Befriending resistance

June 14th, 2008

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, “resistance” means the way we sometimes fight against painful thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc. It’s a good word for getting across the physicality of what is supposedly a mental struggle: when we’re resisting, it can feel like someone is tugging on us, trying to pull us over, and we’re fighting to stay upright or get away.

Resistance can set up quicker than thinking, as quick as throwing a hand in front of our face if an object seems about to hit us. Bang! It hits us anyway, and we find ourselves grappling with our anxiety, our depressive thoughts, our hostility or panic or self-loathing.

Resistance can also be slow. It can build from some seemingly minor incident, some event we shrug off as no big deal. Our shrugging off is how it begins, but we don’t notice this. Over hours or even days the heat of the resistance spreads the way a coal seam fire spreads underground beneath an entire town. Suddenly it bursts into the open, and we find ourselves behaving badly, hurting ourselves or people we love. Not understanding why. If this happens enough times, and if we pay attention, we may start to remember the small triggering incidents - we may start to see the pattern.

Resistance seems like a bad thing, does it not? It’s avoidance; it’s the thing we’re not supposed to have, the thing we’re not supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to drop the rope, but here we are hauling away on it. Ashamed of ourselves, even. Why haven’t we made more progress?

Yet we can think of resistance as our friend. Why not?

Once we notice it, we can work with it. Over and over, the same way we do everything in life over and over: sleeping and waking, eating and fasting, resisting and accepting. Naturally, over and over. Seizing the possibility of something more.

It is clear that resistance begins with the mind’s judgment that whatever we are feeling or thinking or sensing is so wrong as to be intolerable. Letting go of resistance begins with letting go of this judgment - not denying it, just opening our hand so it can slip free. Sometimes I’ve felt the release as a physical event. Other times, most times, not. There is no rule I know of.

The release may result in thoughts springing up: What does this say about me? What do I do next? A hard part is realizing that in fact we don’t know what will come next. Here, experience helps. We can learn that in certain situations, opening up leads to unpredictable but generally good things, so that we become willing to repeat the experiment, create a habit of openness.

That goes only so far, of course - at first. Until we realize sometime later that yes, we did succeed - and triumphantly yet fearfully begin to generalize, to work our way farther away from comfort, extending willingness with each step into more difficult territory.

I wonder what awaits us - what awaits me. If I begin to find beauty in unguessed places inside myself, will I also find it in unguessed places in the world?

Entry Filed under: Mindfulness, Third-wave behavioral therapies - ACT, DBT, etc.