I have found some most interesting notes on resistance in the latest book i've been reading and I thought I would share some excerpts from the chapter on Resistance here (I hope that it's ok to share a substantial amount of text from this book, there were just too many good quotes!... I'll include a link to the book on amazon too).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Betwee...id=1338112704&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Between-...id=1338112565&sr=8-1


Between person and person: toward a dialogical pshychoterapy - by Richard Hycner, Maurice Friedman


"Resistance is the residue of an attempted dialogue cut short in mid sentence."

"All so- called resistance is a manifestation of just how vulnerable this person feels. It is an essential form of self-protectiveness."

"Until the therapist can appreciate someone's resistance, his self-protectiveness, the therapist hasnt really fully entered into the client's experiental world."

"The initial task of the dialogical therapist is to appreciate the wisdom of the resistance. This is a shift in attitude from the traditional perspective. ... Along with this appreciation, the therapist must also recognise how limiting resistance can be. This is obvious, yet needs to be focused on primarily later in the process of the therapy. To make it primary early on is to make the therapy a battleground, with a winner and a loser rather than it being a healing endeavor. This is a difficult dance that the therapist is called upon to engage in. It is a dance with the client and with his resistance. It has a rhythm all its own - once often difficult to move with. It is participated in gingerly, for there are many potential missteps."

"It is necessary to teach the client that to impose external goals on himself to overcome his resistance paradoxically guarantees increased resistance. The first step in this process is for the therapist to help the client to experience his resistance. Once the client has an experiential sense of his resistance, it is then necessary to help the client to begin to acknowledge, to appreciate, to accept the resistance as an integral part of one's self."

"The therapist needs to see in the resistance its creative value. ... No real progress can be made in therapy until the client is willing to first of all acknowledge, then to appreciate, the wisdom of his resistance: that there is something invaluable about the resistant behavior."

"Resistance is not to be castigated, but rather to be embraced. Resistance is not to be broken through, but rather to be incorporated. The only way to get where you want to be is to accept where you are, even if where you are isn't where you want to be. What is required for growth is an integration of seemingly opposed polarities. It is the paradoxical valuing of all of one's self, including those parts perceived as undesirable, that begins the road to recovery."

"A fundamental question that needs to be asked of the client is: "How is this resistant behavior supportive to you?" "

"A client's resistance is often an aspect of what is traditionally called transference. However, this does not mean, as was sometimes thought, that the client superimposes previous experiences on the therapeutic situation irrespective of who the therapist is, or how he responds. Transference resistance is very much a function of the between, the meeting of therapist and client. There is no resistance without another person to be resistant to - either present or imagined to be present.... A therapist's lack of responsiveness, or a particular kind of response may elicit or increase resistance."

"Resistance is a as much an experience within the therapeutic relationship contributed to in part by the style of the therapist, as it is a dynamic process within the patient. Resistance is a natural consequence of the transaction between the patient's characteristic modes of relatedness and the analyst's therapeutic style and skill."

"One of the soul-searching questions that needs to be asked in every psychotherapy is : "Who is being resistant: the client - or the therapist?" Often, it is both. The client's resistance is often exacerbated by the therapists's own resistance. "

"It is the creative task of the therapist to be able to meet the client at the point of his resistance. All resistance is on one hand avoidance of some behavior, yet on the other had is also contact with oneself intrapsychically: it is contact with earlier defensive needs while concurrently being inter-personal contact - circuitous as it might be. Circuitous because it is contact through conflict. ... It's importance is underlined by the reality that it is precisely at this point that others have abandoned this person because of the this seemingly insoluble conflict."

"Perhaps it is the greatest challenge the therapist faces - the challenge of genuinely "being with" someone who is experienced as oppositional."

"The challenge of the therapist is to meet the client at that point of contact, in a manner that encompasses that resistance, rather than threatens it. It is to genuinely see the resistance as a point of contact between rather than as merely an oppositional force against. ... It is a task that may become a shared endeavor of therapist and client."

"Joining with is the next movement beyond contact at the point of resistance. ... In joining with the resistance, the therapist is standing on the side of the client's fearful self. ... It is asking the client's real self - almost like asking a frightened child - whether it's okay to enter into the sacred privacy of his hiding place."

"However, there is also the reality that sometimes resistance is just resistance. This initial effort of meeting at the point of the resistance, and of joining it, does not exclude larger efforts to challenge the resistance. In fact, such a challenging, perhaps a "supportive nudging", occurs only after the therapist has thoroughly understood the client's meanings and empathized with them and has established a bond with this person which provides the context for such a nudging."