Change, resistance and loss
In my previous post I wrote about the various factors that I believe make up psychotherapy and their contribution to its success.
Successful therapy is a subjective concept and hard to measure, it depends on what people say about how they feel. Often, people come to therapy because they want to feel good and therapy can help in achieving that. Aside from feeling good, therapy has another purpose, to help people bring about change and to a degree, change can be measured more objectively.
Different therapy approaches consider change in different ways, some settle for new or increased awareness and others actively encourage new behaviours. In all instances, whether it is about accepting our reality as is or working towards a new one, therapy is about change. And change often means loss.
Yet, as much as we may want to change, we invest a lot of energy in maintaining our current state because what we do now, despite how dissatisfying it may be, is familiar and therefore safer. Any attempt at giving up a familiar behaviour is often accompanied by a sense of loss of our core beliefs of who we are. This means that we enter therapy conflicted and with some resistance, not always knowing why.
Resistance to change can be an important element in therapy because it is relational. Traditionally, resistance has been considered as something clients do when they are in therapy, but, resistance is something that two (or more) people do, one person cannot resist if nothing pushes back. The dynamics of resisting and being resisted have the potential for growth because they offer us the opportunity to form boundaries and have clearer ideas of what we accept and what we don’t.
Apart from supporting the formation of boundaries, when we resist we also become aware of what we may lose. With increased awareness, a gap opens up between old versions and a new and “improved” version of ourselves, this gap I believe creates tension. It can be very tempting to just undo the tension and go back to old habits.
Thus, therapy can become the dialogue between the dissatisfied and the disappointing parts of who we are, what we have lost and who we can become. What is required for growth is to understand that resistance is a point of contact and a dialogue worth taking part in.
Realising its inescapable nature we can see change not as the end of the road but the close embrace of the essence of who we had hoped to be and who we are. It seems that much of our dissatisfaction with life stems from our wish for the present moment to conform better to the expectations we set for it in the past.