I’ve been there before too, many times. Wishing, hoping, pleading, and negotiating for another to change. To change the way they think about things, act, treat us, or look at how things happened in the past, and so forth.

You can’t change another person, only they can do that. You can’t choose it for them, they must claim it for themselves, or not.

The work, I’ve found, is in being able to change the way we relate to a person who is stuck, blocked, or resistant.

What does clinging to the need for them to change do? What does surrendering do? What if we let go of the need for them to see it through our lens? What if we accepted that things would not change? Then what?

What happens when we let go? Accept? Surrender? How does relating to another shift when the above is embodied?

I encourage you to explore this and see if shifting the way you relate to another not changing brings any peace forward for you? Peace does not mean free of emotion. Peace may indeed still hold sadness and disappointment for what won’t be, but also freedom to choose what we allow to take up room in our internal world.

If I accept that I cannot change you, what happens next? The possibilities are many, but what I’ll leave you with here is this: Change happens. When you accept that you cannot change another what happens is something changes. It may not be the story you wrote up for change, but a story of change nonetheless.

—Vienna Pharaon