Resistance in therapy: when part of you doesn't want change, and why that's normal

You signed up for therapy yourself. Nobody made you, you’re paying for it out of your own pocket, you genuinely want change. And yet: on Monday you realise you completely forgot the session. Next time you come, but spend the whole hour talking about work, even though you know something else is really burning. When your therapist asks a question that lands, you respond with a joke. And once you catch yourself angry at them on the way home — you don’t quite know why.

If you recognise yourself, let me tell you something freeing: you aren’t sabotaging yourself. What you’re experiencing has a name in the field — resistance — and it isn’t a fault in the process but one of its most eloquent parts. In this piece I’ll explain what resistance really is, the disguises it appears in, why it arises in people who sincerely want change, and what to do with it — in therapy, and even before that, while you’re still deciding.

Resistance isn’t sabotage — it’s information

The old view of resistance was accusatory: the client “won’t cooperate”, “isn’t motivated”, “is running from the work”. Modern psychotherapy understands it very differently: resistance is a message. A part of you — often the part you don’t hear directly — is signalling that you’re getting close to something important and that it’s afraid.

It helps not to see yourself as a single block with one single will. In each of us there’s a part that wants change — and a part that guards the old balance. That second part isn’t the enemy. It once had good reasons: your patterns, including the ones that stifle you today, were once solving something. Withdrawal protected you from rejection, pleasing from conflict, armour from pain. The part that resists change is really an old security guard who hasn’t yet been told the danger is over.

That’s why resistance in therapy is almost always a good sign in bad disguise: it turns up where the work touches something live. With subjects we don’t care about there’s no resistance — there’s nothing to defend. Research indirectly confirms this: review studies (Beutler and colleagues among others) show that resistance is one of the most important factors a therapist has to adapt their style to — and that with clients who show more resistance, less directive approaches work better, ones that give resistance room rather than talking over it.

The faces of resistance: do you recognise any?

Resistance rarely says “I don’t want to”. As a rule it puts on a disguise. Here are some of the most common ones I notice in work with people (and in myself!):

• Being late and forgetting. You’re late for the first time in your life, you forget the appointment, an “urgent” obligation appears just before the session. Your calendar becomes unusually full at exactly the hour of therapy.
• Intellectualising. You talk about your pain as if it were an interesting case: analytically, with technical terms, without feeling. Your head is in the session, your heart stayed at home. (This is the favourite disguise of those of us who like reading about psychology.)
• Humour at the crucial moment. A joke at precisely the moment tears might have come. Laughter is wonderful — but sometimes it’s also an emergency exit.
• “Nothing happened this week.” A week full of events shrinks in the session into “same as usual”. Or you fill the session with a safe topic so there’s no time left for the dangerous one.
• Anger at the therapist. Suddenly their voice bothers you, their questions, their room. Sometimes the criticism is justified — but sometimes anger is safer than what you’d otherwise have to feel.
• Pleasing. A less obvious but very common form: you become the model client who says what the therapist “wants to hear”. Accommodating can be just as effective a shield against authenticity as withdrawal.
• The thought of stopping precisely when it gets real. “I feel better already” or “this is pointless” comes up suspiciously often in exactly the week when something big has opened up.

None of these forms means resistance in itself — sometimes lateness is just lateness and criticism just criticism. But the pattern is telling: if one of them recurs and coincides in time with approaching a sensitive subject, it’s worth looking at what it’s protecting.

Why we resist what we want

At first glance it makes no sense: you pay for therapy and then dodge it? But resistance has its own logic, and once you understand it, it becomes almost touching.

First: change threatens identity. We carry our patterns so long that they grow into the answer to the question of who I am. “I’m the one who always takes care of everything.” “I’m solid, I don’t cry.” If I let that go — who am I? Change at a deeper level isn’t only the gaining of something new; it’s also the death of the old, and the old self fights for its life.

Second: change threatens relationships. Our patterns didn’t arise in empty space — they’re woven into networks of relationships that have tuned themselves to them. When a person who has always pleased others starts setting boundaries, the system around them wobbles: someone will be disappointed, someone angry, some relationship will have to be renegotiated. Part of resistance is therefore an entirely realistic fear: what will my change do to my people?

Third — and this is talked about least: symptoms also bring benefits. The field calls this secondary gain, and it calls for an honesty that can be uncomfortable. Anxiety can excuse you from risks you’re afraid to take. Exhaustion may be the only legitimate reason for rest in a life that otherwise permits none. The role of “the one with the problem” can bring attention within a family or postpone other conflicts. This doesn’t mean you’re faking the symptom — the suffering is entirely real. It only means that when the symptom leaves, a gap will open, and part of you senses that. Good therapy therefore doesn’t just remove a symptom, it also builds what will take its place: the right to rest without burnout, closeness without illness, a boundary without anxiety.

Ambivalence is normal — wanting and not wanting at once

From all this follows something that, to my mind, ought to be written on the door of every therapy room: ambivalence isn’t a lack of motivation, it’s its ordinary form. To want change and fear it at the same time — that isn’t being split, that’s being human.

The psychologists who understood this best were William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, the authors of motivational interviewing, one of the most researched approaches to working with ambivalence. Their key finding, confirmed in hundreds of studies: if you argue someone into change, they will — quite naturally — take up the side of the reasons against. Each of us carries both sides of the scale; if the other person occupies one, we’re left with the other. So intelligent support doesn’t persuade, it helps a person lay out both sides themselves — and hear for themselves what genuinely matters to them. Reasons for change that you say out loud weigh incomparably more than reasons someone else tells you.

The stages of change model developed by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente is useful too: change moves through phases — from not yet thinking about it at all, through contemplation and preparation, to action and maintenance. Resistance is often simply a sign that some part of you isn’t yet at the same stage as the rest: the head is already at action, the heart is still weighing things up. That isn’t a fault to be skipped over — it’s a map showing where to meet you and what you need first. A good therapist works with the part of you that’s genuinely there, not with the part that “ought to be” further along.

In practice this means: if in therapy (or before it) you swing between “I want to” and “not yet”, you don’t have to make one side win. Both are allowed to exist. The question isn’t “why are you resisting” but “what is each of these sides protecting, and what does it want for you”.

What to do with resistance in therapy: say it out loud

And now the most important practical advice in this piece. When you notice one of resistance’s disguises in yourself, the most powerful move you can make is also the simplest: tell your therapist. “I notice I’ve been talking about everything lately except that one thing.” “I really didn’t feel like coming today.” “I was angry at you last week and I don’t know why.”

I know it sounds frightening — but those sentences are often the gold of therapy. Resistance that is spoken stops operating from the background and becomes a shared subject: you can explore it, ask what it’s protecting, and invite the part that has been holding back to the table. In my work I notice that the deepest conversations often happen at precisely the moment when a client risks saying something “inappropriate” about the process itself — and finds that the therapist doesn’t take it personally but with interest.

And what does the therapist do with resistance? Above all, they don’t fight it. Miller and Rollnick coined a lovely image for this: we don’t wrestle with resistance, we dance with it. If a therapist responds to your reservations with pressure (“you need to try harder”), the resistance grows; if they meet them with curiosity (“tell me more about the part that doesn’t want to”), the resistance usually softens by itself. So your therapist’s response to your spoken resistance is also a good indicator of quality: you’re looking for someone who explores your “no”, not someone who overcomes it.

The same goes for anger at the therapist. We therapists are human and we make mistakes: sometimes we miss something, interpret too quickly, get the tone wrong. If you say so, what the researchers Jeremy Safran, Christopher Muran and colleagues call rupture and repair can happen — and their research shows that successfully repaired ruptures as a rule strengthen the therapeutic relationship and improve the outcome of therapy. For many people this is the very first experience that conflict doesn’t destroy a relationship. More on why exactly that is so healing in the piece on the therapeutic relationship.

Resistance before therapy: when you resist the decision itself

All of this of course doesn’t begin only in the therapy room. The same protective system speaks up earlier — while you’re still only thinking about therapy. You’ll recognise it by the familiar sentences: “It’s not that bad.” “Other people have worse problems.” “What am I even going to talk about for a whole hour?” “Now isn’t the right time, after New Year.” You put off for months a call that would take two minutes.

Here too the same holds: this isn’t laziness and it isn’t a lack of genuine distress. It’s the same part guarding the old balance — and before the first step its voice is loudest, because the unknown is greatest. I’ve written a separate piece about the fears that come before therapy (what if I cry, what if I don’t know what to say): Fear of therapy. Here let me add only one thing: the first step doesn’t require the ambivalence to be resolved. You can come to an introductory conversation with both sides of the scale — even “I don’t know whether therapy is for me” is a perfectly legitimate way to open. You can read how I work on the Services page.

A protective system that deserves gratitude

To close, a frame I like to offer people when they’re appalled at their own resistance: try looking at it kindly. That part of you came into being when you were smaller, more dependent, more vulnerable, and with the means it had it did important work — you survived. That it’s still standing guard today isn’t malice on its part, but loyalty.

In my work I often put it like this: if your resistance could speak, what would it say? The answers that come are almost always moving — “don’t let them near again”, “if you don’t feel, it doesn’t hurt”, “if you expect nothing, you won’t be disappointed”. These aren’t the sentences of sabotage. They’re the sentences of someone who once had to survive with very limited means.

Therapy isn’t a war against that guard. It’s a negotiation with it: slowly, with evidence, showing it that circumstances are different, that today you have strengths and choices that didn’t exist back then — and that it can gradually put down part of the burden. When that happens, resistance doesn’t “break”. It simply becomes unnecessary.

So if you’re resisting — therapy itself, or the decision to start — there’s nothing wrong with you. Something in you is taking change seriously. And that’s actually the best possible starting point for a conversation: get in touch, even with the sentence “part of me doesn’t want to be here”. That part is wonderful to work with.