At some point in your life, you will run into a situation where you need someone to change and that someone won’t change. What you will be facing is absolute unworkability in the other person. You will feel like you are up against a wall and also completely stuck.

The way to know whether someone will not change is that they are demonstrating the same behavioral pattern, no matter what. No matter how many conversations you have about it. No matter how many different approaches you have taken to try to get them to change. No matter it being reflected to them that they are being unworkable and by doing so, are creating an impossible situation. And no matter them being fully aware of the consequences they will face if they continue to demonstrate that behavioral pattern. With a few exceptions that involve a person literally not being able to change something, even if they want to, another great way of telling whether they will not change is how much they demonstrate with their behavior and actions that they want to change. How much initiative, energy and effort they are putting into it, without you feeling like you have to try to force them to do it. 

If someone won’t change, you have to accept it. Accepting it is the hardest part of all. We often completely burn ourselves out by the point we become willing to swallow as hard a truth as accepting that something won’t change. But once you do that, you get out of that painful canyon between who they are and who you want them to be. You stop fighting a losing battle against reality. The focus changes from trying to control their behavior to trying to manage your own wellbeing in the most conscious way possible. You switch to finding a way to make it so that your happiness does not depend on their progress or change. You shift the locus of control to yourself. By giving up on them changing, you drop your expectations, disappointment and constant frustration. And from there, you have two options. 

1. Make a change to yourself. 

2. Make an executive decision in alignment with your wellbeing based on the fact that they will not change. 

Within these two options, there are usually many options. Let me explain, starting with making a change to yourself. I want you to imagine that when you hit up against something totally unworkable, you are hitting up against solid rock. You can’t get it to move, change, shift or anything. So, the only way forward is for you to move, change or shift. But you’ve got to do this consciously. Many people who do this subconsciously simply do this by finding a dysfunctional adaptive strategy. For example, say that a woman is in a relationship with a man who will not stop his alcoholic behaviors. She may change herself by going into denial. This adaptation allows her to be able to move forward in the marriage and be with him. 

But on the conscious side, there are many things you could choose to change that relate to yourself. Making a change to yourself could mean changing your perspective about the situation. It could mean changing the core adaptive beliefs that led you to the situation or are keeping you in the situation. It could mean recognizing what the situation is triggering in you, so as to embark on a personal healing process relative to those wounds. It could mean setting firm boundaries and actually following through on them when they are ignored. It could mean changing one or more of your patterns that reinforces the very thing in them that you want them to change. It could mean changing your behavior in some way. Doing something different in the relationship etc. This process of changing yourself will in and of itself lead to you making choices and taking actions in the situation at hand.   

There are also probably many executive decisions you could choose from based on the fact that they will not change. When you do this, it is less like transforming yourself in some way in response to unchangeability on the outside. Instead, it is more like unchangeability meeting unchangeability and recognizing that incompatibility and making a decision according to that reality. The different executive decisions you could make obviously depend on the exact situation you are in. 

Here is an example. Remy is in a relationship with Yuto. Yuto often acts unreliable. He tends to overpromise and under-deliver. One of his common patterns is to say he will help with chores or be home for dinner, but he "forgets” or gets distracted and doesn’t follow through on his word. Remy nags. He leaves sticky notes to get Yuto to remember. He gives Yuto the silent treatment when he doesn’t do what he says he is going to do. They have gotten into so many fights over this during the year they’ve been living together. Remy has threatened the relationship many times over this. And Remy spends a lot of time venting to friends about how unreliable Yuto is and how much of a child he is. Nothing changes. 

Now, Remy realizes he is up against a wall. He spends some time really facing the reality that Yuto may never change. He is deeply present to his own vulnerability that surfaces when he faces what scares him if this were true. Eventually, he accepts that Yuto is not going to change this behavior. He is putting no energy into changing it at all, despite him knowing how much damage it causes and knowing the consequences. So, Remy realizes he has two options. 1. Change himself in some way. 2. Make an executive decision based on the fact that Yuto will not change. The decision he is tempted to make is to end the relationship. He doesn’t want to make that executive decision yet. So, he decides to focus on changing his expectations and his actions, so as to protect himself from the constant hope-disappointment cycle. He stops expecting that Yuto will follow through. He does not want to do everything for the both of them as if Yuko was a child, so Remy decides that he is no longer going to rely on Yuto for critical tasks. He will do those himself or he will bring in a friend or hire someone reliable to do them. But with not so critical tasks, Remy decides that if Yuto is late for something, like dinner, he is going to go out on the town and spend time with someone else and leave Yuto to the consequence of loneliness, rather than staying condemned to it himself. He sets the firm boundary that if Yuto is not going to be there for the relationship, he is not going to be there for the two of them. Remy feels that what he does get out of the relationship with Yuto is worth the reality that he is functionally alone in the relationship. Now that the fighting has stopped, things have improved. They are living parallel lives under the same roof often. But that space does not really bother Remy.    

Yuto’s past partner, Hideki found himself at this same impasse with Yuto. When he hit this impasse, and accepted that Yuto would not change and be reliable, he had to face the reality that he was not facing by trying to get Yuto to change. The reality that he felt completely alone in the relationship and actually was in many ways. They may have had incredible sex and great quality time together when they were together, but he could not rely on Yuto at all. He was fundamentally unsupported in the relationship. Hideki spent most of his time in his youth feeling completely alone. He did not experience this kind of forced independence as a kind of space to be in peace and free in the relationship. Rather, he experienced it as a fundamental deprivation of his deepest needs for connection, partnership, support and togetherness. By looking deeply at his own wounding from his childhood, he realized that to settle for a partner who could not be relied on, he would be abandoning himself. He didn’t want to stay with the hurting, which is what staying with Yuto would be for him. So, he made the executive decision to expand his support system by finding other social outlets than Yuto. He also made the executive decision to move out and get an apartment that was closer to his work, so it wasn’t such an unsupported hassle to get there. And eventually, he met someone new. He then ended the partnership with Yuto.

If you are struggling with a situation where you need someone to change, but they aren’t changing, you may benefit by also watching three of my videos. The first is: How To Deal With Unworkability. The second is: Consciously Choose your Consequences. And the third is: The Real Reason Why People Don’t Change.  

It is hell when someone won’t change because it means the problem (the reason you need them to change) is not being owned by them and therefore, it no longer belongs to the relationship. Instead, it is solely in your lap. This is why it doesn’t feel like a relationship anymore when someone in a relationship is being unworkable in some way. But the time does come when the hell of accepting the reality that a person won’t change is better than the hell of fighting against it. Better than the hell of the powerlessness and pain of keeping your wellbeing linked to them changing in some way. And you never know… for some people, consciously choosing to change themselves, or making an executive decision for their own wellbeing, is exactly what leads them to end the relationship. But for others, choosing to change themselves or making an executive decision for their own wellbeing is exactly what smooths out the problems in their relationship.