This past January month amplified a very familiar condition. Tiredness. A low-grade, semi-depressed lack of light, vitamin D, energy and momentum. It does so every year, reliably, right on the dot.
What feels different now is the duration. For the past thirty months, I’ve watched a plethora of people and organizations remain stuck in that depleted limbo, long after the calendar should have shaken them loose. Backs feel broken. Elastic worn thin from being stretched too often. Reserves and morale permanently on empty. The fire burns low, the chill sets in and no one seems willing to throw in the intellectual equivalent of a good, old log.
Instead, people loop. “Nothing will change.” “Why would it?” “It’s always been this way.” A closed circuit of resignation disguised as realism. I’ve spent enough time in meeting rooms and at diner tables where nothing was supposedly possible to recognize the pattern early.
It always starts the same way. Someone reaches for some history, a past project, a screwed up integration from long ago early in the conversation. Past failures are named and innuendos implied, and cultural and societal scars are carefully laid out. That reorganization that went wrong resurfaces. That new way of working that did not excel. The new technology that never really worked. And, of course, that transformation that “traumatized” people is brought back into the light, usually with a lowered voice and a knowing look around the table.
The word lands heavy. Trauma. Past scars. It carries enough gravity to slow everything down. It signals caution, it asks for care, for revenge. More often than not, it quietly ends the fruitful future shaping conversation before it has properly begun. Heads nod. The mood shifts. What was framed as a question of choice turns into an exercise in explanation. The language drifts from agency to analysis, from responsibility to context. People stop asking what could be done and start documenting why it is complicated.
At that point, the room changes function. It no longer exists to decide. It exists to understand itself. Before you know it, everyone is laying on a metaphorical couch, analyzing why change is difficult, disruptive and next to impossible instead of asking what it would take to make it happen.
I am tired of that posture.
I know the past has its importance. It carries weight. It shapes reflexes, habits, fears, loyalties. But I see it used way too often as an alibi. Experience turned into ballast. History repackaged as inevitability. Cheap (and most often pseudo scientific) psychological language pressed into service to justify why things must remain exactly where they are. I’ve watched too many coaches, consultants, and leaders slide into what I can only describe as Freudian sofa-coaching. Long sessions of excavation. Wounds identified, blockages mapped, resistances carefully named. The work sounds serious. It feels humane. And yet, sadly, it often ends right where it began, with a deeper understanding of why movement feels uncomfortable and very little expectation that it should/could still happen.
As if understanding why something hurts, relieved anyone of the responsibility to move with the limp.
Sigmund Freud gave us a powerful lens for understanding how the past inhabits the present. His work taught generations to look backward, to trace behavior to origin, to assume that unresolved conflicts quietly govern current action. That insight has value, it explains much. It also encourages a seated posture toward change, one where insight is the primary achievement and motion remains optional.
This is where I part ways.
My own stance sits much closer to Carl Rogers. Rogers operated from a radically different assumption. He believed that people possess an inherent capacity for self-actualization and positive change, provided the conditions invite it. That belief was anything but soft. It placed a heavy demand on individuals and systems alike. Growth, in his view, emerges when trust, clarity, effort, and expectation coexist. Remove any one of those, and stagnation sets in.
This distinction matters. Where a Freudian frame privileges explanation, a Rogerian one privileges responsibility. Where one dwells on what shaped us, the other asks what we choose to do with that knowledge. Rogers never denied the influence of history. He simply refused to let it define the ceiling.
What I encounter far too often instead are authorization loops of pity. Narratives repeated until they harden into identity. Stories that explain why nothing will change here. Why this team is different. Why this culture is uniquely constrained. They sound compassionate. They feel protective. They lower the bar gently and permanently.
And that is precisely why they corrode.
Once people are granted unlimited permission to explain their immobility, something else quietly disappears: the energy required to imagine themselves in motion. Past wounds carry information, experience carries texture. Both can shape what comes next… trouble starts when they are polished into memorials, and meeting notes, endlessly revisited, carefully protected. Treated differently, they become fuel. The shift is subtle, the consequences decisive.
A Freudian lens, used without restraint, keeps attention anchored behind us. It elevates origin stories above destination choices. It encourages a seated posture toward change, reflective, cautious, interpretive. Valuable for understanding. Limiting once understanding becomes the endpoint. At that stage, insight loops back on itself and progress slows to a standstill.
A Rogerian stance begins elsewhere. It assumes people are capable systems waiting to be trusted. It treats awareness as a starting point rather than a conclusion. It pairs empathy with expectation and insists that understanding gains meaning only when it alters behaviour.
Resistance still shows up but simply loses its romantic aura. When I hear “this will never change,” I hear fatigue speaking. When teams say “we’ve tried everything,” I hear the edges of identity pressing up against habit. When history is invoked as proof of immobility, I see a story that has grown more comfortable than the uncertainty of rewriting it.
I’ve watched what happens when people are treated as capable of movement, rather than entitled to paralysis. The central question shifts. The focus moves from what went wrong to what is now worth risking. The air defrosts. Language tightens. Energy returns, as resolve.
I listen carefully to where people come from. I anchor just as firmly in where they can go.
The past can weigh a system down or give it leverage. That choice remains open. Individually. Collectively. Uncomfortably.
I know which side I’m on.
