As the year draws to a close, many people find themselves reflecting on what has changed and what has not. There is often a quiet pressure to identify progress, lessons learnt, or intentions for the year ahead. For people who have lived through trauma, imprisonment, or long periods of exclusion, this pressure can feel especially heavy. Change is expected. Improvement is implied. Yet the lived experience is often far more complex.

At The Reasons Why Foundation, we have learnt that meaningful change rarely arrives through effort alone. It does not come from being told to do better, try harder, or fix oneself. In fact, many of the people we walk alongside have spent years trying to change in exactly these ways - often with painful consequences. What we see, time and again, is that change begins somewhere quieter and less dramatic.

It begins with awareness.

Many of the behaviours that attract attention in systems - anger, withdrawal, control, avoidance - are not signs of failure. They are signs of survival. At some point, these responses helped a person to endure something that felt overwhelming or unsafe. They reduced harm, created distance, or restored a sense of control when none seemed available. When we forget this, we risk misunderstanding the very people we hope to support.

Trying to force change without understanding what a behaviour has protected someone from can feel like another form of threat. It asks people to give up strategies that once kept them alive, without offering anything equally reliable in return. From a trauma-informed perspective, this is not resistance - it is wisdom.

Gestalt-informed practice offers a helpful way of understanding this. Rather than seeing change as something we impose or achieve, Gestalt invites us to notice what is already happening. It encourages us to stay close to experience, to pay attention to what emerges when someone feels safe enough to be present with themselves and others. Change, in this view, is not manufactured. It unfolds.

This is sometimes described as the paradoxical theory of change: the idea that people change not by striving to be different, but by becoming more fully who they already are. While this may sound abstract, its implications are deeply practical. When someone is met with curiosity rather than correction, something often softens. When their responses are understood rather than judged, new possibilities begin to appear.

Over the past year, we have seen this in many small, human moments. Someone who has always relied on anger notices, perhaps for the first time, the fear underneath it. Another realises that their withdrawal is not laziness or indifference, but a way of avoiding disappointment. These moments are not breakthroughs in the dramatic sense. They are shifts in awareness. And yet, they are often the ground from which lasting change grows.

An asset-based approach helps us to stay aligned with this way of working. Instead of asking what is missing, we ask what is already present. What capacities have allowed someone to survive as long as they have? What strengths are embedded within behaviours that are now causing difficulty? This does not mean celebrating harm or ignoring its impact. It means recognising that the energy within these responses can, over time, be redirected rather than suppressed.

As the year ends, it can be tempting to frame change in terms of outcomes achieved or goals met. These have their place, particularly in systems that require measurement and accountability. But they tell only part of the story. Much of the most important work happens beneath the surface, long before it becomes visible. It happens in the slow rebuilding of trust, in the courage it takes to stay present, and in the gradual expansion of choice where once there was none.

For those who have spent much of their lives being told who they are or who they should be, being met without an agenda can be profoundly reparative. It offers a different experience of relationship - one where they are not being fixed, managed, or corrected, but encountered as a whole person in context. From this place, change is no longer something to be achieved, but something that emerges naturally over time.

As we move towards a new year, our commitment remains the same. We will continue to work in ways that honour people’s histories, respect their survival, and trust in their capacity for growth. We will continue to value process as much as outcome, and relationship as much as intervention. And we will continue to believe that when people are supported to become more fully themselves, change follows.

Not because it is demanded, but because it is possible.