Real Change Starts Inside: Why Mindset Matters More Than Behavior
In therapy and in daily life, people often say things like I just need to stop doing this or Why am I like this. The focus falls on behavior: the shutdown during intimacy, the pursuit of validation, the avoidance of commitment or the inability to hold boundaries. Behavior feels visible and therefore easier to target. Yet behavior is often a symptom rather than a starting point.
From an existential perspective, lasting change begins in the mind rather than in the behavior itself. Not in the sense of positive thinking, but in the willingness to confront the internal attitudes that shape how we relate to ourselves and to others. This echoes Rollo May’s distinction between mere impulse and will. Will, for him, was not force but the capacity to engage life consciously.
Many people wait for the feeling to change before they act. They wait to feel brave enough to set a boundary, confident enough to ask for what they want or healed enough to remain present during sex. The difficulty is that mindset does not shift through waiting. Readiness rarely arrives as a feeling. It emerges as a choice.
Existential Sex Therapist
Behavior often reveals the beliefs underneath it. Avoidance may protect a person from shame. People-pleasing may protect against abandonment. Sexual shutdown may protect against exposure. The question is less why am I doing this and more what does this allow me to avoid. As Irvin Yalom has argued, insight without action does not create change. A person can understand their patterns with impressive clarity and still remain unchanged by them.
Mindset involves how a person interprets their experience. It involves the meanings assigned to desire, the stories told about worth and the assumptions carried about what is required in order to be loved. These interpretations are often inherited long before they are examined. Sartre wrote of mauvaise foi, or bad faith, to describe the quiet ways people deny their own freedom by deferring to roles or expectations. Behavior often echoes these unexamined roles.
Change begins when a person notices the pattern without collapsing into judgment. Noticing creates space. In that space there is room to choose. The pause between stimulus and action, described by Viktor Frankl as the locus of freedom, becomes the site where transformation begins.
This does not mean the past is irrelevant. Family conditioning, trauma and cultural narratives shape how a person learns to survive. But existential therapy asks a different question: given this history, what will you do now. The past explains. The present decides.
Mindset is not a feeling of readiness. It is a stance toward experience. It can sound like I am no longer living from this story even if the fear is still present, or I am willing to disappoint someone rather than abandon myself, or I am willing to remain in my body during intimacy long enough to see what is true.
This kind of change is slow. It is uneven. It does not announce itself through triumph but through subtle shifts in how a person meets their own experience. Behavior follows, sometimes quietly. When the mindset changes, the pattern gradually loses its authority.