When I was a client (not a therapist), one of my earliest & smartest teachers taught me that:
Right at the moment you are getting close to major growth and change, your unconscious will become quite frightened of facing the resulting destabilization.
From that place, your psyche will create one of these stories to justify quitting this deep emotional work. Your cognitive thoughts will be:
- this process isn’t working and isn’t worth my time
- it’s too much money and I can’t afford it right now
- my therapists is incompetent (or malicious) and this is harming me
- therapy in general is BS and won’t make any difference; aka it’s hopeless to aspire to something better
- I’ve heard of this new healing modality (magic mushrooms; yoga; meditation; hypnosis; etc) and I think I’ll switch over and try that
All of those are just mental strategies to preserve the status-quo (aka homeostasis). To escape destabilizing change.
So when I have a client show these tells, I generally know I’m on the right track … my problem is not missing the issue … it’s pushing toward it a bit too aggressively. So their resistance is my reminder to SLOW WAY DOWN!
Dewey Gaedcke’s answer to How do you teach people accountability and to stop being a victim?