Inner Resistance on the Healing Path
I’ve written this as part of the intro to the Drinking From The Depths of Self intensive, but am making it public for anyone who may find it helpful.
We begin healing or personal development work because we want things to be better. Sometimes we have specific things that are going wrong in mind. Sometimes it’s something specific we want. Sometimes it’s less clear, maybe an unknown that feels missing. This is the important step that allows us to begin: the acknowledgement that something is incorrect for us and the desire to correct it. Without this, only rare miracles bring about the opportunity for real change so there is cause to celebrate this first step no matter how specific or mysterious it feels. We all have room for improvement and feeling like there’s nothing wrong sabotages the opportunity to pursue that improvement. Celebrate the courage you have to acknowledge that you want to overcome something.
We are extremely complex creatures with many different layers of being and some of them are aligned with each other and others are in conflict. We can see this in our conscious experience. For example, we might want to be physically fit but we don’t want to exercise. We might want close knit friends, but we are also tired during our free time and have difficulty using it to socialize. In our subconscious we have even more conflicting desires as the process is hidden, not inhibited by time and doesn’t use logic. Within our subconscious lives many voices: younger versions of ourselves, people who have had strong influences in our life, sometimes different expressions of our self, teachers, characters who impacted you and maybe intuitive or collective voices. This can make it very hard to trust intuition or gut feelings. It can cause some difficulty making sense of what we’re experiencing mentally, emotionally and physically and differentiating actual danger from perceived danger. It can make certain kinds of shame or the sense of something being intrinsically wrong with us feel very real and true. It dramatically shapes our perception of the world and ourselves even though our conscious mind is not directly experiencing any of these processes. It’s common to employ our conscious mind to apply stories, logic or reasons that we can connect to the feelings we’re having, but often the initial trigger is related to a distant past experience or unconscious belief.
Much of our subconscious wants to keep us safe from pain and has difficulty differentiating our present/future experiences and potential outcomes from the limited view of past experiences. It has a kind of database of experiences and information and then encourages us to adopt habits in our thinking and actions to seek out or avoid similar experiences. One of the big things we are doing as we heal or develop is work to change the impact of our own subconscious by bringing chunks of that database to light and feeding it truer and better information.
A simple example of this is to say you had a scary experience with a dog as a small child. Later in life you feel nervous around dogs. This makes dogs nervous around you and they act unpredictably and sometimes aggressively reinforcing your subconscious belief that dogs are scary. When you begin to work on this you remember the original cause of your aversion to dogs and that your unconscious actions and feelings about them have contributed to further bad experiences. It’s not enough to simply know how it began, so you start to then feel and release the fear you couldn’t fully process during these bad interactions because your focus at the time was on protecting yourself. When you feel ready, you begin to interact with dogs regularly to put your new vantage point into practice. Eventually you have enough positive experiences with the dogs that the initial charge you had around them is released. At this point your subconscious has had the opportunity to experience dogs in a new way consistently enough to release the need to protect you from them.
Even a very straightforward example like this takes time and you can imagine the layers of resistance you might feel towards many of these steps if dogs induced terror in you and the idea of being around a dog elicits panic. You can also imagine how easy it would be to decide that there is plenty of evidence that dogs are actually dangerous animals. That this is a fact and trying to overcome your fear of them makes no sense at all. The part of your subconscious that holds the belief that dogs are dangerous will feed information to and reward your conscious mind for having thoughts it believes will keep you safe. Imagine also how badly you’d want to overcome your fear of dogs to move through all these processes, doing truly frightening things and coming into contact with unpleasant memories and feelings all while a big part of you is resisting the process and trying to divert you from it.
This is not to say that there’s no hope and that all processes of retraining our subconscious have to be very unpleasant or scary. It’s good to be aware that one of the big obstacles we have to change is inner resistance. Many of the things the subconscious believes are terrifying are clearly not dangerous at all and can be easily let go of once that fear is revealed for what it is. Most things it believes are relatively benign, but make us feel disconnected from our real self or inauthentic.
The subconscious also encourages us into situations and actions that give us small amounts of power or perceived safety or perceived control. As an example you could regularly find yourself in situations where you end up feeling justified anger which gives a sense of power. You could find yourself in situations that you can quickly detached and walk away from exercising a sense of control. If you were afraid of dogs you could unconsciously lead yourself into scenarios with scary dogs to feel justified, validated or right. Many of these habits are clearly beneficial for us to overcome, but we will also face internal resistance to changing them since a part of us is benefitting from them even if another part of us is being hurt.
Resistance can look like denial, intellectualization, attaching a story to something, diversion, blame, excitability, emotionality, desperation, despondency, inaction and self destructive activities. This is hard because this process is one that brings up genuine grief, shame, regret, sadness, sometimes excitement, elation and requires thoughtfulness & rest. It’s important to process these genuine feelings without falling out of balance and into the mental or emotional places that inhibit or talk you out of your progress.
Below, I’ve outlined some remedies to maintain this balance as you go, but first I want to note that the common steps and pitfalls we all undertake when we heal or progress are not helpful to be projected onto others or to have others project them onto us. This happens usually with the purpose of coercion or control - even if it’s well meaning. No one should tell you that your resistance to working with them or doing any specific kind of healing process is a result of your resistance to healing or change. A good healer or practitioner will know that there are many resources out there for this process, that there is not a one size fits all approach and that compatibility and trust are an important element when you’re receiving assistance with your process. Most of the time we come to these kinds of discoveries on our own and sometimes we have a healer/teacher/guide/therapist who can help us discover them, but ideally that comes with love, compassion and help. Pushing you into inner work, making you question your intuition or undermining your sense of what’s right for you is contradictory to what a good healing assistant should be fostering. Also, when we begin to make personal discoveries there is part of us that wants to share them and it’s easy to feel excited about seeing through the veil into many patterns. We can feel compelled to tell other people about the patterns we see in them and what we think they should do about it. We can also be good healing assistants at this point by remembering that there is no one size fits all approach, that people cannot be pushed into this work and that having a positive, respectful and genuine connection with someone is often more healing than any information.
Remedies to Resistance
Be aware of the potential to feel resistance while healing. This is an excellent start to begin to track subtle layers of your own process. What thoughts and feelings tell you to stop or that you can’t do this or that it’s not worth doing or that it's impossible to do? What justifications or evidence comes into your mind to back any of these things up to further compel you to stop? What thought processes, ideas or narratives disconnect you from feeling? What material has come up immediately before or after these voices or impulses feel strongest and why do you think this material might be particularly charged? What is the quality of these voices or resisting forces?
Practicing with initial internal barriers will help you move through other, more subtle barriers in the future and foster more complex communication with the self. Eventually you may be able to experience compassion and gratitude for these voices even as you disagree with them. They are parts of you who suffer to try to keep you safe and part of your work is helping alleviate them of that suffering. Just as you might wrestle a sick cat who believes it’s protecting itself into receiving medical care, you can be bigger than the fight and understand the benefit of the help from a much more informed place.
Don’t beat yourself up for feeling shame, regret, sadness, anger, guilt or anything else. These are all normal feelings and there is nothing wrong with having them. You don’t have to try to stop them or try to find reasons that they are valid. They simply are and it’s okay to have them. When they begin to make you feel like you can’t go on or shouldn’t go on or don't deserve to go on or have a distracting story to them is when to reflect more on the process you’re moving through.
Realizing or finding out hard things about ourselves or our life can feel like a terrible sentencing, but it’s actually the opposite. These are opportunities to repair something that already is and already has been. It’s not information that foretells the future, only the past. Try to celebrate these things even if you also must process sadness around them. Like a medical diagnosis this can feel very scary, but now that it’s known you have the opportunity to address it.
Be patient with yourself. When things come to light, whether hard or exciting, is wonderful but either way, changing patterns takes time. Everything that lasts and is true on deep levels takes time. Think of this like a masterpiece. All artists become frustrated and disenchanted with their work during their process. The key is to continue coming back to it.
Qualities and actions that we think of as shameful or bad can be important or beneficial as long as we don’t stop with our progress. Coming from a spiritual perspective I think of things like pride or ignorance as being shameful but also necessary to have pulled me and many others into spiritual work. Ignorance allowed for a kind of enthusiasm I might not be able to muster now. Pride encouraged me to take on things I’m glad I did but would be more hesitant to now. Every stage has value as long as you don’t stop. Try not to focus too much on past shame or label yourself with the qualities. For example, “I’ve felt angry and acted out of anger but that doesn’t mean I’m an angry person. I’ve acted foolishly but that doesn’t mean I’m a foolish person.” We all express a wide range of qualities we are not ultimately defined by.
Rest, celebrate, act with care for yourself, do things that are relaxing and nourishing. It’s okay to have a treat, go for a nice walk or picnic, watch something silly, do something fun or creative, etc. Alleviate the pressure of the work with things that are nice for your body and mind.
Use many tools. We are complex and fortunate that there are many different kinds of resources at our disposal to help match that complexity. Talk to a therapist, get a massage, go to a yoga class, listen to a guided meditation or meditative music, talk to a friend, write, incorporate ritual, try different types of therapies or healing resources. There’s nothing wrong with doing things that make the difficulty easier as long as we don’t abandon what we’re doing.
Keep going in spite of resistance. It’s good to build the confidence that you can do things part of you thinks you can’t or shouldn’t out of fear. Keep writing, ruminating, attending healing work, self care and showing up in general. There will be times where we have to attend to other things, rest, process and that’s okay. Just keep coming back to what you’re working on.
Practice compassion for yourself and others. It’s easy to look back through the difficulties in our life and want to place blame on ourselves and others in the circumstances. Instead of blame, work to forgive yourself just as you would someone you deeply love like a child or sibling or best friend. Look at the bigger circumstance around you and acknowledge that you were acting in reaction to many things you didn’t start, but had to cope with. The same for others that may have hurt you. I think it’s important to acknowledge our bad or traumatic experiences with others in order to fully process and let them go. Hopefully over time as part of our healing process we develop an understanding that every other person in our life is also subject to a larger story they didn’t begin and that they too were and are experiencing suffering. Anger is important to express, but if we hold onto it it holds us back. This goes for anger with ourselves and anger with others.
Have a goal or purpose for your work in mind. Why do you want to overcome challenges? Why do you want to improve? There is no wrong answer to this and it can change frequently. It can be specific or vague. Come back to the question when it all feels like too much. What am I hoping to gain? What am I striving to be?
Discovering that your thinking or way of relating to a thing hasn’t been innate or natural doesn’t mean you won’t be able to have access to that thing any more. For example, we realize that our drive to earn money is connected to a sense of self worth which is connected to feeling lovable, safe and acceptable. Working to alleviate the connection to self worth will not lead to having no other motivations to earn or will be prevented from having money. We might even have more of it or feel more relaxed about what we do have when it no longer feels so closely connected to receiving love. Try not to jump to conclusions about how the future will look if you let go of perspectives, beliefs or orientations and be open to the many unimaginable ways things can get better.
Address and change patterns on as many levels as you can. This could be on a spiritual level, mental level, active level and emotional level. It won’t happen all at once and often not quickly but, addressing something at an energetic or mental level will be more impactful if you also practice redirecting your mind from associated habits and even more so if you change your actions around it. This doesn’t always mean doing the opposite or anything big. It’s often very subtle and begins simply with noticing our inclinations and what they might be attached to. Then hopefully you have more opportunities and space to reflect on what you’re doing and why before fully committing to the thought, action or feeling you’d usually go to.
Have faith in your future self or in your potential or in the positive unknown future. I know this is hard for many of us, but in whatever way you can try to believe that things can get better and you are capable of making this happen and are supported in making this happen. Thank you for trusting me to be part of this support.
