Before You Make New Year's Resolutions
the question that matters most
A couple of months ago, I brought a book into therapy.
My therapist is endlessly tolerant of my doing this, as long as I can tie the book to my therapeutic goals in some way. I’ve brought in everything from Plato’s Republic to pop psych self-help to Star Trek novels. As long as I can make a connection between what I want to achieve and what’s in the book, we talk about it.
This particular book was very relevant to a therapeutic goal I’ve had for years, and I expected to have an interesting, challenging conversation about the book’s proposed path to changing the area of my life that it purports to help readers change.
As often happens with a real therapist — someone who’s not your friend, doesn’t want to be, and is laser-focused on your getting better over feeling better — the session didn’t go as I had planned.
A paragraph into my reading, he interrupted: ‘You’ve talked about this goal, on and off, for five years. Rather than diving into yet another book’s solution, what you really need to be doing is coming to a deep understanding of why you haven’t done this already.”
I blinked, nodded, and quietly closed the book.
I thought we would talk about that—why I haven’t done it already—but he stopped me again, as soon as I tried to segue into examining that. “No,” he said firmly. “You can reflect on the why on your own time. When you come back with some semblance of understanding, I’ll help with the ‘deep’ part. But the first part is your job, not mine.”
My therapist is very, very big on me doing my job and him doing his job.
As usual, he was right.
I don’t know if it’s the wisdom of his age, the Venn diagram of a stratospheric IQ and keen listening, or just the insulting simplicity of understanding a traumatized nerd girl like me — but after years in therapy with him, I’ve realized he is always right. Maddeningly right. Frustratingly right.
Even—especially—when he’s throwing me back on myself in some way that’s scary, painful, and confusing, knows it’s all three, and couldn’t possibly care less.
If The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms ever needs a photograph to go under “Magnificent Bastard,” that man would be the only contender.
And that’s why his name goes into my Gratitude app so much that the first letter immediately brings it up as a predictive text suggestion.
Finding the Deep Answer
After a week of reflection, I arrived at my usual tangled knot of an answer: “It’s a mix of five factors, in proportions I can’t pinpoint, and even if I could, they’d probably shift constantly anyway.”
Recognizing this answer wasn’t sufficient, I spent another week delving deeper, questioning what those five factors had in common.
What were their roots?
Where did they originate?
Why hadn’t I examined them sooner?
What was I holding onto by keeping them alive?
Answering these questions isn’t easy, but a two-step approach can help. Once you think you’ve answered, don’t stop. Step one: follow each answer with a ‘Why?’ Step two: begin every response with ‘Because.’
Take meditation as an example: maybe you’ve wanted to practice regularly for years but haven’t succeeded. You meditate now and then, find it helpful, but never build a consistent habit.
When you ask why, your first answer might be that the only available time is before your kids wake up. Sacrificing twenty minutes of that time—or waking up even earlier—feels impractical and unappealing. That’s your initial answer. Now keep going, alternating between ‘Why?’ questions and ‘Because’ answers. Here are two examples to show how this can reveal deeper insights: one hypothetical (I’m not a parent) and one from my own life, unrelated to the earlier issue.
A Parent’s Problem, Identified
Why don’t I want to wake up earlier?
Because I’m tired all the time anyway.
Why am I tired all the time anyway?
Because I don’t go to bed early enough.
Why don’t I go to bed early enough?
Because I stay up waiting for my firstborn to be the only kid still awake.
Why do I stay up waiting for my firstborn to be the only kid still awake?
Because it’s my only chance to talk to him.
Why is it my only chance to talk to him?
Because he’s glued to his phone until those 20 minutes of winding down between brushing his teeth and going to bed.
Ah! Sounds like there are parenting issues that need addressing: the surface-level one of the kid’s phone addiction, and the deeper one of your not getting much more than that brief window every day to talk to him.
Uncovering and addressing the deeper reasons behind why certain changes never happen is undeniably beneficial—but it’s not easy. Often, these issues are interconnected, feeding into one another.
For instance, if you’d already established a regular meditation habit, the resulting self-awareness might have forced you to confront your parenting deficits—an uncomfortable, to say the least, reality for you to face.
No wonder you were avoiding it!
My Defense Mechanism, Demolished
My friend
will tell you that my living space is exceptionally neat, clean, and organized. But I wasn’t always a neat freak. Before I fully committed—during my first year of college—to living in a way that made life easier and more pleasant, I wanted to live that way but didn’t.Instead, I lived as I had growing up: in a house so filthy that, had I known enough to call CPS, I probably could’ve gotten myself removed.
I tried countless times to change, but nothing stuck. Every deep-clean-and-organize lasted about two days before my place was filthy again.
My two-step process revealed why.
Why does every deep-clean-and-organize last about two days?
Because I stop doing the maintenance.
Why do I stop doing the maintenance?
Because I don’t make myself do it. I prioritize other things.
Why do I prioritize other things?
Because doing the maintenance makes me feel bad.
Why does doing the maintenance make me feel bad?
Because it activates my nervous system. I feel anxious, my adrenaline spikes, and I get tingles on my backside like I’m bracing to be switched.
Why does it activate my nervous system in those ways?
Because it reminds me of being a kid.
Why does it remind me of being a kid?
Because I associate housework with physical pain and avoid it to escape those memories.
Why do I avoid housework I think I actually want to do, to escape those memories?
Because too much of me still exists in the past.
Why does too much of me still exist in the past?
Because I don’t fully believe the past is over. Some part of me still fears that bad things could happen at any moment.
Why don’t I believe the past is over?
Because I’m still terrified I’m worthless, still poor, and still living like I did back then—in filth.
That realization changed everything. I knew my fears of worthlessness would take a lot more therapy to address, and that leaving poverty was a matter of graduating and getting a job. But I could do something about the filth.
I could live in neatness, cleanliness, and order and provide myself with constant evidence that the past was over.
It’s not about that anymore. Now, I genuinely love living this way, and I think I would keep it up even if some brain disease erased every memory of my childhood.
But it began as a deliberate choice—a chance this two-step game helped me create.
What My Five Reasons Had In Common
The five reasons I uncovered in my pursuit of understanding why I haven’t made the change yet had one thing in common—they were all rooted in my habit of revisiting the same thoughts about the same issues, over and over.
This pattern is normal to an extent. Recovery from complex trauma differs significantly from recovery from a single traumatic event. In regular trauma recovery, you start with a relatively stable life, interrupted by something terrible, and work to integrate the event and establish a new normal.
Complex trauma is different. It occurs when life is so profoundly and persistently disrupted—usually early on—that there’s no stable foundation to return to. Recovery means figuring out what a healthy, normal life even looks like while untangling the interconnected consequences of the harm done and the ripple effects of your attempts at healing — all of which are three steps forward, two steps back.
It’s a process, and much like peeling an onion, each layer removed reveals another beneath it. Each layer feels new, demanding reassessment and adjustment before the next can come off. Or, as my therapist often reminds me, “Psychotherapy is cycle-therapy.”
So yes, thinking repeatedly about the same topics is part of the process. It’s normal. But it’s also the root of my problem with regard to the particular change I’m still struggling to make.
For 2025, I’ve set one and only one personal goal: to address this habit. I’m not sharing what, why, or how, because of something called the intention-behavior gap—a studied phenomenon where publicly stating your goals can actually reduce the likelihood of achieving them.
If I succeed, it’ll likely be obvious to most of you, as I’ll end up writing about new and more interesting things as the year goes on. It’ll be completely obvious by the end of the year, and I’ll write about it then.
If I fail, well, I’ll have to live with that.
But my personal goals aren’t the point.
Here’s the real takeaway: if you’re thinking of making the same resolutions for 2025 that you made in 2024, 2023, or even earlier, pause and ask yourself why the change hasn’t happened yet.
Don’t stop at your first answer—it’s rarely the real one.
Use the two-step process: ask “Why?” to every answer you come up with, and start each response with “Because.” Keep going, round after round, until you hit a “because” that feels like a gut-punch. That’s when you know you’ve reached a deeper truth.
This isn’t a quick or easy process. It requires honesty and a willingness to confront what’s beneath the surface—fears, patterns, or old wounds you may not even realize are holding you back.
But that’s where real change begins. Once you uncover the root, you’ll see the problem more clearly, and the path forward might finally reveal itself.
So don’t just resolve. Reflect. Dig deep.
And use the next few days not to plan what you want to achieve, but to uncover what’s been standing in your way. That clarity could be the key to making 2025 the year things truly change.
That reflection may be the most valuable thing you do in the next few days.
An excellent post.
You do have a very good therapist.
Thanks for sharing . GOOD LUCK in making meaningful progress toward achieving your 2025 goals.As a quantitative studies major over 60 years ago I am impressed by your use of a Venn diagram in describing your therapist. They are one of my favorite descriptive tools. BTW- my observation as an 82 year old still in excellent health is that I have perhaps subconsciously adopted the why - because methodology much earlier in my attempts to overcome my difficulties and move towards achieving my goals because I realize that I probably no longer have 50 years to procrastinate and practice avoidance. Putting off achieving a desire goal for several years now means fate ( or the infirmities of old age) is more likely to intervene and keep me from achieving that deferred goal. One example is finally attacking the reasons for the almost thirty pounds that I had gradually gained during the past 15 years ( besides the fact that I enjoy all types of food) and getting serious about discovering a sustainable dieting approach that would enable me to maintain my marathon times as I age . As a result , in the past 18 months I have lost 28 pounds, I again weigh what I weighed in high school and my 2024 NYC Marathon time was my best since 2017. It was difficult but I am sure my pride is obvious that I did it.