{"id":28,"date":"2012-09-14T00:37:02","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T00:37:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/?p=28"},"modified":"2012-09-14T00:37:48","modified_gmt":"2012-09-14T00:37:48","slug":"28","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/28\/","title":{"rendered":"Resistance – 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the website<\/a> I explain resistance<\/a> in some detail and I encourage you to read that before the rest of this entry.\u00a0 Resistance is the hardest topic to compress into digestible web pages and thus the one I will probably talk most about in this blog.\u00a0 Here are two quick examples.<\/p>\n

The first comes from everyday life.\u00a0 When I was 20, I was visibly balding.\u00a0 By the time I was 30 I looked like Patrick Stewart.\u00a0 I joked about it, frequently performed as an actor and cheerfully donned whatever wigs were requested by the director, and otherwise gave the impression \u2013 to myself and to others \u2013 that I had long accepted this this development in my development.\u00a0 About 10 years later, I shaved the remaining hair off.\u00a0 Now remember that for the previous decade I\u2019d had only the smallest fringe around the back of my head, reaching around just over my ears; otherwise I was a cue ball (in fact I think Patrick Stewart has more hair than I do).\u00a0 Yet for well over a month after I did the deed I would find myself physically startled by my reflection in the mirror.\u00a0 Each time I looked at myself I was genuinely astonished to realize “wow!\u00a0 I’m bald!”\u00a0 And don’t forget most of what I shaved can’t even be seen when looking in the mirror anyway, as it’s in back of me.<\/p>\n

The first thing to understand about resistance is that it happens at the unconscious level.\u00a0 My experience after shaving my head is a perfect example.\u00a0 Although I firmly believed that I knew I was bald \u2013 had gone through my self-conscious phase and had accepted the loss \u2013 you cannot deny my physical reaction.\u00a0 And that reaction can\u2019t be explained by anything other than my less than conscious denial that I’m bald.\u00a0 At some level, despite a decade of all evidence to the contrary, I held onto some belief that I had hair like Mel Gibson in the \u201cLethal Weapon\u201d movies.<\/p>\n

In a more serious vein, as is so for all patients Amy\u2019s resistance was at the core of her therapy.\u00a0 She came to me in her early 30s complaining of emotional constriction \u2013 she could scarcely remember having cried in her life \u2013 an obsession with getting attention from strange men, a series of failed relationships, chronic distrust, and other unhappiness.\u00a0 She grew up very poor, with a chaotic and cruel family.\u00a0 Her mother and stepfather routinely humiliated or neglected her; her life history is peppered with one horrible story after another of raised and then violently dashed hopes.\u00a0 As she tells it, Amy learned by the time she was about eight years old to take care of herself.\u00a0 She found ways to comfort and even entertain herself; at the conscious level she understood that her parents were alternately unreliable and cruel, and she managed successfully to seek out emotional and practical support from others.\u00a0 When she was 17 she left home.\u00a0 She has become a successful businesswoman, is now in a fairly stable relationship despite her anxieties about it, and on the surface she seems to understand her past and to some degree what it has done to her.<\/p>\n

But as I like to remind patients, you can\u2019t argue with data.\u00a0 My reaction to my shaved head must be accounted for, regardless of what I think I already know (i.e. that I\u2019d been bald half my life by then, long gotten used to it).\u00a0 And the data with Amy include that she was continuing to devote a great deal of thought and effort to trying to communicate with her mother and stepfather, constantly astounded by their lack of response \u2013 just as I was repeatedly astounded by the sight of my bald head, 15 years after it got that way.\u00a0 She would obsess during our sessions, for example, about a phone message from her mother, wondering why she had called, whether she should call back, recounting stories about her mother illustrating the latter\u2019s neglect and lack of interest in her (past and present), resentful of it and yet dwelling on the possibility of finally getting this woman to finally acknowledged and appreciate her, and so on.\u00a0 She spent much energy and money on long distance holidays with the family, seeking the perfect gifts and activities they might appreciate, yet for her entire life was never rewarded with an ounce of recognition for all this, and she was never given anything remotely similar in return; meanwhile she failed to appreciate and build upon the relationships with available people in her own life, some of who loved her and had much to offer.\u00a0 She claimed never to think about her biological father, yet found herself experiencing the kind of physical surprise that I did over my shaved head when she managed to make contact with paternal relatives and had to face \u2013 again \u2013 the reality that this man had no interest in her overtures.\u00a0 Despite what she thought she knew about herself, Amy found that she was depressed, enraged, and otherwise astonished that her father and his family were so unresponsive to her.<\/p>\n

In short, Amy thought she knew where she had come from, and what she felt about it.\u00a0 But her unrelenting efforts to build her relationship with these unavailable people, and her repeated shock at finding them so unresponsive and uninterested in her \u2013 despite a lifetime of experiences with them \u2013 show that she did not<\/span> know, that she was in fact resisting awareness of exactly that which she claimed to know.<\/p>\n

It was only when she began to really face \u2013 remember, feel, relive \u2013 the reality of her family and their past and present behavior towards her, that two important things happened to her.\u00a0 First she gradually abandoned the draining, repetitive, endlessly frustrating efforts to make them appreciate her.\u00a0\u00a0 Second, her other symptoms started to abate:\u00a0 She lost her obsession with getting attention from men and her panic when such attention wasn\u2019t constant, she cried and physically loosened up, she began to enjoy herself and her talents instead of living in tense hope that the next accomplishment would finally make her feel better, and she relaxed with her boyfriend instead of constantly worrying that he was cheating on her.\u00a0 But all along \u2013 like me with the hair \u2013 Amy thought she knew herself.<\/p>\n

Some branches of psychoanalysis are fond of saying “analysis of the resistance is the treatment”.\u00a0 There is a lot of truth to this, and you can see how this worked with Amy.\u00a0 More examples to come, and again be sure to read the \u201cResistance<\/a>\u201d page of the main website (\u201cAboutPsychotherapy.com<\/a>“) for a more complete description of the phenomenon.\u00a0\u00a0 And watch for examples in your own life!\u00a0 They happen frequently, and I\u2019ll have examples in future entries.<\/p>\n

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In the website I explain resistance in some detail and I encourage you to read that before the rest of this entry.\u00a0 Resistance is the hardest topic to compress into digestible web pages and thus the one I will probably … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions\/33"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}