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People actively test with others to see if their prior expectations still hold.

These tests often happen outside awareness.

Missed responses can confirm old beliefs.

Change depends on experiencing safety and disconfirmaion of old beliefs.

This post is the second in a two-part series. You can read Part 1 here: Why We Don’t Change—Even When We Know What’s Wrong

In my previous post, I discussed a central problem in psychological change: People often understand their patterns clearly, yet still find themselves repeating them. Insight, on its own, is rarely enough.

One influential framework—predictive processing—helps explain why. It suggests that the mind is constantly generating expectations based on past experience and tends to prioritise predictability over accuracy. This makes change difficult, even when new experiences contradict what we believe.

But this raises a deeper question: If these beliefs are stabilising—even when they are painful—why would anyone move toward situations that might challenge them? Why risk giving up a model of the world that, however limiting, is at least familiar?

Control–Mastery Theory (CMT), developed by Joseph Weiss and colleagues at the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group, offers an answer: People don’t just wait for change to happen. They actively move toward it. And they do so by testing.

Enter Control–Mastery Theory

But to see how, it’s worth tracing the two terms—control and mastery—back to Freud, where both originate.

“Control,” as Weiss uses it, draws on Freud’s later work, where the term referred to the ego’s capacity to gain command over its own mental functioning. Weiss develops this into a motivational idea: We are, both consciously and unconsciously, oriented toward gaining greater control over our own internal processes: our thoughts, feelings, and the defences that organise them.

This includes becoming aware of defences that were previously outside awareness, and integrating them into overall functioning. In this sense, control is not about suppressing internal experience. It is about increasing the mind’s capacity to know what it is doing, and to function with more........

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