Psychotherapy, when working correctly, acts as a door opening to the possibility of change. We approach it because we are wanting to make at least something in our lives different. Or maybe someone close to us has expressed the desire/need for us to change. For whatever reason, the appeal of transforming our lives in some way drives us toward initiating the process of psychotherapy and, we soon discover, its requisite self-examination. Perhaps we’re feeling motivated to do this work, having told ourselves the ways in which we will appreciate how our lives will improve when we make these changes.
But beneath desire and need for change is a stubborn status quo that wants things to remain just as they are. There are aspects of our personalities that we say we want to tinker with. But we have become the way we are very gradually and/or over a long period of time, Looking back, it most likely seems that we’ve been “that way” as long as we can remember. We’ve become quite comfortable with those questionable parts, even after having noticed problems caused by them. Why is that? Simply because of stability – that’s how it’s been for so long. But things about ourselves that we want to change or eliminate will look and feel quite different when we begin to try to let go of them. Anyone who has quit smoking knows exactly what I mean.
Very often resistance in psychotherapy will involve projection, which is the process of unconsciously treating the therapist as if he or she has the personality traits of an important person in your life. For example, if you seek therapy to work on commitment issues and your father was critical, intolerant and lacking in his understanding of you, you may come to feel that the therapist is being the same way if he questions your reasons for leaving your current relationship. You will feel as your father made you feel, but chances are, you will not even connect the feeling to your father.
It is important to know that projection in therapy is more the rule than the exception. It is the job of the therapist to understand the important people in your life, to know how they affected you and to notice when and how they show up in projections. And what may be even more interesting is that in these situations, resistance, or going against change, is associated with a relationship in which something dysfunctional happened. For example, if your father was indeed too critical, that would have made it harder for you to trust your own instincts. An overly critical parent fails to encourage the child to get used to making autonomous decisions and trusting them.
When a significant relationship show up in therapy, it can be tricky and difficult. But drawing all the right lines to connect past and present people, behaviors and feelings can lead us to some life-changing insights in psychotherapy. It can help us develop more consciousness regarding how our past shows up in the attitudes of our present.
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