Working with Resistance

“I don’t want to do this and you can’t make me!!! I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!!!”

No, that’s not the voice of the toddler in the next apartment. It’s the voice of one of my inner children this morning.

(Yes, I said “one of” and if you want to know more about my theoretical frame of reference, go check out more about Internal Family Systems.)

So what was I doing that was bringing up so much resistence from an inner child?

I was trying to create an elevator pitch for my therapy niche (for those who don’t know marketing speak, read that as “trying to make up a mini-speech to explain exactly what I do and for whom”). Not exactly an emotional task, at least on the surface of things.

So there I am with my peer and collaborator, trying to set this resistence aside so I can brainstorm, but my throat is closing up and I am breathing in measured breaths, trying not to cry from frustration and whatever is under the surface.

What did I do?

First of all, thank god for my collaborator, Dina, because EVERY healer needs a healer, and she’s one of mine. And she held the space for me to check in with that freaked out kid inside of me. When I did, I found out that this little one was scared because I was facing some unexpected change in my business focus. She was scared because in her world, stuck at age six, change means divorce and a big move to another state.

So I took her hand and soothed her, after crying with her, natch. And I asked if she’d like to be updated to the place and time I exist in now. She was all for it, so I visualized all the years since her time period, and man, she loved seeing me in college and beyond, in a time when I finally had some say-so in my life circumstances. She wanted to feel a time where she gets to be in charge of any decisions that involve change. And she’s with me here now.

The setup for this story isn’t an uncommon one. We all encounter some type of inner tension when we confront a change in our life. But boy, this way of working with and healing the resistence is something I wanted to share here. Because what could’ve taken weeks to integrate got resolved in half an hour today.

Oh, and by the way, I’m a healer for other healers. Check out my revised Services page.