Question
Why do clients resist?
Answer
Most of the time clients resist because they have a fear of change. What's going to happen if I change? What's the risk? What's going to happen if I stop doing this?
Therapists oftentimes do not consider that clients often are comfortably uncomfortable and that they are continuing to do something because in their mind not doing it is riskier or scarier, or what they have to do differently is scarier. Therefore, they resist doing what they need to do because they are afraid.
Therapists have to design and use interventions that are appropriate for the specific stage of change that the client is in. Therefore, the whole goal of motivational interviewing, the whole process, the whole purpose, ideally, is just to decrease a person's ambivalence. That's, the part of them that wants to change and the part of them that doesn't, so it's like a teeter-totter. Ideally what we (Therapists) want to do is tilt that towards change, but the harder we try to get it to go this way, the more resistance we're going to get, so we have to work it so that we try to balance it out and ideally get the client, if we can to accept change. It is important to note that there are things that we do as Therapists/Counselors that can make this process easy or easier, or it can make it harder.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the webinar, Motivational Interviewing: A Different Way of Looking At It, presented by John Smith, PhD, LCSW.
