Change at this level is not a decision. It’s a practice. A daily, sustained, humbling practice that will require more honesty from you than you’ve probably ever allowed yourself.

Here’s what it actually looks like.

It means sitting with shame without immediately deflecting it onto someone else. Shame triggers a physiological response – your nervous system reads it as a threat and activates the fight, flight, or freeze response. Your deflection patterns are your survival mechanism. But survival mechanisms, once they’ve outlived their usefulness, become prisons. Dialectical Behaviour Therapy calls this “distress tolerance” – the ability to feel an emotion without acting on the impulse it generates. When you feel that familiar surge – the urge to blame, rewrite, counterattack – you stay. You feel it. You ask yourself what it’s protecting you from. And you choose, in that moment, to be accountable instead of defended. This rewires your nervous system over time. It’s neuro-plasticity in action.

It means learning to feel other people as real. Attachment theory describes how early relational patterns shape your capacity for genuine connection. If your early relationships taught you that safety came from control, or that love was conditional on performance, your brain learned to relate to people transactionally, not as separate human beings with their own inner lives. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a neurological pattern. But patterns can change with sustained, conscious effort.

It means tolerating the discomfort of being wrong. Of apologising and meaning it. Of not needing the last word. Of letting someone else’s hurt exist without making it about you.

And it means starting somewhere simple. Radically, uncomplicatedly simple.

Stop making everything about yourself. Notice when you’re about to one-up someone and don’t. When someone shares good news, let them have it for the whole conversation. When someone shares pain, ask one question instead of redirecting to your own experience. These are small things. They are also everything.

Be honest with the people who love you. The ones who have told you, over and over, that something needs to change. Go to them. Not to perform vulnerability, but to genuinely say, “I’ve been reading. I’ve been thinking. I want to do better. Tell me what that looks like to you.”

Because here’s something you may not have considered: the people you’ve hurt know exactly what you need to work on. They’ve lived it. They’ve named it, probably repeatedly, in conversations you dismissed or turned around on them. They are the most qualified people on earth to tell you what change would look like in practice. And the act of asking – genuinely asking, and then listening without defending – is itself one of the most powerful first steps you can take.

And respect boundaries. Other people’s, and eventually your own. This one is simple when you think about it honestly. You have private things. A drawer in your bedroom, medication, personal items, things that belong only to you. If someone went through those things without your permission, you would feel violated. You would feel that your privacy, your personhood, your right to an inner life had been disrespected.

That’s exactly how it feels when you do it to them.

Treat people the way you want to be treated. Not as a platitude – as a practice. Before you act, ask yourself: if this were done to me, how would it land? That single question, asked honestly and consistently, will change more than years of unchecked behaviour.