The resistance therapist blogReflections on Resistance
Find articles:
What should I ask a therapist in a discovery call or first session?
You can find a ton of articles and blog posts about the basic questions to ask a therapist when you first meet with them. They include questions about their background and training, their years of experience, the types of clients they have experience with, etc.
What most of those lists aren’t going to include, though, are questions that will help you know how a therapist handles the more challenging moments of therapy. And while I might be biased, my experience as a client and as a therapist is that most of the irreparable ruptures I have experienced are as a result of…
How to Work With Client Resistance
When it comes to navigating client resistance, the foundation of any other skills or guidance is this: work with resistance - not as something inconvenient or problematic, but as a vital part of the client's process.
Without this perspective, the specific approaches that I offer could be used to simply keep you stuck battling against resistance rather than…
How Client Resistance Shows Up
The short version is that client resistance shows up as any kind of “no” in response to something that they are trying to do. We call this no “resistance” particularly when it is directed at something that we (as wellness professionals) think our clients should do.
That “no” can sometimes be…
![Working With “Difficult” Clients [Means Working With Ourselves]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/65308be099e6206436d93199/1acd192b-e1bd-433c-83eb-53e1107560b3/katja-vogt-RNXjjVRUYWo-unsplash.jpg)
Working With “Difficult” Clients [Means Working With Ourselves]
It’s Monday morning and you check your calendar for the upcoming week and you feel yourself tense up a bit. Your most “difficult” client is scheduled to come in this afternoon and you had totally forgotten…
What Your “Resistant Client” Wants You to Know
Well - these are the kinds of things they might want you to know. I can’t know for sure because each person is different. But these are some of the things that I have wanted wellness professionals to know when it comes to my own resistance, and my guess is that some of them might resonate for your clients, too.
While everyone has both motivation and resistance, some of us…
Is My Client Resistant?
Assuming that your client is probably a person (which is likely a pretty safe assumption)…then the answer is…
Do New Year’s Resolutions Work?
The statistics are out there to back up what we all know - that most of us tend to quickly abandon our new year’s resolutions. This is a well-known fact. And yet…
Should I Make New Year’s Resolutions?
I love reasons to start fresh.
I was one of the kids that loved the smell of the office supply store at the start of the school year, bringing with it the tangible sense of a new beginning (and I still can’t walk into one of them without a pang of nostalgia). I’ve always taken my birthday as a moment to reflect back and reset myself around what’s important to me. In any relationship I’ve had, I’ve always played up anniversaries of all kinds.
It only follows, then, that I’ve always been a fan of New Year’s resolutions. But because of the feeling of pressure…
What is Resistance?
I love resistance.
It honestly, truly, cross-my-heart brings me joy when people who seek me out for therapy express the parts of them that don't want therapy, healing, recovery, or whatever else they initially expressed that wanted to get from our work together.
The trick is…