What the Dickens? Researchers say Scrooge-like transformations can happen in real life

It's the enduring Christmas story we love to tell ourselves.

After ghostly visits in the night, a selfish, misanthropic jerk (Ebenezer Scrooge) wakes up transformed into a gleeful, generous philanthropist. With a little help from a guardian angel, a suicidal loser in despair over legal and financial trouble (George Bailey) realizes he's the most beloved person in town. A holiday-ruining crook (the Grinch, of course) miraculously morphs from a meanie to someone with a larger-than-average heart.

We'd all like to become better people. That's why New Year's resolutions are so popular. But do these sorts of awakenings happen in real life? Could a ghost, an angel or a light from above help us undergo a personality makeover?

Surprisingly, some say overnight transformations aren't just the stuff of fiction. The Rev. Travis Norvell, pastor of Judson Memorial Baptist Church in Minneapolis, is one of them.

"We all have these ghosts who haunt us and give us a chance to change," he said.

Norvell used to play softball with "a real bastard of a guy," who ended up getting pistol whipped and dumped in a culvert after he failed to pay his debts to a drug dealer. When he regained consciousness, "he went straight to a rehab center," Norvell said. "He's a different person now. Something changed in his core."

Minneapolis actor JC Cutler, who has played Scrooge six times in the Guthrie Theater's production of "A Christmas Carol," said he got sober at about same time that he first took on the role.

The phenomenon is real enough to attract the attention of researchers more interested in psychology than Christmas tales.

Jon Skalski, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University-Idaho, has studied sudden, transforming experiences. The people he's interviewed reported rapid shifts in attitudes, values, beliefs and actions after undergoing overwhelming stress, feelings of hopelessness and turmoil. In other words, after hitting rock bottom.

"There's a lack of wholeness that seems to prepare individuals for life-altering changes," Skalski said. "There's a discord that seems to be a prerequisite. What they were doing was not working."

Such drastic change might also be triggered by a single traumatic experience, according to other research.

In a new book called "After," doctor and psychiatry professor Bruce Greyson said people who have a near-death experience often report major transformations in attitudes and beliefs, including greater empathy and compassion, a richer appreciation of life and a lessened fear of death.

"Some people have these epiphanies," she said. "They talk about gratitude and appreciation."

An insight, an epiphany

But sudden personality changes can also just happen, according to University of New Mexico emeritus psychology professor William Miller.

Miller and fellow researcher Janet C'de Baca published results of interviews with 55 people who had experienced abrupt, enduring attitude adjustments. Many of the research subjects were hit with a sudden insight or experienced a life-altering epiphany out of the blue. The research resulted in a 2001 book: "Quantum Change: When Epiphanies and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives."

According to Miller and C'de Baca, the sudden changes can be a cathartic, "A-ha" moment of insight or a mystical epiphany accompanied by "the presence of an awe-inspiring Other," a vision, a voice or a feeling of light emanating from within.

When the study subjects were reinterviewed 10 years later, the changes in attitude and behavior had persisted.

"They looked on this as one of the most positive experiences in their lives," Miller said.

The notion of becoming a different person through a sudden change of heart, attitude and personality is as old as the Bible. And historical figures as diverse as Joan of Arc, Leo Tolstoy and Malcom X have described going through psychological quantum change in their lives.

But the experience has largely been overlooked by psychologists, Miller contends. One exception was William James, the "father of American psychology," who wrote about conversion experiences in his classic 1902 book, "The Varieties of Religious Experience."

Quantum change is "not as unusual as you would imagine," Miller said, but added, "I literally didn't find another psychologist who studied this since William James."

In our typical experience of life, personalities change slowly — if at all. That's why people who undergo sudden, dramatic change often are reluctant to talk about it.

"They're such unusual experiences that they can sound kind of crazy," Miller said.

And it seems that these sudden insights and rapid transformations are not ours to command. A mystical experience doesn't necessarily lead to enduring change. Not everyone who hits rock bottom can count on a life-changing epiphany.

Psychologists are uncertain why some people experience quantum change and others don't. Maybe, as suggested by James, sudden insights are the product of "subconsciously incubated" thoughts that have been building over time before suddenly bursting into consciousness.

Those who have undergone such change say it was uninvited and unmerited, something that happened outside of their control. According to Miller, some experience a sort of "why me" guilt about it. Most of us change slowly and step by step; "some of us get a fast forward," he said.

Engel, the hospital chaplain, says we can get started by cultivating a sense of gratitude.