An Open Letter to Health & Wellness Professionals
(Note: The bulk of this letter is focused on my experience with therapy, both as a client and as a professional. However, the underlying messages here equally apply to any other health and wellness professional, even as our roles and work might be quite different. I would love to hear any responses - especially feedback and criticisms. It is the only way we learn and grow.)
Resistance is not the problem.
Yes, it can be incredibly frustrating that our clients get stuck - when something in them seems to go against what they want (or what we believe they should want). Maybe they come to us wanting to get fit, to eat more nutritiously, to recover from an injury, to heal past trauma, or any number of other goals. But we notice that, whether implicitly or explicitly, they seem to get stuck or just not do what we believe would support them.
In other words, they seem to be dealing with some kind of resistance.
And their resistance can be especially frustrating when it seems to be getting in the way of us doing our jobs as health and wellness professionals.
But we miss the point entirely when we direct our efforts to help our clients to “make progress” against the resistance as if the resistance itself were the problem.
If there was a hill I’d be willing to die on, it’s that absolutely everything we do makes sense and is an attempt to take care of ourselves or someone else (and to the extent that we are all interconnected, those are essentially the same thing). And that includes our clients’ resistance.
The Mistake: Making Resistance the Enemy
However, the health and wellness fields (including the worlds of spirituality and mindfulness) have largely made resistance the enemy. As a long-time health & wellbeing seeker myself, some of the anti-resistance messages I have directly received include:
Just let it go! (“It” being thoughts, feelings, stories, etc.)
Stop self-sabotaging.
Just feel your feelings.
Simply create a routine and stick to it - even (and especially) if you don’t want to do it.
Your thoughts create your reality, so simply change your thoughts (especially through affirmations, mantras, etc.).
You know what you want, so just get out there and do it.
Push through.
Don’t believe the negative thoughts/feelings/etc.
Clear your mind.
Just do the work!
[Insert any flavor of defensive or pushy reaction to expressing my resistance here.]
Like so many of our clients, I spent years thinking that my resistance (whether to “being present,” to “going deeper” in my internal work, to letting go, to moving my body, to eating well, to getting good sleep, or anything else) was a flaw. That if I could just overcome my resistance, I would reach a promised land of wellbeing. That my resistance was just an illusory barrier put up by my “ego” and not in itself worthy of respect. That my resistance was the thing screwing up my ability to get what I was looking for.
Resistance also gets mislabeled as “self-sabotage.” This implies that there is an intent on the part of the resistance to proactively sabotage ourselves. In reality, the “sabotage” is one of two things: either it is simply an unintended consequence of an attempt to take care of ourselves in another way, or it is an attempt to stop us from doing something that feels like it would jeopardize our ability to meet another need. Either way, it is the price that our system is willing to pay to take care of a need that feels more important than whatever might be “sabotaged” in the process.
Whether painted as a barrier or as self-sabotage, the idea that my resistance was somehow the problem simply meant that I (and too many of the helping professionals I worked with and self-help books I read) perpetuated a war against parts of myself that only wanted to take care of me.
Resistance isn’t the Problem - It’s the Path
Resistance is not the problem that we as health and wellness professionals are here to overcome in our clients. While resistance can be seen primarily as a block to doing/believing/experiencing certain things, that is not actually its deeper intention. It is not just “in the way.” Its intention is always to move us towards something - specifically something that it believes will be compromised by what our motivation is trying to achieve.
Not only is resistance not the problem, it’s actually the path. It tells us exactly what our clients need and the pace they need to go for them to safely and sustainably reach what their motivation is pointing them towards:
Maybe that looks like making sure other needs are being met sufficiently so that they have enough energy/time to do what they need to do.
Maybe it’s supporting them to build skills that they don’t have or don’t know they need (even if they seem obvious to you).
Maybe there’s trauma that needs to be addressed/healed so that it feels safe or even possible to do what they need to do (and depending on your role, that might mean referring your clients to a therapist or trauma specialist to get that support).
Whatever it is that resistance is saying no to, it is an enormous clue to what else a client needs in order to be able to move towards what their motivation wants for them.
The Impact of Resisting Resistance
In my experience, most of the irreparable ruptures that I’ve experienced in helping relationships (both as the client and as the professional) are not because of resistance itself. It’s because of our resistance to our clients’ resistance (aka our metaresistance). However conscious or not we might be of it, it is our judgment and rejection of our clients’ resistance that leads us to respond to it in ways that only serve to keep our clients stuck. We usually respond in one of two ways:
We double-down on trying to motivate our clients, effectively going to war against the client’s resistance.
Give up on our clients and chalk it up to them not being motivated enough.
In our rejection of client resistance, some professionals even go as far as saying, “I only work with motivated clients” (not recognizing that every client who comes to us has both motivation and resistance). What that means is that some of us don’t even entertain working with someone whose resistance is more obvious. And that attitude means that when the client’s resistance inevitably shows itself, those of us who “only work with motivated clients” are often the least prepared to manage it.
As a client myself, I have accumulated too many experiences of being on the receiving end of a professional’s metaresistance. The wounds that resulted from these experiences at times motivated me to continue my search for someone who might be able to handle my resistance, but too often led me to withdraw and give up on finding support (at least for a time). And I know this to be true for so many of my clients who share similar stories with me.
Some of the consequences of mishandling client resistance can include impacts on both your clients and yourself as the professional.
Impacts on our clients:
Staying stuck because the need that is trying to be met via their resistance is not being tended to
Ending their work with us prematurely
Doubling down on being the “good client” and not giving us important feedback
Internalizing a sense of failure or not being good enough
Blaming themselves for the ways they feel stuck
Impacts on us as professionals:
Feeling stuck because it seems like “nothing is working”
Ending the relationship with the client prematurely
Doubling down on being the “good professional” and going past our own limits
Internalizing a sense of failure or not being good enough
Blaming ourselves for our own and/or our clients’ stuckness
In my own journey, these experiences of misattunement to my resistance damaged my trust in my own profession to the point of feeling completely at a loss for who to turn to during the most extreme mental health crisis I’ve faced as an adult. And while I found my way through and can even make meaning out of the way my path unfolded, I will always maintain that it didn’t need to go the way it did. And I would honestly rather it hadn’t.
(Note: I want to add that all of what I say here about befriending our clients’ resistance applies to our own metaresistance. Our resistance of our clients’ resistance is also an attempt to take care of ourselves or our clients, which I talk about a bit more here.)
The Resistance Roadmap: Befriending Resistance as the Way Out of Stuckness
So then - what do we as professionals do to avoid these outcomes?
We befriend resistance as our ally, not our enemy.
There are three important steps that make up the roadmap to befriending client resistance:
Recognize and explore our own relationship to resistance (aka our metaresistance)
Understand and connect with the needs trying to be met by the resistance
Include both resistance and motivation in our work to support clients in moving toward their goals
In order to take these steps, though, we must assume responsibility for our relationship to our clients’ resistance and see it as the foundation of our work with them.
It is always the responsibility of the professional to be able to recognize and tend to their clients’ resistance, whether or not we are conscious of that responsibility. Not as an inconvenience, but as a vital actor in the client’s process. And while I personally am angry at the fact that at the end of the day many of the professionals I worked with as a client struggled with that responsibility, I also can’t fully blame them. There is so little training and effective guidance on how to not only tolerate or work around resistance, but to actually leverage it to the benefit of both the client and the professional.
But just like even the most genuine ignorance of the law doesn’t stop us from our responsibility to face the consequences of breaking it, the same goes with our responsibility to take our clients’ resistance into consideration. The consequences of not taking up that responsibility will follow, whether or not we were made aware of it or supported in developing skills to respond to it in our training.
In the negative experiences I’ve had, I know that the professionals I worked with were good people having a hard time (as Dr. Becky Kennedy says about parents struggling with the challenges of raising children). I know that the outcome was not lined up with their conscious intentions, which I’m sure were to help me in my process. I’m sure the same is true for the professionals that many of my clients have worked with before me, and also for myself when clients have been on the receiving end of my own mistakes.
The vast (vast!) majority of us who get into the work of supporting others on their health and wellness journey want the best for our clients. Given that, my hope is that by offering this perspective on resistance (and effective tools for working with it), health and wellness professionals can continue to better match these genuinely well-meaning intentions with the actual outcomes we know are possible.
Ready to get started?
My free self-assessment and guide, The Resistance Reframe, offers a framework to support you in taking the first step: more deeply understanding and exploring your relationship to resistance.
Inside you will get:
A self-assessment to see if client resistance is (at least part of) why you feel stuck with some of your clients
A framework that redefines resistance and positions it within the wider context of each client’s process
Specific guidelines for applying the reframed approach to resistance with your clients (no matter what your field or approach)
A list of practical tips that can address other reasons (aside from client resistance) that you might be feeling stuck in your practice
If you are looking for more individualized support and consultation around working with client resistance, let’s chat and see if we might be a good fit.
