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In a client conversation the other day, the topic of free will came up. We were talking about why our thinking causes our own suffering — and whether we actually choose our thoughts.
My answer was yes. And no.
Free will is one of the greatest gifts we’ve been given — by Creation, God, the Universe…whatever word fits your belief. It’s the power to make your own choice, in any moment. And those choices we make in this moment directly create our future moments.
But here’s the part I find fascinating: we all have free will -- but many of us don’t choose our actions much of the time. We defer our choices to our subconscious, to beliefs we constructed long ago. Most of the time, we are actually just reacting.
React is a funny word. It is the opposite of acting. It is an action that, by definition, we’ve taken in the past, and now we are taking again. It is an action that we almost always take without even thinking about it. It’s rote. And because re-action is an action rooted in our subconscious beliefs, it is tied to an emotion. And when the emotion drives our action, it’s usually a re-action.
Researchers have spent decades on this. One landmark study by psychologist Wendy Wood found that roughly 43% of what we do in a given day is habit — performed on autopilot, while our minds are somewhere else entirely. We’re not choosing anything, we’re running a play from a playbook written a long time ago.
It took me decades to understand this. And one of my personal playbooks is where it finally became clear.
I still remember the moment clearly. I woke up late at night, my father was asleep. I went to find my mom, and before I entered the room, I saw her -- crouched behind our bar, drinking straight from a bottle of vodka. She didn’t know I was watching. At 5 years old, I was confused by what I was seeing -- but I knew it wasn’t good. Her behavior was strange and erratic. And that’s when my anger towards my mother began.
This reaction drove me my whole life. My mother was an alcoholic, and she never got sober for more than a few months at a time. When she would drink, it would enrage me. She couldn’t be reasoned with. She was mean. Lazy. Sometimes violent. She wasn’t the mom I wanted her -- or needed her -- to be.
That 5-year-old who knew something was wrong but couldn’t name it -- he was driving the bus from the inside. Lashing out. Getting angry. I was someone I didn’t want to be. But I had no idea how to stop it.
I lived this pattern from the time I was five until the day I held her hand, as she took her last breath. 35 years. I never broke it.
The pattern was based on a belief that I carried most of my life: if I could just get my mom to stop drinking, my life would be perfect.
When I was in middle school, I had a therapist I would see on occasion. I’ll never forget when she told me that I can’t control other people, I could only control myself. I hated that. I refused to believe her. My inner child, the 5 year-old desperate for a solution that put me in control, lashed out in frustration — of course I could get my mom to stop! I just had to find the perfect words, the perfect action, the thing that would make her see the damage she was doing. Then she would want to stop.
So every time she drank, I re-acted. Same belief driving the same emotion. Same script, decade after decade. And I never saw that my actions weren’t a choice. Not until it was too late.
It wasn’t until after she was gone that I even had the space to look at it. Grief, and the healing of time, showed me what I couldn’t see before. The point that I refused to acknowledge in middle school finally had room to land.
I can’t control other people.
My therapist was right. I just wasn’t ready to hear it from a twelve-year-old’s chair.
This is the work. To first see where we aren’t being who we want to be. To examine the thoughts and emotions that are driving our actions. To create just a little bit of distance between the emotion and the action. And then -- make a new, conscious decision in alignment with the life we want. With the way we want to be in the world.
When we act with autonomy, from a conscious place, we take back our lives. We no longer re-act. We act with purpose. We exercise our true Free Will.
This is how we step into our authenticity. With conscious intention.
So here’s the important question: are you re-acting to a script you wrote when you were five? And what would it take, today, to write a new one?
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