered, "We don't know." Well, said Jesus, "neither shall I tell you by what authority I do these things" (Mk. 11:27-33). They had ostensibly come inquiring of Him, ready to listen, but their minds were essentially closed, unready to break their old habits of thought.

Rational apologetics has a long and honorable tradition, but modern man is not impressed with — or not trained to handle — traditional arguments for the existence of God and the divinity of Jesus. As Bishop Fulton Sheen wrote in his essay "Instructing Converts," modern man must come to God through his "disordered, frustrated, complicated, confused, bewildered self," because we are no longer prepared, as our forefathers once were, "to accept the sacramental character of the universe."

Indirection, suggestion, paradox, and surprise are tools that we would recommend to the modern evangelist. Walker Percy made sly use of implication, humor, and — as he put it — "every trick in the bag" to impart a Catholic perspective in his works of fiction. We, too, must be aware that presenting traditional apologetics to nontraditional modern man might be imprudent and might even mean swift alienation. Grace is, of course, the ultimate source of any conversion. God is the source of all grace, but in His generosity He allows us to participate, to be co-converters. And a few good strategies couldn't hurt, particularly strategies based on a sound understanding of the psychology of change.

"Take what the patient is bringing to you," is a fundamental starting point in most psychotherapy since Milton Erickson. We recommend this same basic attitude for any Christian addressing a potential or would-be convert. Try to avoid viewing the person as a reluctant student or an outright opponent. First, learn the person's language and see things from his point of view. Only then, by reframing the situation or by finding the incongruity in it, might you be able to suggest a shift to a second order of reality. Consider an essential area of body-and-soul where conversion is badly needed today, the realm of sex. How can young folk tempted by pre-marital sex come to an understanding that true freedom only exists in the service of the good, and that true love never uses the beloved as an object? One can help them transcend the first-order realm of sexual trial-and-error by encouraging them to see their actions from another perspective: "Do you want to teach your future husband or wife that it is perfectly acceptable to have sex outside of marriage?"

One might also appeal to the idealism of young adults and challenge them by saying, "The problem with cohabitation is that it is such a consumerist and impersonal response to a feeling of love. You treat the other person like a new pair of shoes or a new car on a test drive. Real love doesn't treat someone like an object."

To someone using artificial birth control, you might say, "Well, I would like to recommend Natural Family Planning to you, but I am reluctant to do so. NFP would require you and your spouse to talk with each other frequently and very openly about sex, and you might not be ready to do that at this stage of your relationship."

And when a couple fears that the romantic attraction in their marriage is fading, it may be time not for discouragement but for a shift in viewpoint. They can consider the advice that a priest gave to a confessing soul who said that he was having an arid period of prayer. "Great," said the priest. "Now you finally get to show God your will and desire to love Him." Seeming dead ends in the first order can be steps up to a second order where greater clarity and achievement are possible. Fading romance may really be a blossoming opportunity for deeper love.

A shift in viewpoint can end a pointless conversation and begin a new and pointed one. In these days of ecumenism, committed Catholics meet committed Protestants far more often than would once have been the case. Predictable conflicts and misunderstanding can ensue even when greater mutual understanding is the stated goal. Listening well and reframing are invaluable skills in this area. To standard Protestant arguments about Catholicism's deficiencies, a Catholic who has grasped the Protestant's concerns might suggest a new view of things. "I agree with you that what is essential is a more personal relationship with Jesus. That's what I want too. That's why I go to Mass every day." To someone declaring that you must be "born again," you might say, "Exactly right. And I'm born again every time I go to Confession."

Some of these replies raise a chuckle, and many of the stories of second-order change sketched above bring a laugh. It is striking how much humor is released in the shift from first order to second order. Fr. George Rutler puts his finger on why: "Humor is among other things the perception of imbalance as imbalanced and the appreciation of incongruity as incongruous." The depressed man in our first story saw nothing funny in his problem, but from a higher level, a second order, he did. Reframing the situation can reveal the inherent humor. It is a humor that does not wound, that has no wish to hurt — a humor, indeed, that saves. The authors of Change recount the tale of the military officer who is told to clear the square by firing on the rabble gathered there. The officer draws his soldiers up and has them level their weapons at the crowd, then announces, "I understand that there may be a few decent, upstanding citizens in this crowd. Would those decent citizens please leave the square so that I may safely fire upon the rabble?" Everyone leaves the square.

New self-recognition is a mark of second-order change. My new way of seeing my self may not be immediately comforting but it may be ultimately curative. Consider the classic instance of this in John 8:3-11: "They brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle." The crowd around the sinning woman, it is important to note, was not a mob. It was a group of respectable believers who were righteous, logical, and authoritative, and they brought Jesus a pair of first-order alternatives: Either affirm Mosaic Law or deny it. Jesus opened to them a second order of reality: "Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." One by one they went away, "beginning with the elders." The woman in the middle was also shown a higher reality: Not to be stoned does not mean to be condoned. Jesus said to her, "Go, and do not sin again."

Once the option is presented to behave in a way not previously thought possible, or to view oneself and others in a new (transcendent) light, barriers to conversion can dissolve.

Of course, belief in Jesus Christ and membership in His Church do not amount simply to holding a different point of view. Faith is not merely a new perspective, nor a solution to psychological problems, nor a revised philosophy of life. Faith is, rather, one's opening up, by the grace of God, to transcendent truth. To have faith is to dwell in a second order of love and mercy where formerly, perhaps, one had dwelt simply in the first order of the natural world. Christians believe in the seen and the unseen, in a sacramental world infused with divine grace. Conversion is a change not just of mind but of heart, and the incorporation not just of a new view of things but also of a new commitment to the transcendent person of Jesus Christ. Among God's marvelous creations is the human psyche, and understanding the psychology of change can perhaps help us to discover and remove, in ourselves and others, obstacles to His converting grace.

Art Bennett is a practicing psychotherapist who regularly provides seminars on the psychology of men and women for Catholic marriage preparation programs. Laraine Bennett, an M.A. in Philosophy, is a writer and mother. Both are Catholics and are home-schooling their four children.

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