What we resist persists!

It is a powerful axiom that what we resist we have the paradoxical response of actually giving the resistance more strength, not less as we may have hoped. The old observation to try to not think about pink elephants and, of course, the elephant appears in our mind’s eye-pink and all. Often the issues we wish to avoid and never discuss or process are the one which we must. If we can pay attention to the particular issue without resistance or judgement (mindfulness) and using curiosity we ask ourselves what it is about this topic that we do not wish to face and process. No doubt it may be very uncomfortable to look into, but we believe in psychology that the particular issue is always “on” deep inside and we are trying to process it regardless whether we are consciously or not.

One of the long term goals of therapy is to learn the skills to process these issues on our own which we learn how to process with our therapist in our sessions.

 Can You Think of Some Issues in Your Own Life you are Avoiding?