Resistance is a mechanism of psychological defense, which, on the one hand, protects us from realizing such information about ourselves that is not pleasant to us (what makes us ashamed, scared, painful), and on the other hand, interferes with the study and acceptance of ourselves, creates a great internal tension and anxiety.

Resistance can manifest itself as follows:

The desire to cancel or reschedule a meeting to another day (and looking for reasons to do so);

• An inexplicable feeling of reluctance to meet with a psychotherapist, emotional discomfort;
• The desire to complete psychotherapy much earlier than originally agreed upon;
• Effective psychotherapy suddenly begins to seem pointless, expensive and ineffective;
• You have repeatedly started working with different specialists and completed the process without reaching the end;
• Disappointment in the psychotherapist is similar to what you have already felt in relation to other people significant to you;
• After 2-3 meetings, it seems to you that everything has worked out, your request for psychotherapy has been exhausted

The last point is especially interesting. Indeed, the severity of the experience often decreases already during the first meetings, however, this does not mean that any profound changes have occurred. The psyche does not change in a week. The process of deep transformation takes a long time. Often behind rapid improvements there is an unconscious desire to be good, successful, capable in the eyes of the psychotherapist, as well as a resistance to revealing what the client considers bad, humiliating, etc.

In the case when you want to stop therapy, resistance not only interferes, but excludes the possibility of receiving help. Therefore, in such a situation, it is recommended to leave 1-2 sessions in order to discuss the reasons for such a desire.

Talk to your therapist about any resistance you discover. When resistance and its reasons are voiced, tension is reduced and it becomes possible to talk about what is really important. Overcoming resistance is a turning point in psychotherapy, which takes you to a new level of awareness of the problem and opens up fundamentally new possibilities for working through it.