Photos by Magenta School of Magick
One of the stranger parts of personal growth is discovering that changing yourself can change relationships you weren’t consciously trying to change. For example, when you become more confident, somebody experiences you as less agreeable. When you establish a boundary, somebody who is comfortable with your availability experiences you as distant. The moment you stop needing quite so much reassurance, a relationship that was partly organised around giving and receiving that reassurance suddenly feels different. As you become a leader who asks questions rather than immediately providing answers, the people around you wonder why you aren’t stepping in.
Nothing necessarily went wrong, you just changed. And because relationships develop between versions of people, rather than between fixed identities, something between you and the people you have relationships with may have to change as well.
Key Ideas
- Personal growth often changes relationships because other people have learned to relate to an earlier version of us.
- Healthier boundaries, greater confidence and increased self-trust can disrupt established relationship patterns before a new dynamic develops.
- Not every relationship needs to survive unchanged for personal growth to be successful; some deepen, some evolve and some become more distant.
- These patterns can appear in families and friendships, between businesses and clients or competitors, and between leaders and their teams.
- Within Humanistic Magick, changing relationships can be understood as part of identity integration: learning to relate to others without continually returning to an older version of ourselves.
Growth rarely happens to one person in isolation
We often talk about personal development as though it happens inside us. So, we become more self-aware. More confident. More resilient. More comfortable with uncertainty. We develop stronger boundaries or a clearer sense of what matters to us. But other people have relationships with the person we used to be. That can make becoming someone new surprisingly complicated.
Perhaps you have been the child who keeps the peace in your family. Or perhaps the spiritual practitioner who worries about being judged by other people in their field. Maybe the business owner who says yes to every client request. Or the colleague who can always be relied upon to sort something out. Perhaps you’re the leader who protects their team by carrying more than their fair share.
These aren’t just behaviours. Over time, they can become relational identities. Other people have learned what they can expect from us just as we learnt what to expect from them. And so without anybody consciously agreeing to it, a pattern forms.
Then one person begins to change.
Sometimes healthy change feels like disruption
This is one of the reasons growth doesn’t always feel as empowering as we all imagine it will. There can be an uncomfortable period in which you know the old way of relating to one another no longer feels right, but the new way has not yet become normal.
You might know that you want better boundaries but still feel guilty when somebody reacts to them. Or you might recognise that you no longer need a caregiver’s approval while still feeling the old instinct to seek it. Or you might want to run your business according to your own values while noticing how quickly you compare yourself with competitors.
There is often a gap between understanding the person we want to become and being able to inhabit that identity comfortably. And relationships can make that gap particularly visible because another person’s response can invite us back into an older version of ourselves.
And sometimes that version still feels safer.
The people around you may need time to meet the person you are becoming
This doesn’t necessarily mean that somebody is trying to prevent your growth. They may simply only know how to have a relationship with the person you have been. In other words, if you have always said yes, your no may initially feel surprising. If you have always looked for reassurance, your growing independence changes the conversation. If clients have become accustomed to immediate access to you, a healthier boundary may feel like reduced service. If you have built your professional identity around being the person with the answers, becoming a leader who creates space for other people’s thinking can initially feel uncomfortable for everyone involved.
This is because relationships contain habits too, and when we change, those habits have to change with us.
Sometimes people adjust, such as a parent begins relating to you as an autonomous adult rather than the child they remember or a client learns what working with you now looks like. The relationship doesn’t disappear, it just evolves. And sometimes, surprisingly, it becomes more honest because neither person has to keep performing the role that originally held it together.
But not every relationship comes with you
There is another possibility that is harder to talk about.
Sometimes you grow and discover that a relationship worked partly because you maintained a particular version of yourself. Perhaps it depended upon you being accommodating. Or uncertain, available, or responsible for everybody else’s emotions. Perhaps you realise that the connection was held together by comparison, competition, rescuing, approval or a shared way of seeing the world that you no longer entirely share.
Your personal growth doesn’t automatically mean ending those relationships, but it can mean seeing them differently. And occasionally, the healthiest development of a relationship is greater distance.
There can be grief in that.
We can know that something is right for us and still miss what it used to be. We can recognise that we have outgrown a dynamic without deciding that either person was wrong. We can love someone and realise that we cannot continue occupying the role they knew us in.
So, sometimes personal development is about becoming able to recognise which relationships can evolve with us.
This happens in business too
When we think about relationships, we tend to think first about family, friendships and romantic partners. But businesses are built from relationships as well.
Think about the relationships between you and your clients. Or you and your audience, you and collaborators or you and any competitors. Even the imagined relationship between you and what you think your industry expects from you.
As your sense of self develops, those relationships can change.
By this we mean that a practitioner who once looked constantly at competitors for reassurance may gradually become more interested in their own work. And a business owner may realise that being endlessly accommodating isn’t the same as providing excellent service.
Someone whose work has evolved may discover that the clients they once tried desperately to attract are no longer the people they most want to serve.
That can initially look like loss, but sometimes what looks like losing an old way of doing business is evidence that a clearer professional identity is emerging. It doesn’t mean you are necessarily rejecting anybody…Instead, you may be becoming more capable of choosing the relationships your work is built around.
Leadership changes relationships as well
The same process happens inside organisations.
Leadership development is often described in terms of acquiring certain skills like communication, coaching, delegation, strategic thinking and so on. Becoming a different kind of leader changes your relationships with people.
If you have built your credibility by knowing things, you may have to learn what it feels like not to demonstrate your expertise every time somebody brings you a problem. If you have protected your team by fixing things for them, you may need to tolerate the discomfort of allowing them to struggle with something you could solve more quickly yourself.
If you have associated leadership with certainty, saying “I don’t know yet” can feel like a change in the relationship between you and those you lead.
And people may initially resist that change. They may continue bringing you decisions.They may ask you what you think before telling you what they think. They may interpret space as absence.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the new approach isn’t working, just that the new approach needs time (sometimes a system needs time to learn that the leader has changed). People will need the time to learn that they don’t have to return to their old identity simply because other people still expect it.
Look for the evidence of becoming
We think it can be useful to notice smaller evidence of change rather than waiting for a dramatic transformation.
Notice when perhaps you didn’t immediately say yes. Notice when you felt uncomfortable setting a boundary and kept it anyway. Notice when someone else does something impressive and you can appreciate it without using their success as evidence of your failure. Notice when a conversation would once have left you defensive instead leaves you wondering what you can learn from it.
These moments can seem insignificant but they aren’t.They are evidence that the relationship between you and yourself is changing. And when that relationship changes, the relationships around you often begin changing too.
Where humanistic magick fits
This is one of the places where a framework like humanistic magick becomes useful.
Humanistic magick is concerned with the relationship between inner change and lived action: recognising the patterns we have inherited or developed, becoming conscious of what no longer fits, experimenting with different ways of being and gradually integrating those changes until they become more natural.
Within this framework relationship change can appear throughout that movement and eventually, through practising a new normal, some of those behaviours stop feeling like techniques, they become part of who we are.
The interesting thing is that the people around us then have a choice too. They can develop a relationship with this emerging version of us or they can continue asking for the person we used to be. We cannot entirely control which they choose, though perhaps that is part of the work as well.
Relationships don’t have to stay the same to have been successful
There is a tendency to measure relationship success through longevity.
Did the friendship survive? Did the client stay? Did the partnership continue? Did everybody remain happy with us?
But are these always the right measures? Perhaps a successful relationship is sometimes one that becomes capable of changing. One in which both people are allowed to become more fully themselves. One in which disagreement doesn’t automatically threaten connection. One in which boundaries can move. One in which responsibility can be redistributed. One in which we are curious about who the other person is becoming rather than continually asking them to remain who they have been.
And perhaps, sometimes, a relationship has served an important part of our lives and doesn’t need to accompany us into the next one. That doesn’t make the relationship meaningless or bad per se. It just means that we changed.
The difficult part of growth is that we rarely know in advance which relationships will deepen, which will need renegotiating and which we may eventually leave behind, but there is another relationship underneath all of them. And that is the relationship we have with ourselves.
And as that becomes more trusting, more compassionate and more congruent, we may become a little less willing to abandon ourselves simply to keep every other relationship unchanged.
That, too, is evidence of becoming.
References
About Humanistic Magick
Humanistic Magick is a psychology-informed framework developed by Andie Brookes that integrates reflective and symbolic practises to support meaningful, lasting personal change. You can explore the full reference guide here: https://magentaschoolofmagick.com/what-is-humanistic-magick/
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