Befriend resistance

It's pretty common for negative feelings and thoughts to get in the way of our goals, for example, making progress on a personal project (e.g. writing a novel), taking action (e.g. moving to another city), or confessing something scary (e.g. asking someone out). As soon as we start considering concrete action, we get flooded with fear, anxiety, doubts, and uncertainty. These unruly thoughts and feelings can also sometimes obstruct relaxation, focus, and sleep.

Reacting to resistance #

For many people, the default reaction is to flee this distress and abandon ship. A second and often promoted option is to fight back, resist resistance, feel the fear, and do it anyway. In this post, I would like to suggest a third option that tends to be overlooked: negotiation.

Like many others, I've let resistance get the better of me for a long time. When it reared its head, I would retreat. I didn't know how to sort through my doubts, so I would often end up procrastinating, and I didn't make much progress on my projects over time.

With time and the guidance and inspiration of various people, such as Steven Pressfield and his book The War of Art, I started to practice pushing through it. That's in part how I managed to finally start working consistently on my blog when I first started in 2023 after years of stalling.

To an extent, I agree that pushing through resistance is a necessary practice, but it also comes with drawbacks. It requires extending a decent amount of energy. It doesn't feel very good. Furthermore, as long as the inner distress persists, it serves as a parasitic distraction to the work we have to do and makes it more challenging. Although with time ignoring resistance can get easier, by only using this approach, no steps are made to actually defuse or resolve it.

I've always been drawn to the ideal of minimizing friction as much as possible and maximizing harmonious coexistence with other people and within ourselves. Through experience, I've noticed that when it comes to communication and negotiation, reacting to antagonism in kind isn't usually a very effective strategy. It just adds fuel to the flames.

Understanding what's really going on, addressing the other's concerns, and working toward a compromise tends to be more productive and gratifying. Nonviolent communication (NVC) is a very useful framework in this context. If you'd like to learn more about it and interpersonal conflict resolution, check out my posts Why productive conflict resolution is so rare and Resolving conflict through constructive empathic inquiry.

When I discovered the Internal Family System (IFS) therapeutic model, I began to wonder if the same applied to the inner world. What if instead of fighting a war of attrition, we could understand and communicate with our resistance? Well, I've started trying this approach, and based on my personal experiments, the results seem promising.

Understanding resistance #

In order to know how to interact with it, we first need to refine our understanding of what it is. In the context of this post, I will define resistance as the loose bundle of negative thoughts, unpleasant feelings, and bodily sensations that arise within us in specific contexts.

The subset that's made up of all our undermining self-talk is sometimes dubbed our "inner critic". I find this framing to be pretty imprecise and not very helpful.

Indeed, one misconception to dispel is the idea that resistance is a single entity. As IFS points out, the mind is plural. We have several competing needs, concerns, and agendas within us. This explains how we can feel torn between different parts of ourselves and why we sometimes have inconsistent reactions to similar situations at various points in time.

Another important distinction to make is between symptoms and root causes. Feelings of resistance stem from maladaptive subconscious beliefs formed through the conditioning of painful experiences and unmet needs. These go by different names. In Beck's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, they're referred to as schemas. In IFS, they are called burdens.

Let me give a common example to illustrate this process. A person gets bitten by a dog as a child and forms a strong subconscious belief that they are dangerous. Now, even as an adult, whenever they are faced with one, they get flooded with fear, despite being aware that this reaction is probably disproportionate. Some part of them might even want to pet it.

These subconscious beliefs are frozen in the past, usually as a child or young teenager version of ourselves. They have valid concerns that are worth being considered; however, they tend to have a terrible communication style. Instead of making an articulate and cogent argument, they will throw a tantrum to get your attention. This usually takes the form of strong physical sensations and emotions and/or internal criticism.

Ignoring or rebuking them doesn't make them go away. They'll either double down or bide their time for the next outburst. Conversely, when they feel acknowledged, heard, and understood, they tend to calm down. Hence, the value in trying to use a friendlier approach.

Befriending resistance #

Now that we understand resistance better, we can interact with it more constructively.

A few things to keep in mind #

I've experimented with a few strategies so far. I've found the ones I'm about to share to be pretty effective, but they require more time than gently dismissing resistance. So if you don't have at least ten minutes to spare, give or take, it might be better to save them for another occasion. On the other hand, when you're feeling really strong resistance, I think it's worth the time since investing the energy to push through it on top of whatever task you're tackling will hinder your productivity.

Just to be clear, befriending resistance is not a one-and-done. Just like pushing through, it's a repeated practice that becomes easier with time, but it does come with an added benefit. Indeed, with every "rep" your knowledge of yourself grows. You get better at identifying and addressing the sources of your resistance. Furthermore, when your inner concerns feel understood and taken into account, they don't need to be as aggressive to get your attention.

One last disclaimer: I'm still learning and practicing myself. I'm not trying to position myself as some sort of expert. I still fail to follow the advice I'm about to give you more often than not. However, on the rare case where I actually do follow it, it usually works a lot better than whatever other coping strategy I was trying before, and I'm reminded I should make it a more regular habit. So here's to hoping these techniques will come in handy for you too.

They're presented in a sequence, because that's usually what tends to work best most of the time, but feel free to skip to a specific one or mix it up based on what works for you and what feels intuitively right in the moment.

Doing a brain dump #

The first useful technique is to do a brain dump. Write down all the thoughts twirling inside your head until the chatter has subsided. Once that's done, you can regroup them by category and discern the central themes.

It's easy to fall victim to tunnel vision when we keep all of our concerns in our heads. We get stuck in a loop because we're always forgetting a few key elements as we're brainstorming solutions, and we're forced to start over again and again. After all, a human mind can only hold about 5 to 7 chunks of information at once.

It's much easier to clear your head and find a good compromise when you can see all the components of your problem laid out visually in front of you.

Using this technique has already helped me get out of ruts when writing posts. Considering all the legitimate preconscious concerns that were vying for my attention empowered me to come up with better organization and processes. Sometimes, it has even sparked renewed inspiration.

Identifying feelings and needs #

Brain dumps work well for mental agitation and anxiety, but they're not always enough if your distress is more emotionally charged. For instance, intellectualization isn't the right tool to address burning anger or deep sadness. In this post, I'll focus on understanding the causes behind this unrest, which can help calm it down, but there are other effective and complementary techniques to process emotions (like physical activity, ranting, crying, listening to music, and more).

The best method I know of to understand what our emotions are trying to tell us is to identify our specific feelings and needs. Do your best to list each feeling that is active within you. Then try to associate them with the needs they are being generated by. Satisfied needs can give rise to pleasant emotions, but if you're feeling resistance, then it's most likely caused by unmet needs.

This identification process can be tricky, especially if you lean on the lower end of emotional granularityYou might also want to check out the Wikipedia page on alexithymia/emotional blindness if you're not familiar with the concept. as I do and struggle to quickly and precisely label your feelings. Therefore, I recommend scanning the NVC feelings & needs inventories for support and inspiration. Refer to my aforementioned posts on productive conflict resolution and NVC for additional guidance. The How We Feel app also offers some pretty good support to build the habit of identifying your emotions. It becomes more natural with practice.

Demonstrating you got the message by correctly identifying the feelings and, even more importantly, the needs behind your current distress will often be enough to appease your internal resistance.

Self-soothing #

If being receptive, identifying your feelings and needs, and coming up with the best compromise you can think of still isn't enough to calm you down, then the final step is self-soothing.

Empathize with the parts of yourself that are distressed, address their concerns, reassure them, and explain why you have chosen your current course of action and why, despite being intimidating, it is still necessary. If you're genuine and compassionate, that should usually do the trick. (Yes, I'm afraid you can't bullshit your emotions into submission).

Remember what I said about these parts of yourselves being frozen in a childlike state? Well, what's the best way to deal with a young kid who throws a tantrum, in your opinion?

Should you mercilessly berate and beat them into submission? Should you cave and meekly let them have whatever they want until they finally let you off the hook?

Whether you're dealing with literal in-person children or symbolical internal ones, I think there's a healthier approach. Be considerate of what they're going through. Try to understand what they are upset about. Reassure them and calmly explain why you're doing what you're doing. Then go through with it even if they're still indisposed because you've deemed it to be the responsible course of action as an adult with a broader and longer-term vision.

In doing so, you model the best kind of leadership: receptive, fair, level-headed, foresighted, responsible, and caring yet firm.

Conclusion #

You've probably heard the well-known tale of the Two Wolves, which says there are two metaphorical wolves struggling for power within us, one good and the other evil, and that the ultimate victor is the one we feed and nurture over time.

I think we can use a similar analogy for the approach we choose to react to inner turmoil. Will you experience your resistance as bloody warfare, a rat race where might makes right, or as a respectful and collaborative process of deliberation? Which type of interaction will you nurture within yourself? What environment will you foster through your actions?

Just like when dealing with other people, building trust and goodwill not only helps find better resolutions for the current negotiation but also greases the wheel for future interactions and makes the next ones even smoother.

That is the internal experience I yearn and aim for, irrespective of external factors. Not perpetual struggle but harmony, not strife but cooperation, not mere grudging tolerance but happy coexistence. I want to believe there's more to creative work, authenticity, and growth than a bleak and never-ending callous war of attrition with our fears.

I do not find meaning in facing adversity merely for the satisfaction of asserting my domination over it. That's why I aspire to a serene and constructive relationship with endeavoring, exempt from superfluous friction.

I don't know if I'll ever reach this ideal, but that's where I'm headed. I'll fight when it's necessary, but only ever with the intended purpose of ensuring future peace.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy: