{"id":56,"date":"2013-10-24T19:04:46","date_gmt":"2013-10-24T19:04:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/?p=56"},"modified":"2013-11-07T19:48:09","modified_gmt":"2013-11-07T19:48:09","slug":"resistance-what-a-mess-and-why-psychotherapy-is-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/resistance-what-a-mess-and-why-psychotherapy-is-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"Resistance – what a mess! (And why psychotherapy is fun)"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the thorny things about identifying and helping a person with their resistance<\/a> is that it can present as almost any behavior, thought, or feeling; thus, one man’s resistance is another man’s honesty.\u00a0 I remember a good example of this with Emily, a patient who came to see me complaining of depression and a pattern of avoidance that she feared was interfering with her career as a self-employed business consultant.\u00a0 She also described frequently racing thoughts, rumination over any perceived slight, and nightmares that awakened her in a panic.\u00a0 Her marriage was fairly stable, by all accounts her husband was a reasonable and supportive guy, but she struggled with frequent irritability which we quickly identified as mostly defensive \u2013 i.e. she would snap at him, or want to, because she felt challenged, backed into a corner, criticized, or \u201cmanipulated\u201d, and didn\u2019t feel able to speak up directly about it.<\/p>\n

In one session Emily described her frustration with her 5 year old daughter who came home from her first day at school and announced emphatically that she would not be returning.\u00a0 She repeated this declaration rather melodramatically several times when Emily tried to inquire about the reasons for the little girl\u2019s decision.\u00a0 In the same session, Emily reported a dream in which she was running some sort of microwave emitter over the skin of a small, albino man with a shaved head, charring him as she did so.\u00a0 She awoke in a panic.\u00a0 She went back to sleep, had a less frightening dream (see below) but again awoke in panic.<\/p>\n

Sounding like a shrink, I asked Emily about her feelings while talking to her daughter.\u00a0 Referencing a previous session in which we had seen how her and most people\u2019s rage usually covers feelings of helplessness, humiliation, insecurity, or similar shakiness, Emily dutifully responded that she felt helpless.\u00a0 I didn’t believe her.\u00a0 I asked for the details of her inquiry into her daughter’s reasons for refusing school.\u00a0 Emily reluctantly realized that her response to her daughter was one of marked impatience and irritation.\u00a0 She demonstrated a gesture she made at the time which would clearly be very unsettling to a five-year-old girl.\u00a0 At that point Emily volunteered similar moments of difficulty with her daughter, e.g. the child\u2019s habit of asking her mother or father repeatedly some question like “can you help me with this”.\u00a0\u00a0 Emily complained that her daughter hardly allow time for an answer such as “in just a moment, sweetie” before repeating her request.\u00a0 Again, suspecting there was more to this story, I asked for details.\u00a0 Emily responded “I try to tell her to give me a minute”, to which I inquired “you \u2018try\u2019?”<\/p>\n

Even without knowing Emily as I did by this session, you may suspect that there is something missing here because surely there is no particular effort required in giving such an answer, and Emily had already told me that her daughter was not a particularly loud, insistent, tantruming child.\u00a0 Sure enough, as Emily described her behavior it was clear that she was struggling with considerable frustration which she expressed<\/span> to her daughter, although she did not mean to do so \u2013 just as Emily had already told me in previous sessions she at times lashes out unreasonably with others (her husband, colleagues, even clients on occasion).\u00a0 And if the child was indeed interrupting with a repeated question so quickly that Emily could not get her answer out, what about using a gesture that communicates “just a moment” nonverbally and immediately, e.g. holding up a finger?\u00a0 Emily demonstrated such a gesture in response to my inquiry, and said she employs it, but in her demonstration clearly looked away from her daughter in irritation, even disgust.\u00a0 (I double checked how Emily performed the gesture.)\u00a0 It is no wonder that the little girl repeats her questions, anxious and frustrated, even panicked by her mother\u2019s bewildering dismissal \u2013 abandonment \u2013 just when she needs her.<\/p>\n

Before acknowledging all of this, however, Emily was at first insisting, in her typically rather dry and lifeless tone, that she felt “helpless” when her daughter announced that she did not want to attend school or when the girl asked a question repeatedly.\u00a0 Somewhere in our exchange, I don’t recall exactly where, I smiled and said simply \u201cShaddup\u201d several times; Emily tried to ignore this and talk over me.\u00a0 My admittedly outrageous bit of behavior appears in few if any standard texts on psychotherapy, however it was just right for Emily and I.\u00a0 I asked her about this odd effort to ignore my rude interruption, and she showed for her a rare bit of emotionality in the session; she angrily said “you were just telling me that I should be careful about expressing frustration or becoming insistent about Jackie [the daughter] going to school because as you say the poor, helpless child has no real power except to refuse, and she is too young to express or even identify just what was upsetting her at school\u201d.\u00a0 Now, that\u2019s all true \u2013 I did say all that earlier in the session \u2013 but it was not what I had just asked Emily.<\/p>\n

I said as much and Emily acknowledged that what I\u2019d just asked was her feelings<\/span> while talking to Emily, not what she actually did.\u00a0 At that point, perhaps because she was already incensed by my teasing, Emily acknowledged how angry she was at her daughter, and also how much hostility she was actually communicating \u2013 as well as feeling \u2013 in her nonverbal behavior toward the child, e.g. the looking away in disgust while holding up the finger.\u00a0 Of course, such behavior has the opposite effect on Jackie from what Emily wants.\u00a0 It makes a child more frightened, frustrated, insistent on and demanding of a response. \u00a0What is needed is the same gesture but with clear attention and eye contact from Emily, without the disgust, which would say to the child \u201cyes, I hear you, and I\u2019ll answer, but you gotta wait a moment \u2018til mommy finishes her sip of coffee\u201d. Such a gesture is usually very well received, comforts and reassures a child while at the same time requiring that she learn to tolerate delay, a moment of frustration, and all the other necessities of dealing with other people; teachers and peers, and later employers and lovers, are not going to answer just when and how you want.<\/p>\n

So here is a case where irritation and rage are not the standard defense they usually are against<\/span> the acknowledgment of such unwieldy feelings as helplessness, uncertainty, humiliation, and so on.\u00a0 Rather, Emily was using a superficial acknowledgment of feeling helpless as a way of hiding from just how angry and hostile she not only felt but actually acted.<\/p>\n

And why is any of this important?\u00a0 Not because shrinks like to get in touch with feelings.\u00a0 Rather, because Emily felt and did better as result of our discussion (combined with other sessions, of course).\u00a0 Her anxiety lessened, she felt clearer and stronger, she looked and sounded more alive, and she was much clearer on how she was perpetuating her daughter\u2019s less adaptive behavior \u2013 the badgering people with repeated questions \u2013 by her own inadvertently hostile and rejecting responses.\u00a0 Finally, relieved of the burden of hiding from \u2013 resisting \u2013 her feelings of irritation, hostility, frustration, she was more relaxed and less unnecessarily combative in her dealings with everyone – husband, daughter, colleagues, etc.<\/p>\n

But things don\u2019t end here.\u00a0 To further complicate matters, do not doubt that Emily’s hostility and combativeness towards her daughter and others is itself another layer of resistance!\u00a0 Although at first she resisted acknowledging such unflatteringly aggressive feelings, they are themselves a cover for more unwieldy, uncomfortable feelings of insecurity, helplessness, self-doubt, being judged, and so on.\u00a0 We discovered all this in much later sessions.\u00a0 Thus 1) she hid from her feelings of aggression and rage with a more socially acceptable (especially in our culture for women) admission of feeling helpless; 2) those aggressive\/hostile feelings themselves at least in part serve to resist more substantial feelings of humiliation, helplessness, etc. that at this point she was touching superficially.<\/p>\n

This brief sketch and especially the last paragraph you just read demonstrate a reason I don’t talk about resistance in too much detail on my website<\/a>:\u00a0 It’s too damned complicated! it doesn’t lend itself to easy description.\u00a0 I have a full book chapter<\/a> on the topic available for those who are interested.<\/p>\n

This vignette demonstrates a couple of other points.\u00a0 First, remember that dream at the top of the entry?\u00a0 And her panic as the dream awoke her at 4 a.m.?\u00a0 Remember also that this was not the first such dream and panicked awakening.\u00a0 As Emily and I discussed the dream, it became clear that the figure in the dream was me.\u00a0 Then in her second dream that night, she was being chased by robbers, was gathering weapons to fight them off, and then found a tiny box of gold which she was able to give to the villains saying “I have what you want”.\u00a0 Although this dream ended calmly, she again awoke in a panic.\u00a0 Emily’s own association to this dream was to the “little bits of gold that I get from some of our sessions”.\u00a0 She described leaving my office sometimes very excited by the “little epiphanies” that she would have as we talked or which occurred as she later thought about our discussions.<\/p>\n

What emerges as lurking under Emily’s at times quite listless presentation is the passion seen in her dreams, in her rather constant feeling of irritability and frustration, in her moments of panic and anxiety, and in her behavior towards her daughter and others.\u00a0 On the more positive side, her dreams also reveal her excitement about our work, about outgrowing her timidity, sense of being burdened all the time, and her resultant sour attitude; in the second dream that night, she experienced and expressed how much our sessions mean to her, her excitement at her “little epiphanies\u201d and how much better they left her feeling, all of which one would hardly suspect from her outward demeanor.\u00a0 Alternatively, but with equal energy and passion, we see in her first dream just how furious she can become with me \u2013 perhaps at times because of how fragile and exposed she becomes in sessions, opening up her personal life to me, and how she therefore how wants to turn the tables and destroy me, making me small, colorless (albino, draining the life\/color from me), then torturing\/destroying me.\u00a0 By contrast, in her daily life Emily tends to keep herself bland, on the straight and narrow, amiable, professional, even colorless.\u00a0 (Of course if that approach worked, she would not be having nightmares and panic, would not be so depressed \u2013 lifeless\/colorless? \u2013 would not be in such constant irritation or outright conflict with others, and would not have contacted me.)<\/p>\n

Finally, this vignette illustrates one of the great things about my job.\u00a0 People sometimes ask me “how can you listen to people’s problems all day?\u00a0 Don’t you get bored?\u00a0 Doesn’t their unhappiness affect you?”\u00a0 The answer to these questions is in this vignette.\u00a0 Our session left Emily feeling more alive, calmer, more optimistic, clearer, and functioning better \u2013 of course, not all sessions are this productive \u2013 so not only don\u2019t I feel crushed or weighed down by her problems but I\u2019m 1) hopeful, 2) gratified that I can help.\u00a0 It\u2019s also great fun because it is in my office that I can be most honest.\u00a0 Think about it.\u00a0 Unless you’re talking to a very close friend, it is not usually acceptable to interrupt with several repetitions of “Shaddup\u201d when you feel bored, when listening to someone\u2019s defensive retreat from admission of what they felt and did in the story they\u2019re telling, when hearing a sanitized or even self-serving version of events \u2013 such as when a politician or salesman says almost anything.\u00a0 But in my office not only can I tell the truth but I have to; it\u2019s what cures.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the thorny things about identifying and helping a person with their resistance is that it can present as almost any behavior, thought, or feeling; thus, one man’s resistance is another man’s honesty.\u00a0 I remember a good example of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[5,4,3,6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56"}],"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=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions\/60"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}