Counselling: From Resistance to Acceptance
Your 39-year-old female client seats herself and looksat you with frustration. It’s been many months now since she was diagnosed withthe neurodegenerative condition, but she just can’t accept it; life is becomingimpossible.
Your 20-something male client suffered a relationalbreakup seven months ago; this was his “love of my life” and he can’t get overit. He feels completely stuck and keeps coming to session with different plansfor contacting his former girlfriend, who has persistently declined to meet up.He just doesn’t get that it’s over.
Your late 50s former colleague recently called you,too. He was fired from your workplace because of “performance issues”: somethinghe is sure was motivated by a conflict he had with a third colleague. He feelsaggrieved, and wants help hatching a plan to sue your employer, even though theemployer gave him many chances to improve before finally letting him go.
What do all of these cases have in common? They —like all of us at times — are resisting accepting a change that has happened. Toresist is natural. As change management consultants are fond of saying, we arehardwired to resist change; our brain’s amygdala interprets change as a threatto the body and releases hormones for fear, fight, or flight (Pennington,2019). It’s how our body protects us from change. There’s a problem, though. Sometimesthe change forced upon us is permanent, and our continued resistance to it keepsus miserable, without having any effect on the situation. Recognising that andembarking on the journey to acceptance may be the only way we can reclaim ourinherent birthright of joy. We look into how we may do that.
Definitions
Some simple definitions will be helpful as we explore thistopic.
Resistance is “the act or power of resisting, opposing, or withstanding”, or in psychiatry: “Opposition to attempt to bring repressed thoughts or feelings into consciousness” (Dictionary. com, 2019a)
Acceptance, meanwhile, is “the act of taking or receiving something offered” (Dictionary.com, 2019b)
Stages on the road to acceptance
Imagine this scenario for a moment. Let’s say you come to livein a community which places top priority on being hospitable, so there is a lawthat citizens must accept into their homes all guests who present themselves atthe door. One day you answer a knock only to find there your new guest. Dirty, ugly,unkempt, scowling and mean, yet powerful, the guest comes in, despite yourmisgivings. Now life gets really interesting. How do you respond?
In the context of mindfulness leading to self-compassion,Christopher Germer (2009) outlines five stages of acceptance, althoughacknowledging that the process of moving through them from resistance is aniterative, back-and-forth affair, rather than proceeding neatly from the firstto the last. Let’s see how these resonate with you — or your anguished,change-resisting clients.
Stage 1: Aversion
At the beginning of the journey to acceptance, we arepresented with the change: the unwelcome guest in our analogy. It is at thisstage that our resistance is strongest. It’s the, “Oh, no — anything but that!”factor. Some of us go into denial, like the client above who continues tocontact the girlfriend as if the relationship were still intact. For others, itmay mean a second, or even third expert opinion, or more medical tests, beforethe terrible diagnosis is acknowledged. Resistance has been likened to “arguingwith reality”. As one author noted, however, when she does that, she loses: “butonly 100% of the time” (Farmer, 2016).
Mental health experts generally agree that resistancedoesn’t change things. Carl Jung observed the paradox of it: “We cannot changeanything until we accept it” (Bode, 2007). Yet at this stage, our stuckness isunyielding, our defences against change fully mobilised. Sally Kempton, writingin the Yoga Journal, names a few of them (Kempton, 2017).
Emotional armour. Resistancedoes have a helpful function (more on that in a moment), but carried too far,it stops being a useful filtering device for us and becomes a wall, a kind ofarmour. If we have been resisting for a significant period, we may haveingrained the habit so deeply that we are unable to tell if our inner “no” isvalid and helpful or just obstructive. An example here could be the couple whoknows on one level that their relationship is in jeopardy; genuine intimacy hasbeen slipping away for years. Yet night after night, they flop onto the couchfor more television watching, rejecting vehemently the suggestions of intuitiveothers that they need to talk.
Avoidance. What about theperson who loses his job, but then finds myriad excuses for not spending timein the job search effort to get a new one? Or the person who knows she needs tore-organise her finances to accommodate a changed life situation? Perhaps shekeeps putting it off because, secretly, she doesn’t understand how money worksand really hates facing that she is now forced to live in straitenedcircumstances.
Distraction. Some of us “do”resistance in a covert way. On the surface we seem to be going along with thechange, but on the inside our minds are worlds away, completely absent from theactivity we overtly agreed we needed/wanted to engage. A case in point here isthe person who does actually arrive at the meditation mat for the mindfulnesspractice they acknowledge they need, but once they begin the practice, they arethinking about anything but the breath they are supposed to be watching.
The Aversion stage is painful, yet that very pain — when itreaches an unbearable intensity — comes to be the ticket out of resistance. Atsome point, we are just so fed up with all the life energy that is being lostin resisting that we begin to look around for another way.
Stage 2: Curiosity
Germer’s second stage is marked by a subtle softening towardthe unwanted guest. Perhaps we realise that loathing and avoiding him isgetting us nowhere, except to bed in a cloud of fatigue and dread. We see thathe is not going away, and we can’t avoid him forever; after all, he lives inthe same “house” (our life) as we do. So . . . how else could we regard him? Isthere any other way we can find to be with him without being so enraged/disgusted/despairing?Carl Jung is also reputed to have said that we don’t solve our problems as muchas outgrow them. Thus at Stage 2, we begin to move toward exploring ourreluctance to deal with our uninvited guest. What, we ask, is ourdenial/avoidance/stuckness all about? What is the fear that lurks behind ourstrong emotion?
Stage 3: Tolerance — safely enduring
Coming into this midpoint on the road to acceptance, wenotice that — even though we still strongly protest that we don’t like him andthat it isn’t really “fair” that we have to shelter him — we are somehowfinding a way to tolerate our terrible guest. Perhaps we have learned how tomodify our daily life routines to accommodate a reduced capacity due toillness. Perhaps we have, albeit reluctantly, begun to engage socially againafter the agonising breakup. The important point is that, even if we still failto admit it to ourselves, we have begun to change ourselves in order to accommodate the change. Our nightmare guestis definitely still with us, but we see that we are surviving despite that. Forthe record, we may still say we can’t stand him, but we are learning to copewith him. In short, we acknowledge him and his presence, and the psychologicalpain of resistance is reduced accordingly. If we likened the changed situationto a hostile country on our borders, we would say that a truce is beingobserved. There is no true peace just yet.
Stage 4: Allowing
This stage is subtly different from mere tolerance. Here we are conscious of thoughts that still come to us about how great things were before The Unwanted Guest arrived, but now we allow them to come, knowing that the thoughts will leave, too. For example, we may see our late friend’s picture and wistfully recall all the marvellous conversations over endless cups of tea; for a few minutes, we ardently wish he hadn’t died. We may see a jogger in fine form and notice strenuous thoughts of frustration that we had to hang up our jogging shoes when our knees got really bad. But after those resistant thoughts, which we can now afford to openly acknowledge, we go back to living in the present moment, uninvited guest (of change) and all. We may still not like to admit it, but life is more or less ok again. We have given the guest the key to the house, so he can come and go as he pleases. Little by little, probably without noticing how it happened, we came to this place of being “sort of” ok with the change, of moving over psychologically to make room for it, even though we still look back in the rearview mirror on occasion, reflecting that “those were the days”.
Stage 5: Friendship
Germer’s last stage — arrival at acceptance and friendship —heralds an exciting development. We said at the outset that resistance has auseful filtering function, because sometimes we are better off when we doresist. If our boundaries are violated, we should resist. If we aredisrespected or treated in a degrading manner, resistance serves to let theother party know that they have crossed a red line — and had better cross backover it again to the other side! At this stage of coming to be with anunwelcome and possibly permanent change, however, we are in a differentrelationship with resistance. At Friendship, we finally come to comprehend thevalue of the experience we have just been through. Our uninvited guest nolonger looks so ugly or so threatening. In fact, to our great surprise, we seecause for friendship with him. That is, we are able to disidentify enough fromour initial resistance that we can see the silver lining in the change. Weappreciate the insights and lessons gleaned and know that we are somehowlarger, more powerful, more deeply connected to ourselves and all of life thanwe were before the change.
We may note, for example, that after a period ofunemployment, we are able to embrace our new work with more profound gratitude— and we learned how to live more simply in the bargain. Dealing with a chronicillness may have taught us to joyously welcome the good days, and learn to bemore even-minded with the not-so-good ones. And a newfound self-confidence inrelating to people after the breakup may make us seriously attractive to thekind of partner we always wanted. (Stages adapted from Germer, 2009).
Powerful questions to help clients journey to acceptance
As mental health professionals or coaches, we are inthe business of reframing, and the journey from resistance to acceptancedemands nothing less. Here are some reframing questions that you can use to helpclients along the road:
What is the currentimpact of this resistance in your life?
How do you envision thesituation in three months if there is no change?
Was there a time in thepast when you experienced something similar? How did you handle it? How didthat approach work?
Are you willing to seethis situation differently?
Do you believe that youhad a role in creating this? If so, what was it?
What fears, concerns, orobstacles come up as you think about letting go of the resistance?
How do you envision thesituation in three months if you accept the situation?
How does this align withyour values and beliefs? (Bode, 2007)
Acceptance is probably in that category of thing that is “simple, but it isn’t easy”. Moving past our resistance may be tough, but accepting reality allows us to make needed changes. It doesn’t mean we failed! It does mean we are freer: to be our more authentic selves, to respond to what our life needs, and to engage with meaning and purpose at ever more profound levels. At the beginning of the journey, it seemed that to accept the change meant the end of things: far from it. Acceptance is not the end. It is the beginning.
References
Bode, C. (2007). Power tool: Acceptance vs. resistance. Coachcampus.com. Retrieved on 25 June, 2019, from: Website.
Dictionary.com. (2019a). Resistance. Dictionary.com. Retrieved on 27 June, 2019, from: Website.
Dictionary.com. (2019b). Acceptance. Dictionary.com. Retrieved on 27 June, 2019, from: Website.
Farmer, J. (2016). The battle of acceptance versus resistance. Attorney with a life. Retrieved on 27 June, 2019, from: Website.
Germer, C. (2009). The mindful path to self-compassion: Freeing yourself from destructive thoughts and emotions. New York: Guilford Press.
Kempton, S. (2017). Free yourself. Yoga journal. Retrieved on 25 June, 2019, from: Website.
Pennington, C. (2019). People are hardwired to resist change. Emerson Human Capital. Retrieved on 27 June, 2019, from: Website.