The Therapist’s Resistance The patient’s resistance will persist only if you resist. The patient’s resistance and your counter-resistance go hand in hand. If a patient’s resistance is not dropping, ask yourself: “How am I keeping the resistance in place?” For instance, are you trying to help someone who does not yet want to be helped? Are you trying to explore something he does not want to explore? Are you trying to convince him he has a problem when he doesn’t think he has one? If so, you are trying to manipulate and control him. When you explore something he does not want to explore, this becomes your goal and need, not his. Then he will oppose you. Then ask yourself: “Why is it so important for me to control and manipulate this patient? What is MY issue?” “When I impose my agenda which I think is “right” and try to convince him that he is “wrong”, what is my issue? Who do I think I am that I think I have a right to impose my agenda and tell him I know better than him what is right for him?” What if you actually don’t know what is best for him? Once you’ve done this. Drop the rope. Stop arguing. Stop being so oppositional☺ You are rejecting the person who is before you. Instead, meet him where he is. Let go of the fantasy patient you want to work with, and relate to the real person before you. When you keep asking him to be someone else, he feels you rejecting him. That’s why he gets angry. That’s why you get a misalliance. Can you listen to his resistance? Can you accept it as it is in the room? Can you say to him why he likes his resistance and finds it useful? Can you let go of your need to change his resistance? Can you accept his resistance as his best attempt to let you know where he needs healing? If so, you have started doing your job and stopped doing his. After all, only the patient can change his resistance. The more you act out the urge to change it, the less he will feel a need to do so. All the more reason to drop the rope. When you try to change him, you don’t accept him as he is. You tell him, “Don’t be the way you are. Be how I want you to be. The way you are is wrong. My fantasy of how you should be is right.” Then ask yourself, “Who made me God? Why should the patient be made in my image? Where do I come off telling people how they should be?” In our best resistance work, we don’t try to change the patient. We meet him as he is. We don’t just align with him. We align with life as it presents itself to us moment by moment in the room. And when we align ourselves with him and the living reality of his resistance, he has nothing to resist. As a result his unconscious longing to be healed begins to emerge and do its work. No therapist ever overcame a patient’s unconscious resistance. Only the patient’s unconscious therapeutic alliance ever did that. Get out of the way. Let the patient do the work which you can never do.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 22:33:46 +0000
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