How to Work With Client Resistance
Work With Resistance, Not Against It
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 collaborating with it as the key to your clients’ success. We might try to use compassion to manipulate resistance out of the way. We could seek to understand what the resistance wants for our client so that we can try to prove that it’s not necessary.
For better or for worse, the approaches I offer will never “work” when they are used against resistance. And I would argue that going against resistance never actually “works,” anyway, regardless of how you try to do it.
Treating resistance as the problem will only lead it to dig its heels in deeper. It will simply find other (and often even more effective) ways to keep on doing what it does, all while being even more disconnected from the client’s process.
When we work with resistance, it actually allows us to build genuine and lasting rapport, to support the client to go at a pace that works for them, and to create the conditions for sustainable change. All with less work and more ease for everyone involved.
What is Client Resistance Really About?
In short, client resistance is when something in a client says “no” (whether overtly or covertly) to whatever it is they are trying to do in their work with us. We call this “no” resistance when it goes against what we think our clients should be doing.
In reality, what we call “resistance” is simply an attempt to meet a need by pushing against something that seems to be competing with it. For example, I might be resistant to working out more often because it competes with my free time. My “resistance” here is really just trying to meet my need for free time. (You can read more about what resistance is here.)
And What Is Our Relationship to It?
As wellness professionals, we are not here to get over, around or through our clients’ resistance (contrary to how many of us have been trained). Our job isn't to get rid of it or to try to help our clients in spite of it.
Our role is to be an ally to our clients’ resistance.
As an ally, we support the underlying need that the resistance is trying to communicate, right alongside supporting the more obvious motivation the client has to accomplish their goals in working with us.
The guidelines below allow us to be effective allies to our clients’ resistance so that they can get what they came to us for, stick around long enough for that to happen, and for everyone to enjoy the process.
Five Guidelines for Working With Resistance
Start with yourself: Our inner work is the foundation of our work with clients. Before we became wellness professionals, we had a past. And that past likely includes our own attempts to make changes in our lives and to try to help others make changes. All of those experiences leave a mark, and some of those marks are tender. Maybe we tried to help a parent stop drinking or a friend to take care of their health, but it didn't "work." Or maybe we suffered a lot in our own process to get healthy or heal trauma.
Some of those tender spots can get touched on when we see our clients struggling in ways we've experienced ourselves or seen our loved ones struggle with.
This isn't in itself an issue and is to be expected. In fact, I'm sure those tender spots are what drive so many of us to help in the ways we do.
The problem can come when we respond from those tender places without realizing it. When we don't know how to work with it and be able to separate our own stuff from out clients'. When that happens, we are no longer acting within our role.
So before we even try to learn skills for working with our clients, first the invitation is to work with yourself. To tend to the tender spots so that you can be truly available for the brilliant work you do with your clients.
Assume positive intent and get curious about what your client’s resistance is doing for them: Everything we do - including our resistance - is an attempt to take care of ourselves or others. This is the mantra I developed after less than a year of working with court-mandated clients. And after many years of doing that work, I can confidently say that there wasn’t a single client I worked with whose actions weren’t about trying to take care of themselves or others, however ineffectively or however negative the consequences might have been.
When I led DUI groups, one week of the 12-week program started with me asking everyone to name what they got out of substance use. At first, the answers would usually focus on the negative consequences:
• “Nothing good, that’s for sure.”
• Legal problems.
• A lot of fights with my family.
But after some encouraging to focus on the positive things that made the substance use worth it (in spite of the negative consequences), the energy in the room would pick up and it would be hard to stop them:
• Relaxation
• Confidence
• Connection
• A break
• Energy
• Sleep
And the list goes on.
So of course they were resistant to stopping substance use. Who would want to just walk away from something that gives them what I argue (and I think we can all agree) are basic human wants and needs?
Seeing the positive intent behind our clients’ resistance doesn’t mean that we condone them continuing to try to meet their needs in ways that are ineffective or have negative consequences, though. What it does mean is that when we are looking to support clients in making the changes they are coming to us to make, we are coming to the table from a place of understanding and collaboration with their resistance rather than judgement and rejection of it.
If we don’t bring the needs their resistance is trying to protect into our work and if we don't assume they have a good reason for not wanting to change, then we’re not going to get very far.
Take care of the resistance and the motivation: I half-way joke that for every one client we have two clients: our client’s resistance and our client’s motivation. If we don't treat them both as equals or if one feels prioritized over the other, we will only feed into the client's internal conflict. And we will put ourselves in conflict with some aspect of our clients.
So the message is: Do. Not. Take. Sides. While I tend to focus on building our relationship to resistance and taking into account the needs it’s trying to meet, the main reason for that is because it’s harder for us to do that than it is to befriend our client’s motivation. I don’t know that you need too much help with that. However, my focus on resistance doesn’t mean I think that we should take the side of our client’s resistance or prioritize it over their motivation, either. We need to be accepting of and responsive to both, keeping in mind that wherever there is resistance, there is also motivation - and our clients need both of them to achieve their goals.
Our job is to treat both of them how we hope a parent would treat two siblings (and to support our clients to do the same) - with equal attention and care. Like siblings, motivation and resistance might have different needs, but their needs are equally important and valid. We need to communicate our understanding of each one without the other feeling left out or less important.
Another way to see it is how a couples therapist has to create safety with each person in a couple before diving into the work they came in to do. If one person in the couple doesn't feel safe with me or understood by me as the therapist, you can imagine how the session is going to go. And it's the same inside of our clients.
Take (what might seem like) the longer road: Don't try to use “tricks” and shortcuts. Our clients are more perceptive than we might think they are, and their resistance is especially attuned to any attempt to get rid of it or around it. This can be challenging when our clients themselves are trying to do just that, without realizing that their attempts to outwit or strongarm their resistance is precisely what’s keeping them stuck.
Often, our clients have come to us hoping that we’ll be able to do with their resistance what they haven’t been able to: make it go away. And fast.
So the saying in Internal Family Systems (IFS) that we need to “slow down to speed up” is helpful to remember here.
When you try to fight against resistance, it’s like hitting the gas when your truck is stuck in the mud. It just digs the wheels deeper. And just like you have to take the foot off the gas to actually get the truck out of the mud, you have to stop and spend time with the client’s resistance if you want to have any chance of them moving forward.
Resistance is not the problem. And just like in the truck analogy, slowing down and working with resistance is the path to clients achieving and sustaining their goals over the long-term.
(The irony here is that our clients might be resistant to the idea of slowing down and being with their resistance - and so we tend to that just like any other resistance that might pop up.)
Give your clients the option to say no as much as you can: I have heard too many horror stories about clients being pushed into interventions or practices that didn’t feel right for them. There are also experiences of having interpretations of their challenges pushed on them that didn’t align with their own self-understanding. Some clients assumed that because they were seeing an “expert,” they must be wrong to disagree, and so they stayed and kept trying in spite of it not getting quite right. Others walked away immediately, but with some (or a lot of) damaged trust in wellness professionals. The underlying issue that they all identify is that it didn’t feel like they could say no and/or that the other person could handle it if they did.
If a client can’t say no, then they can’t actually say yes. And if they’re not free to disagree with us, they can never be free to agree. This is the basic foundation of true consent in any relationship, including our relationships to our clients.
When we seek to create the conditions for clients to express their resistance directly and then on top of that we know how to receive and welcome their “no,” we are way ahead of the game. Not only are we showing that we can handle their resistance, we are inviting it as a necessary player.
The challenge here is that even if you do everything in your power to invite your clients to express their resistance, they still might have a hard time either because they don’t trust that you really mean it or because of their own judgment of their resistance.
All you can do is let them know that the door is open for their “nos”, proactively checking to see if there is ever one lingering outside and offering validation and acceptance whenever they do walk in.
Next Steps
As always, my perspective is to try it on for yourself and see what fits and what doesn’t. I would also love to hear about your experience as you start to apply these concepts.
If you are interested in having my support to explore how to directly apply these approaches in your work with clients, you’re welcome to get in touch or to directly schedule a Resistance Reframe session.
