Resistance
Whatever a person does, usually without knowing it, to avoid becoming aware of or changing something painful, even while consciously wanting help or change.
What drives it
Protects the existing balance of the personality against the anxiety, grief or shame that change would bring. Every pattern does a job; resistance is that job defending itself.
How it shows
Work
Agrees in the meeting and does nothing afterwards. Asks for feedback, then argues every point. Postpones the difficult conversation, changes the subject, gets busy, gets ill, goes vague. 'Yes, but...' The coaching programme that runs smoothly while nothing shifts. Also the team that welcomes a change initiative and slowly wears it down.
Relationships
The topic everyone avoids. A partner who agrees to couples therapy and keeps missing sessions. A joke, an intellectual debate or a fight about something else at the moment a real issue comes close.
Self
Sudden fatigue, boredom or distraction as you approach a particular subject. Strong certainty that 'that's not the issue'. Forgetting the thing you meant to raise.
What tells it apart
Psychological reactance: Reactance is pushback against pressure on one's freedom and fades when the pressure stops; resistance persists even when the person chose the change. Back off: if the pushback stops, it was reactance.
Passive aggression: Passive aggression expresses hostility towards another person indirectly; resistance is against one's own painful material and continues even when there is no one to defy.
Ambivalence: Ambivalence is conscious mixed feeling about a change and can be talked through openly; resistance operates out of awareness, and the person usually insists there is no obstacle.
A test
Name the pattern plainly and watch the response; if the conversation slides at once to a new topic, a joke or an argument about details, resistance is active.
Questions to carry
- Once the pattern is named plainly, where does the conversation slide in the next minute?
- Which change I say I want do I keep finding reasons to put off?
How strong the research is
clinical. Clinical concept; motivational interviewing research reframes much 'resistance' as a product of the helper's approach, and clients' reactance levels do predict how they respond to directive treatment (Beutler).
Where it comes from
Sigmund Freud, 1895 (Studies on Hysteria); Wilhelm Reich on character resistance, 1933; reframed by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick from 1991
On the family tree: Sigmund Freud
Sources
- Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1895)
- Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis (1933)