Humanistic psychology

The Hatherleigh Guide to

Psychotherapy

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~ Hatherleigh Press' New York

3 Resistance to and Fear of Change James F. T. Bugental, PhD, and Elizabeth K. Bugental, PhD

Dr. James Bugental is Rockefeller (Teaching) Scholar at the Cali- fornia Institute of Integral Studies, Emeritus Professor of the Saybrook Institute, and Emeritus Clinical Faculty of the Stanford University Medical School. Dr. Elizabeth Bugental was formerly Assistant Director of Inter/Logue and now serves as a board member and consultant to several community agencies.

KEY POINTS _

• Human beings fear change be- cause it appears to threaten the structures that we take to com- prise our lives. Clients seek therapy when these structures are not sufficiently satisfying their existential needs.

Five" conditions of being" form the parameters of being human: embodiment (we have physical bodies), finitude (we are limited in what we can do and know), action (we are active agents in making what is potential, actual), choice (we have free will), and se paratenes s-but- re la tednes s (though separate from other in- dividuals, we are never wholly isolated from them). These con- ditions form the underlying life

motivations thatanimateour ac- tions, most of them unconscious.

Therapists' perceptions that their clients' fear of change or "resistance" is an opposition to therapy, neurotic, or something that must be overcome are contra therapeutic. Such percep· tions undermine the therapeu- tic alliance and prolong the therapeutic course.

• The therapist should accept re- sistance to change as appropri- ate. To be perceived as an ally, he or she should identify what is being threatened, then assure the client that he or she can change what needs to be changed while protecting those fundamental aspects of the self

worth preserving.

34 The Hatherleigh Guide to Psychotherapy Resistance to and Fear of Change 35

INTRODUCTION

The fear ofchange is familiar in psychotherapeutic and psycho- analytic literature, where it is called the "resistance." Freud was not the first to point out what each therapist discovers: the client who comes desperately seeking help soon seems to try to defeat help being given.

When therapists begin their careers, they are apt to see this resistance as directed against them personally and against their efforts. As they mature in their craft, they come to recognize how much more significant this apparent obstinacy is. It turns out to be the way clients act in their lives at large. Indeed, therapists sOOn realize that this resistance is com- posed of the very patterns that disrupt the clients' lives and are the core of the problems or neuroses that bring them to therapy. It is this keystone recognition that gives therapy the power to affect clients' lives. (Thus Freud insisted that there is no existing psychoanalysis that is not the analysis of the resis- tance.)

Astonishingly, this is still not the end of the chain of signifi- cance. It is this further importance of the resistance that is the point of this presentation.

In brief, we propose that the resistance is not solely that which blocks our clients' full living; it is also what makes it possible for them to have the lives they do lead. Admittedly this is not the traditional view of the resistance, but we will show the values of operating on this hypothesis. In short, we propose:

In order to live out one's life, one must come to some kind of definition of who one is and what one's nature is, and one must similarly define or structure the nature of the world in which one lives. These same definitions or structures that make life possible also limit it and keep one in self-defeating, repetitive patterns of being.

A parable will convey more graphically what is proposed here. In shock, a man wakes to find himself swimming in the

sea. As far as he can see in any direction there is no land or vessel to guidehis efforts. Anxiety enters his veins. He treads water, tries to swim in one direction, but fears he may be only circling. He begins to tire; no relief seems likely. Fear mounts toward panic.

Then a blessed sight: a more solid shape close by. Renewed, he swims to a plank and grasps it. Gratefully, he half-rides, half-swims, looks for more flotsam, and ties a hatch cover to the plant. Slowly - with great struggle at times, with fortu- itous ease at others - the man collects and puts together what he finds until eventually he can climb out on his raft and rest.

When a squall hits, parts of the raft are swept away, but as the squall passes new gifts arrive from the sea. Now the man builds a more stable vessel.

In time, other castaways float by on their rafts, and they merge constructions until the vessel becomes larger and more dependable. Great storms occasionally wreck it, but it is pos- sible to rebuild adequately.

As days turn into years, the children of the raft laugh at legends of how the rafts came to be. They are sure they know reality: the big raft on which they live is "the world," and they are certain that their lives on it are the way lives are really meant to be.

STRUCTURING OUR LIVES

The allegory reminds us that the structures within which we live our lives are, at root, our own constructions. They have been assembled from whatever was at hand, they sustain us with varied effectiveness, and they remain vulnerable to stresses that may come from any quarter. Characterizing them by no means indicates that they are without significance. Quite the contrary, this structuring of ourselves and our world is one of the astonishing and unique expressions of human capacity. Humans create an overworld of meaning, which is superimposed on the world of direct experience in which

36 The Hatherleigh Guide to Psychotherapy Resistance to ,and Fear of Change 37

other animals apparently dwell. From this meaning world, we transform the immedia te world - for good or for ill.

A CLINICAL EXAMPLE

A case synopsis illustrates how threats to our self-and-world structures may bring about excessive fear of change.

Todd is 53 years old, has an advanced degree in electronic engineering, is married, and has two children, ages 18 and 23. He is section chief in a middle-sized but quite successful research and development company. He has been in therapy twice a week for 8 months. In an exchange with his therapist, he tells of driving aimlessly and carelessly on the freeways the previous evening.

'Tm not sure why, but! think I just kind of flipped out. I know I wasn't really there. Shouldn't drive when I'm like that. Though I don't know whether I've ever been like that before. Anyway, I was shut down on all systems-or atleast, most all. Some way I kept enough going not to kill anybody or... .f!

"Or. .. ?" (softly).

"Or myself," (flatly).

"Mm-hmmm."

"It was kind of like being dead, or partly dead."

"Like being dead."

"Yeah, but not really that either. At one point on the freeway I thought of just shutting my eyes and letting the car go without looking, but it was just a thought. I mean, I don't think I would really do that."

"Not really,"

"But driving the way I was.... That was sort of.... Well, I remember thinking, 'It's up to fate.' It was like being partly asleep but still sort of awake."

So why is Todd playing Russian roulette on the freeway? In simplest terms, Todd is fighting off the awareness that he is changing. He believes that if he lets that awareness really take hold, he will cease to be. Within his own experience, Todd is fighting for his life, yet he considers killing himself. What a paradox! Still, that is just what Todd is doing, and it is what many of us do - although, to be sure, not always as overtly and explicitly. Todd is acting out his fear of changing. Yet, ironi- cally, he entered therapy in order to change. When one feels that identity and the known world are in danger of being swept away, it is truly terrifying. The price of preserving the familiar world and one's place in it may be literal and physical death, but that price has been paid repeatedly by men and women throughout human history.

THE NATURE OF LIFE STRUCTURES

We will describe one way of conceiving the nature of the life structures that constitute our identities and our environment. How we interpret the amazing and embracing fact of being is inevitably a product of who and where we are atthe moment of interpretation.

The flotsam from which we build our rafts consists of what Rollo May (1981)" calls our "destiny": the particular epoch, culture, family, and other conditioning and forming influ- ences of our birth and life span. These provide materials from which we create the structures to meet the ontological circum- stances of being human.

That formidable phrase, "the ontological circumstances of being human," means thatwe have come into different worlds depending upon our destinies (as we have just defined that term). Yet behind these differences lie certain constants or

38 The Hatherleigh Guide to Psychotherapy Resistance to and Fear of Change 39

"givens" which all humans must deal with in some fashion These are the ontological givens of being human. .

It is convenient to identify five" givens" of being(BugentaI, 1981) that each person must take into account in some way:

Table 3.1 THE EXISTENTIAL CONDITIONS OF BEING

1. We are embodied. OUf lives are expressed in physical bodies.

2. We are finite. We are limited in what we can do, what we can know, how long we will live, and in all dimensions.

3. We are capable of acting or of not acting. We are not passive observers but are, rather, active agents in the creation of the actual from the potential (Bugental & Bugental, 1984).

"Given"

Embodied Finite Actionable Choiceful Separate-but- related

Confrontation

Change Contingency Responsibility Relinquishment Apartness*

Needs/Values

Spiritedness Identity Potency Meaningfulness Relatedness

4. We have choice. Unlike the tropism- and instinct-governed species, we have the capacity to select from repertoires of possible responses.

5. We are each separate from but related to all other humans. Never are we wholly isolated, never wholly in union.

THE PARAMETERS OF BEING HUMAN

These five conditions of being - embodiment, finitude, action, choice, and separate-but-relatedness - form the parameters of our being human. Although it is helpful to distinguish them as in Table 3.1, it is also essential to recognize that in reality they are fIve aspects of a unity. Thus, for example, finitude is a necessary condition for each of the other four: Our lives are expressed in or through bodies that will live but a time. We can act or not act, but only within certain limits. While we have choice, there is much that we cannot choose. Love may bring us close, but oneness eludes us; hate may divide us, but we can never, if we are truly aware, deny all kinship with our enemy. In the same way, each of the five parameters is interwoven with each of the others.

*in the sense of being a part of, yet apart from.

In some fashion-more implicitly than consciously-each person interprets the meaning of these givens of being. These interpretations are implicit, lived-out patterns. For example, we have no alternative but to be embodied if we are to be physically alive (although Todd is beginning to question whether he will continue to accept that equation). Some center their attention on this dimension, as in those preoccupied with having a "glamour" image; some ignore it, as does the stereo- typic successful businessman who drives himself to a heart attack before he is 50; and some attack the body, as do the ascetics who practice mortification of the flesh.

The existential parameters not only set the stage upon which we play out the dramas of our lives, but also form the underlying life motivations that animate our actions. This comes about because each of these givens confronts us with a life issue with which we must continually deal in some fash- ion. Similarly, each requires us to form certain perceptual structures in order to maintain and live out our lives. Table 3.1 offers estimates of these confrontations and their parallel existential needs.

40 The Hatherleigh Guide to Psychotherapy Resistance to and Fear of Change 41

THE EXISTENTIAL CONFRONTATIONS

In a crude way, the confrontations that arise from these condi- tions are equivalent to the waves that both support and threaten the riders on the rafts. From them emerge the possibilities of constructing our lives. As we construe the fact of being able to act, for instance, we deal with the issue of being responsible for what we do or do not do and discover our own powers and their limits.

Now, what is the point of all of this? The point is that these needs are truly existential and are as vital to life as safety from threa ts, food, drink, and reasonable protection from excesses of heat and cold. Unless we have some degree of spiritedness, identity, potency, meaningfulness, and relatedness in Our lives, we literally grow weak as persons, and we are likely to go crazy, get sick, or even die.

Our clients came to us because the life structures they have created- the timbers, rudders, and sails of their rafts -are not sustaining them, are not sufficiently satisfying their existen- tial needs. These structures are how they view themselves in their worlds, the patterns they have developed for seeking satisfactions and avoiding harms, and the expectations they evolve for how their lives should be.

This last point is so important to the understanding of the resistance to change that it must be emphasized thatwe are not using metaphor or hyperbole when we speak of a "death." When one has lived until the present moment with certain images of who one is and what one may expect in life, then the realization that these images are false and will never be real- ized is a "killing" recognition.

THE NEEDfVALUE STRUCTURES OF BEING

The existential issues with which our being confronts us re- quire some response. These are termed needs/values in Table 3.1. It is necessary to examine these more fully. Each of us needs a degree of spiritedness, energy, and drive or motiva-

tion, and that need, rooted in our bodily being, is evoked as we confront the ever-changing world.

We live in a contingent universe in which we are affected by events beyond our anticipation or control. Our best efforts may succeed or fail; our deepest fears may be realized or not. We are so clearly finite in the midst of infinity, and how we deal with that fact constitutes much of our inner sense of identity. "I am a Christian... an atheist. .. a hard worker... a physician...." All such statements tell how a person sees himself or herself and something of how that person meets the circumstances of life.

The sense of potency is vital to our sanity. The person who feels totally impotent is the one who may go on an insane shooting spree. We insist on having some power in our lives, and we will do anything necessary to get it. To be able to act is to have responsibility for our actions.

Choice, the miracle of our evolved consciousness, inflicts the endless burden of relinquishment, of having to say "no" to possibilities, of having to kill possible selves. Out of our choices we create meaning, and our meanings guide our choices. Meaninglessness is more fearful than the emptiness of space.

Finally, we need a network of relationships with others. Human beings are as much social organisms as they are physi- cal organisms. Solitary confinement is one of the most dreaded punishments, and extended, unsought solitude can lead to madness or death. Even those who choose to be alone soon populate their isolation with fantasied others - real persons to whom they write, imagined persons who torment or support them, divine persons whom they serve. We are each inex- orably separate from others but equally unredeemably bonded to others.

A return to Todd will illustrate these points. Todd learned in his early years that he was brighter than most of his school- mates, that learning came- easily, and that recognition and rewards followed promptly. He learned to expect that he could continually advance in any competitive situation. Al- though he probably would never have said it aloud even to himself, he anticipated attaining the very top ranks 111 hIS

42 The Hatherleigh Guide to Psychotherapy Resistance to and Fear of Change 43

profession and the very fullest satisfactions in his personal life. Over the past 5 years, however, the realization has been seeping into Todd's awareness that he is probably at or near the high point of his career, that others are able to go further, that his marriage and family are not exceptional, and that he, while certainly competent and a good friend and family mem- ber, is not the special person he had secretly thought himself to be. In short, Todd is on the verge of discovering that the person he has believed himself to be does not- and never did - exist. This is, in subjective terms, a kind of death.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THERAPY

The most important implication of what is being advanced is also the most difficult to convey, because in a way it is some- thing that is already familiar. The point is that perceptions of the client's"resistance" as opposition to therapy, neurotic, or something which must be overcome, analyzed away, or cir- cumvented are themselves countertherapeutic. Such percep- tions of what is undoubtedly one of the most central and universal phenomena of therapy repeatedly confound the therapeutic work, undermine the therapeutic alliance, and prolong the therapeutic course.

For many therapists, this will not be a surprising statement. They have known that the old way of conceiving our task has been faulty. Yet we who write this after many years of immer- sion in our work know that implicitly we also often still tend to cast the therapist as the opponent of a negative force in the client.

Our well-being requires that we maintain a measure of continuity in our way of living in the world and that we develop a repertoire of skills for responding to our existential needs. We cannot do so, we cannot remain sane, if we do not modulate our accessibility to the countless injunctions, seduc- tions, inducements, invitations, and teachings of family and friends, the media, pulpit, and classroom, and every other

facet of our lives. Therapists must find ways of supporting their clients' capacity to maintain continuity and must avoid efforts to undermine it.

POINTS FOR THERAPISTS TO PONDER

We offer three observations that therapists may consider as they engage in their work.

1. When the client resists change, he or she is demonstrating that a threat to being is experienced. With this understand- ing, we need to accept the appropriateness of the client's defense and to join him or her in seeking to identify what is being threatened. Although the words will be unique to the individual, the five existential needs described above offer useful directions for exploration;

2. The stance that the therapist takes in displaying to the client how the latter wards off change is, in itself, exceedingly important. If it is evident that the therapist is not invested in the client"s giving up whathe or she feels strongly that he or she must have, then the therapist is experienced as an ally rather than an opponent.

3. It is important for the therapist continually to demonstrate to the client the professional's genuine conviction that the client can protect what is truly needed while relinquishing what threatens or cripples the client"s life. This strong affirmation of the client's potency does much to support the latter's own readiness to move toward change.

It is evident that the three suggestions are basically directed toward how the therapist conceives his or her role in relation to the life structures and their persistence. Far beyond any techniques or stratagems, the crucial contribution of the thera- pist resides in his or her attitudes, empathy, and faith in the client's own latent ability to grow.

44

SUMMARY

The Hatherleigh Guide to Psychotherapy Resistance to and Fear of Change

REFERENCES

45

We humans fear change because it appears to threaten the very • structures that we take to be our lives, rather than simply

the structures that we think support our lives. Because we see these structures in this way, the possibility of their chang- ing is the possibility of death. And there is truth in this apprehension.

To change is to kill, to die. To change is to relinquish one way of being-one identity, one life that might have been. To relinquish is to kill one possible self.

We are confronted with small choices of this type nearly every day. For example, because one of the authors chose to write this chapter at a particular time, he was not able to attend a professional meeting to which he had been invited. On the scale of a day's activities, it is an all-too-familiar and not particularly threatening choice, although, even in such mat- ters, consequences remain unknown and unimaginable.

But larger changes - to change one's way of being alive, one's concept of who and what one is, one's view of the world-can be more sweeping and more frightening, inevita- bly involving potentially serious relinquishments. And relin- quishments are deaths. For example, because one of the au- thors chose to become a psychotherapist, she did not have the large family she had once dreamed ofmothering. Because of an earlier choice, certain roads are forever closed.

Relinquishing the self one has always thought oneself to be is a kind of suicide. Ifone is strongly invested in that identity - as most of us surely are - physical death may not seem to be too high a price to pay to preserve (orto seem to preserve) who one thought one was.

George A. Kelly (personal communication, c. 1987) once commented, "The key to human destiny is the ability to reconstrue what cannot be denied." When we therapists come to consider changing our way of regarding our clients' fears of and resistance to change, we may find that we, too, are con- fronted with our own fear of change.

Bugental, J. F. T. (1981). "The search for authenticity (Enlarged ed.). New York: Irvington.

May, R. (1981). Freedom and destiny. New York: Norton.

FOR FURTHER READING

Becker, E. (1961). The denial afdeath. New York: Dial.

BugentaI, J. F. T. (1980). Intimate journeys: Stories from life-changing therapy. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass.

BugentaL E. K., & BugentaL J. F. T. (1984). Dispiritedness: A new perspective on a familiar state. Journal of Humunisttc Psychology, 24, 49-67.

Bridges, W. E. (1980). Transitions: Making sense of life's changes. Reading,

MA: Addison-Wesley.

Bugental, J. F. T. (1976). The search for existential identity. San Francisco:

Jossey-Bass.

Bugen'al, J. F. T. (1978). Psychotherapy and process. Reading. MA: Addison-Wesley.

Bugental,J. F. T. (1987). The art of the psychotherapist. New York: Norton.

Fried, E. (1981). The courage to change; From insight to self-innovation. New

York: Grove Press.

Kubler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. New York: Macmillan.

Levenson, E. A. (1983). The ambiguity of change: An inquiry into the nature

of psychoanalytic reality. New York: Basic Books.

Marris, P. (1975). Loss and change. Garden City: Anchor.

Schachtel, E. G. (1959). Metamorphosis. New York: Basic Books.

Schneider, K. }., & May, R. (1995). The psychology of existence: An integra- tive, diniclli perspective. New York: McGraw-HilI.

46 The Hatherleigh Guide to Psychotherapy

Tannenbaum, R., & Hanna, R. W. (1985). Holding on, letting go, and moving on: A neglected perspective on change. In R. Tannenbaum, et al. (Eds.), Human systems development (pp. 95~121). San Fransisco: Jossey- Bass.

Wheelis, A. (1973). How people change. New York: Harper & Row.

Yalo01, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.