Question

According to Myers and Salt (2019):

Resistance is a common concern in assisting clients. Resistance comes in many forms, including interrupting the counselor; arguing, saying “yes . . . but”; refusing to consider that there is a problem; and ignoring, minimizing, or rationalizing the continuation of unhealthy behavior. Sometimes, a client will be compliant in words but do not seem to follow through in action. There may be many reasons for such resistance, some of which include fear of change, failure to see a need to change, concerns about the ability to change, a sense of hopelessness, and concerns about how a change would affect the person's life. (p. 77)

Describe your personal approach to dealing with resistance in a client. How will you work with the resistance while still promoting autonomy among the client?

Answer 1

When counselors label a client’s behavior as resistant, typically, one of two things has occurred, “Either we do not have a technique to manage what is going on in the interaction at the moment, or we do not understand enough about the client’s world to understand why they are responding the way they are. So, we label them as resistant as a result of our inability and lack of therapeutic skills. There is always a reason the client is responding the way they are. Our job is to understand the client’s world to the degree that we see their behavior for what it is and not as resistance.”

Clients are sometimes resistant because the counselor is asking them to deal with an undesired agenda, “Resistance means we’re working on the wrong problem a problem that the client doesn’t care to work on. Counselors need to connect with the client in order to find the right problem. I suggest connecting on the basis of clients’ perceived locus of control. Many clients resist because counselors focus too quickly on the clients’ feelings, behaviors or sense of responsibility. If a client resists because they feel everyone else has the problem, then focusing on the client presents a miscommunication.”

The counselor-client relationship is key to helping the client move forward, “Clients are less resistant if they feel connected with the counselor. If counseling is to be successful, the client must be willing to discuss the issue, examine it and make plans. If clients will not disclose their inner wants, actions, feelings and thinking, change is very difficult. But in the context of a safe, trusting relationship, they are more likely to disclose such information. After clients lower their defenses, they can then more freely discuss their inner thoughts and feelings. After this occurs, the counselor can help them conduct a more fearless self-evaluation.”

Also important, is having a mutually agreed-upon goal. It’s all too easy for counselors to put themselves in situations where they have a goal in mind for the client, but the client either isn’t aware of or doesn’t agree with that goal. If the client-counselor relationship is key to good outcomes. A mutually agreed-upon goal is the key to a good client-counselor relationship.

receiving “I don’t know” answers from clients can be frustrating and make counselors feel as though they aren’t getting anywhere in session. But he advises counselors not to grow discouraged or to waste time fighting the client’s response.

How will i work with resistance while still promoting autonomy among the client the key answer is Motivation.

Motivation has received increasing attention across counseling approaches, presumably because clients’ motivation is key for treatment effectiveness.

The Importance of Motivation:

Certain types of therapy rely primarily on the healer’s ability to mobilize forces in the sufferer by psychological means. These forms of treatment may be generally termed psychotherapy. (Frank & Frank, 1991, p. 1) As Frank and Frank’s (1991) classic definition suggests, counseling and psychotherapy involve mobilizing forces or energy within the client in the direction of healing or change. This is especially true in most counseling settings, where counseling represents a largely voluntary activity that may or may not engage the client. Attending to clients’ motivation and volition is an important theoretical and applied issue in psychotherapy and counseling for several reasons. First, although there are many effective approaches and treatments for optimally motivated clients, many clients are not motivated when they start therapy.

A second reason to attend to motivational dynamics is that the effectiveness of any counseling technique likely depends on the clients’ motivation for embracing the technique and persisting in the agreed direction

vated clients. Third, most counselors in daily practice outside of clinical trials do not begin therapy by addressing a focal problem with a set intervention. Instead, they start with an interpersonal exploration to identify what is wrong, whether one needs to begin treatment, and, if so, where to begin (Ryan & Deci, 2008; Yalom, 2002). These early stages in the encounter are critical for subsequent persistence. Even when clients report being motivated for counseling and adopt specific goals, energy for the process remains important. As Nix, Bierman, and McMahon (2009) concluded in their research on parent training groups, “From a clinical perspective . . . findings suggest that it is not enough to get parents to attend sessions; it is also necessary to facilitate their active engagement in the therapeutic process” (p. 429). Fourth, changes in the current climate of counseling make a focus on motivation particularly important. Increasingly, pressure from agencies and third-party payers in many settings dictates a short-term approach to change, which makes motivation even more critical early on (Milner & O’Byrne, 2002). Furthermore, increasing pressure toward specific outcomes impacts both selectivity and therapeutic focus, which yield motivational implications (Ryan & Deci, 2008). Finally, we notice a dramatic trend toward eclecticism or integration (Lambert, Garfield, & Bergin, 2004; Marquis, 2008; Norcross & Beutler, 2008). Many counselors and therapists today draw from numerous approaches in practice, both in an attempt to personalize treatments and interventions (Sue & Sue, 2008) and to address the wide variety of concerns they encounter with their clients, who rarely present with simple or discrete concerns (Rappaport, 1997; Westen et al., 2004). Different types of eclecticism can be distinguished in terms of how they integrate diverse practices into the therapist–client relationship. The potential for combining techniques with different, sometimes even incompatible, ways of motivating clients is thus of interest. In this respect, a comparative analysis of motivational dimensions of techniques may be informative, providing a framework for understanding, on a meta-technique level, how one is motivationally framing an intervention and thus the consequences likely to follow for treatment success.

Motivation can be defined broadly as that which moves people to act. Etymologically, the word motivation derives from the Latin movere, “to move” or “be moved.” More technically, motivation implies both the energy and direction of action (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Ford, 1992).