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Meeting Client Resistance and Reactance With Reverence

Eric W. Cowan and Jack H. Presbury

This article explores the meaning and function of client resistance in the counseling setting from various theoretical orientations.
A relational model of resistance is offered that redefines traditional formulations of the concept and has implications for clinical
treatment. A clinical vignette illustrates that the counselor’s contribution to the emergence of client resistance is a relevant,
although often ignored, factor in overcoming therapeutic impasse.

S
igmund Freud found that when his clients at-
tempted to produce personal content through the
method of free association, they often reached a
point at which they were unable or unwilling to
continue (Schultz & Schultz, 1996). He surmised
that this meant they were resisting making explicit, or call-
ing into consciousness, the “shameful” or “repulsive” memo-
ries of their unconscious mind. Freud saw resistance as the
client’s innate protection against emotional pain. While, on
the one hand, he considered resistance to be a natural de-
fense against overwhelming abreactions, he also considered
that it was a signal to the therapist that the client had come
very close to the work that needed to be done. Freud con-
sidered the appropriate follow-up procedure to be an analy-
sis of the resistance that would give the client insight into
the material that was being repressed or denied.
Freud’s famous client “Anna O” (Bertha Pappenheim) gave
him his root metaphor for the therapeutic work. She re-
ferred to the “talking cure” as “chimney sweeping” (Jones,
1953; Schultz & Schultz, 1996). The idea was that when a
chimney flue is stopped up, smoke fills the house—obscuring
one’s vision and making one’s life a noxious environment—
and seeks outlets in other areas of the house, in the same
way that psychological symptoms are indirect and per-
plexing attempts to release repressed material. Thus, Freud
saw his analysis of resistance as working with a chimney
that needed to be unstopped so that the smoke could be
vented in an appropriate manner. Resistance itself would
come to be viewed as an inappropriate or unproductive
activity on the part of the client. Freud originally consid-
ered resistance to be client misbehavior but later saw it as
a necessary part of the therapeutic process (Karon & Wid-
ener, 1995). Nevertheless, resistance was something to be
overcome by the therapist.
Cognitive therapists took a slightly different view of re-
sistance: Rather than considering it to be a barrier against
repressed and painful material, resistance was seen as a way
of protecting one’s construction of reality. The notion was
that people represent the world by way of cognitive schema
and that the counseling process threatens—indeed calls for
the alteration of—the client’s way of organizing and pre-
dicting the world. As Mahoney (1988) put it: “resistance to
change serves as a natural and often healthy function in
protecting core organizing processes (and hence systemic
integrity) from rapid or sweeping reconstructive assault”
(p. 300). Likewise, Liotti (1989) suggested that human be-
ings all possess a natural resistance to the displacement of
old meaning structures by new ones. Mahoney (1991) main-
tained that it was change itself, rather than any pathologi-
cal process, that brings about resistance. He characterized
it as “individuals’ healthy caution about embarking upon or
embracing experiences that challenge their integrity, coher-
ence, or (felt) viability as a living system” (p. 329).
In the existential tradition of therapy, resistance came to be
viewed as a block to becoming fully aware of one’s threatening
condition or to being open, and therefore vulnerable to, other
people. In this view, resistance was considered part of the client’s
“space suit” in an environment that is seen as inhospitable to
survival. As Bugental and McBeath (1995) put it, “We recog-
nize that the forces within the person that hold off the thera-
peutic inquiry are the same forces that provide some stability
to the client’s way of being in the world” (p. 114).
Brehm and Brehm (1981) took a different view of resis-
tance and considered the client’s reluctance to change to
be a way of preserving personal freedom. To differentiate
this type of client motivation from the more traditional
notions, they called it “reactance” rather than resistance.
According to this view, “when an individual who expects to

Eric W. Cowan is a licensed clinical psychologist and assistant professor of psychology in the Counseling Psychology Program at James Madison University,
Harrisonburg, Virginia. Jack H. Presbury is a licensed professional counselor and professor of psychology in the Counseling Psychology Program at James
Madison University, Harrisonburg. Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to Eric W. Cowan, James Madison University, Psychology Depart-
ment, Johnston Hall, South Main St., Harrisonburg, VA 22807 (e-mail: cowanwe@jmu.edu).

J O U R N A L O F C O U N S E L I N G & D E V E L O P M E N T • FA L L 2 0 0 0 • V O L U M E 7 8 411
Cowan and Presbury
be able to control events is exposed instead to an uncontrol-
lable outcome, the result is reactance arousal and increased
striving for control as the person engages in protective or
restorative behaviors” (Dowd & Seibel, 1990, p. 460). The
concept of reactance seems to be a more benign way of
looking at the client’s reluctance to change in a situation in
which he or she may feel helpless.
CLINICAL MANEUVERS FOR OVERCOMING RESISTANCE
Whether psychodynamic, existential, or cognitive, most
approaches to therapy embody the idea that counselors must
somehow seek to break through the client’s resistance. The
following list of tactics suggested by Liotti (1989) offers
examples of the prevailing attitude toward client resistance
or reactance and possible strategies for breaking through:
1. Disputing [italics added] irrational beliefs.
2. Dealing with higher-order anxieties through appropriate tech-
niques (coping imagery, flooding, shame attacking [italics added]
exercises, desensitization, etc.).
3. Making resort to paradoxical intention [italics added].
4. Educating [italics added] the patient with regard to the treatment’s
rationale.
5. Getting the patient to gather prospective evidence against his cogni-
tive blocks [italics added], through a process of predictions and
behavioral experiments that resembles the traditional experimental
method. . .
6. Preparing [italics added] the patient in advance for difficulties in
the treatment. (p. 31)
From this perspective, the counselor musters a set of tac-
tics designed to defeat the client’s stubbornness. However,
despite a relative lack of sophistication, clients often seem
ingenious in their ability to devise new ways to resist the
best therapeutic efforts to overcome their resistance. Re-
sistant client behavior seems, in this sense, to conform to
Newton’s third law of motion: For every force there is an
equal and opposite counterforce. In a model in which over-
coming resistance potentially becomes a contest, the client
will often win. In addition, our therapeutic efforts to over-
come client reluctance may sometimes do more harm than
good (Ginter & Bonney, 1993). Clients possess their own
wisdom as to how quickly they can become open to change.
Dolan (1985) recounted the story of a man watching a
butterfly emerge from its cocoon. The man, impatient with
the slow progress of the butterfly, decides to help by pry-
ing away the impediment of the shell and thus allowing the
butterfly its freedom:
He fails to recognize the protective nature of the constricting “re-
sistant” cocoon. The butterfly, with the man’s “help,” is set free in
the cold air prematurely. Deprived of adequate time to make the
necessary adjustments within the cocoon, it crumbles into a help-
less, suffering heap. The therapist must have reverence and appre-
ciation for each client’s personal rate of change, idiosyncrasies, dif-
ficulties, vulnerabilities, and resources. (p. 3)
Like the cocoon of the butterfly, resistance or reactance may
temporarily slow a client’s progress, but it simultaneously
expresses a protective wisdom that can never be fully verbal-
412 J O U R N A L O F C O U N S E L I N G & D E V E L O P M E N T • FA L L 2 0 0 0 • V O L U M E 7 8
ized by the client. If asked about their reluctance, clients can
only say—if they can speak of it at all—that for some reason
they are frightened to go further or to talk of certain things.
The butterfly’s helper would see this as a moment when
stronger intervention is required: Tearing open the covering
and exposing the interior is considered by many to be the
most efficient and useful thing to do. At such times, such
techniques as interpretation or confrontation are used to strip
the client of old and atrophied confining impasses from which
they need to break free. Without doubt, if the moment is
precisely right and the client is ready to deal with the real-
ization that such measures bring, these techniques can be
profoundly effective. The problem is that the helper more
often risks forcing the client into a premature insight that
may not then become fully integrated into the client’s expe-
rience, because the idea seemed more the counselor’s than
the client’s. And the worst-case scenario would be that the
client, not ready to face whatever shame or terror might be
associated with the sudden realization, would collapse into a
“heap” like the butterfly. The paradox is that often the
counselor’s efforts to speed up the therapeutic process pro-
duce the opposite of the desired effect. As Erickson (1980)
observed, knowing the correct treatment is not sufficient; it
is equally important that the client be receptive and coop-
erative regarding the therapy, or the therapeutic results will
be delayed, distorted, or prevented.
DECLARING THE DEATH OF RESISTANCE
Beitman (1992) subtly altered the definition of resistance
by describing it as a phenomenon that includes the client’s
perception of and reaction to the forces exerted by the thera-
pist, which are expressive of the therapist’s, not the client’s,
primary concerns: “Resistances and blocks to treatment usu-
ally exist when therapists have specific notions of what the
patient is supposed to do” (p. 218). As Erickson and Rossi
(as cited in Dolan, 1985, p. 6) put it: “Too many psycho-
therapists take you out to dinner and then tell you what to
order.” With this belief in mind, Steve de Shazer (1984)
declared resistance to be officially dead. He said the con-
cept of resistance was the result of a wrong-headed em-
phasis on homeostasis. The tendency of a closed system to
return to the status quo was applied to clients and thought
to mean that people tend to stay “sick” due to homeostatic
mechanisms. As a result, clients would resist changing and
the counselor would have to devise heroic strategies for
overcoming the client’s natural tendency to stay the same.
For de Shazer, this was “closed system” thinking based on
the old notions of physics. He quoted Maruyama (1963)
who contended that a “second cybernetics” operated on
principles that later became known as chaos, the butterfly
effect, and complexity. The idea is that when a system is given
“sufficient push” or “kick” in the “right direction,” it will
enter into a “deviation amplifying” process resulting in
change that is disproportionately large as compared to the
initial perturbation. According to de Shazer, helping profes-
sionals have come to think of people and families as closed

systems that resist change, and we do not consider that what-
ever behaviors are exhibited in a counseling session are
taking place within a system that includes both the client(s)
and the counselor. Instead of “resistance,” de Shazer preferred
to speak of “cooperation.” Change is inevitable. Clients do
the best they can to cooperate in the change process. If change
does not seem to be taking place, then the counselor has not
initiated sufficient “push”; that is, the counselor has not intro-
duced a “difference that makes a difference.”
The chief benefit of declaring the death of resistance seems
to be an alteration of the counselor’s attitude. Instead of view-
ing the client as resistive or reactive, and seeing the over-
coming of this resistance as combat, the counselor can view
the client’s “stuckness” as having yet to reach “escape veloc-
ity” from the patterned interactions that have troubled the
client. The staff of the Milwaukee Brief Family Therapy Cen-
ter, headed by de Shazer, apparently considered the death of
the idea of resistance to be such an important insight, it is
said that a funeral was held to mark its passing (O’Hanlon &
Weiner-Davis, 1989; Young, 1992). We could not find this
funeral ritual cited in de Shazer’s writing, but apocryphal or
not, it makes a great story and dramatizes the importance
with which this change of attitude is regarded.
In a reply to de Shazer, Stewart and Anderson (1984)
seemed less eager to dispense with the concept of resis-
tance. They wrote:
We must confess to some initial shock at de Shazer’s proclamation
that resistance is dead. We thought we had seen it just last week,
alive and looking amazingly healthy. If de Shazer’s report is not
wishful thinking, its death is certainly an untimely one. . . . We were
just looking over the notion, thinking there might be something use-
ful and worth preserving, albeit in a modified form. (pp. 17–18)
We agree that resistance remains a useful concept, but too
often the traditional way of explaining it was an exercise in
client-blaming and was not very revealing of how to get
around it.
RELATIONAL CONTEXTS OF RESISTANCE
In contrast to these traditional views, models of treatment
that centralize the relationship between therapist and cli-
ent as significant to the healing enterprise call for a redefi-
nition of the concept of resistance. In a relational approach,
resistance is not seen as something that happens within the
client, as a response to his or her inner workings, and must
be overcome by the counselor. Rather, resistance is under-
stood as a phenomenon that emerges between client and
therapist in the unfolding interaction between their differ-
ently organized subjective worlds. The intrapsychic is em-
bedded in a larger context, such that a person’s reality never
exists within the “bag of skin” as in the traditional concept
of the isolated mind. The organization of experience, and
of self, develops as the product of ongoing mutual influ-
ence between the experiencing individual and the larger
matrix of persons and things with whom he or she is in
relationship (Ginter & Bonney, 1993).
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Meeting Client Resistance and Reactance With Reverence
Winnicott (1965, 1971) observed that, in psychological
development, there is no such thing as an infant, only an
infant–caregiver system that is mutually influential and regu-
lating. This “systems” emphasis on the development of self-
experience is important for understanding the developmen-
tal arrests underlying the problems and symptoms that
motivate a person to seek counseling. The counselor–client
system is metaphorically and structurally related to the ear-
lier infant–caregiver system, and self-experience and the
emergence of resistance take shape as the subjective worlds
of client and counselor come into contact with one another.
Just as early caregivers function as mirrors that ideally pro-
vide the infant with an accurate and integrating reflection
of his or her own experience and mood states, so the
counselor’s mirroring of the client’s subjective world in-
creases the client’s capacity for self-experience and inte-
gration. This accurate mirroring fosters the process of what
Winnicott (1971) called “personalization”: “When I look I
am seen, so I exist” (p. 134).
This interpersonal understanding of the development of
self architecture and of the phenomenon of resistance has
roots in many contextual theories across a broad spectrum
of philosophical orientations. These range from interper-
sonal process approaches and psychoanalytic phenomenol-
ogy to humanistic approaches that emphasize the value of
the ontological dimensions of encounter and participation.
All of the approaches share the concept that the client’s
world can never be understood apart from the relational
context in which it occurs, including the relational processes
unfolding with the counselor. When resistance appears in
the course of therapy, it must be recognized as a part of the
particular therapeutic dialogue, and the counselor’s contri-
bution to it must be understood.
Stern (1988) drew on concepts similar to Piaget’s
constructivism to explain how the structure of self-
experience is embedded in relational processes. He argued
that every interpersonal encounter is a “lived in” event,
which is internalized and encoded. When roughly the same
situation or event is encountered repeatedly, the invariant
features of these situations are conserved, and merge to
form a prototypic event, while the unique features may be
discarded. This process is the method by which organizing
frames of reference are shaped in the person’s experience,
and which he or she uses to interpret new situations. These
representations may selectively ignore features of a new
situation that do not match the internal representation.
When a client manifests what the counselor perceives as
resistance, the counselor is often tempted to conclude that
the client is imposing his or her categories of experience in
a way that distort reality. After all, the counselor’s intent is
to help the client, and so, when the client reacts to the
helpful interventions as somehow antagonistic, the coun-
selor concludes that the resistance must be based on the
client’s distortion of the counselor or of the counselor’s
activities. The counselor might call this distortion “transfer-
ence,” argue that it is coming solely from the client,, and
that it manifests itself in the client’s resistance to the
413
Cowan and Presbury
counselor’s efforts. The counselor believes that he or she has
nothing to do with this distortion, ascribing it solely to
patterns formed in the client’s previous relationships that
are being arbitrarily imposed on a new situation.
However, at this point, the question arises of defining
whose reality is being referenced. If, for example, my inter-
nal representations of self and the world do not accommo-
date the “reality” of a bus moving at a high rate of speed,
then it is likely, should I step in front of it, that some self
reorganization will take place. This reorganization will take
place regardless of my interpretation of the thing called “bus.”
Often, counselors accord their clinical observations and in-
terpretations the objective reality of a bus, failing to
contextualize what occurs with reference to their own cat-
egories of experience. Thus, counselors may fail to recognize
how they are influencing the transference of this particular
client as both participate in the relational field. Bateson’s
statement about cognitive cartography—that the map is not
the territory—is as true for the counselor as it is for the
client (Becvar & Becvar, 1988). When the counselor’s mean-
ing-making activity is ignored, it may indeed seem to the
client that he or she is being run over by the counselor’s
seemingly objective interpretations and interventions. The
client, sensing danger, steps out of the way of the bus, and
the counselor writes in the process notes for the session, “cli-
ent demonstrating high levels of resistance.” Of course, the
client will invariably impose meaning-making templates on
the therapeutic situation and will interpret some of its fea-
tures as potentially injurious. The relevant question in such a
circumstance is this: What behavior on the part of the coun-
selor elicits these resistant reactions, and how might the client’s
resistance be in response to the counselor’s imposition of his
or her own subjective categories of organization?
Kohut (1971) argued that self-experience always forms
within the context of relations with others and that in coun-
seling the derailed developmental strivings of the individual
will reemerge in the relationship with the counselor. For
instance, a client raised with unreliable or inconsistent
caregivers may experience a failure to gratify the need to
see his or her parents as powerful and capable and may
therefore fail to develop internal principles of organization
that allow self or others to be viewed as consistent or ca-
pable. These unmet developmental strivings may reactivate
during the course of counseling in the form of a need to
idealize the counselor as powerful, capable, completely
consistent and able to handle any situation. In this instance,
the idealizing transference in the context of the relation-
ship yields the clues to the self-organization and meaning-
making activity of the client. The counselor’s quality of
empathic response to transference meaning of these ex-
pressions (and his own participation with the client in their
emergence) is central to whether the counselor’s activities
evoke resistance or participation. If the client believes that
the counselor is usurping a core area of experience or con-
nection (such as questioning the validity rather then the
meaning of the client’s need to idealize the counselor), then
the client’s tentative expression of these hidden longings
414 J O U R N A L O F C O U N S E L I N G & D E V E L O P M E N T • FA L L 2 0 0 0 • V O L U M E 7 8
will cease. These longings will “go into hiding,” and the pro-
tective behaviors he or she has used in the past to prevent
reoccurrence of traumatic injury will manifest in a disrup-
tion of the therapeutic alliance. In contrast, if the client
feels understood by the counselor from within the client’s
own referential world, the therapeutic alliance is strength-
ened and serves to foster integration and to further illumi-
nate the dimensions of the client’s self-organization.
Empathy, in this definition, implies that the counselor is
willing to bracket his or her own interpretive systems to
follow, like Alice of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonder-
land, the rabbit of another’s self-expression into a unique
and personal experiential world. Here, up may be down, and
the relations between things may operate according to prin-
ciples understood only by a Mad Hatter or a Queen of Hearts,
and it will be the counselor’s task to get to know them well.
Kohut’s self psychology infuses traditional analytic concepts
with the humanistic emphasis on empathy as the central in-
vestigative stance in psychotherapy. The centrality of empa-
thy represented a shift from an objective observer stance to
a greater level of engagement and participation in attempt-
ing to understand the client’s inner world. Kohut, and the
interpersonalists before him, argued that with a history of
accurate responsiveness to affective events, a child is able to
integrate and modulate emotions effectively. When accurate
mirroring is profoundly absent, developmental arrests in the
expression and modulation of affect give rise to personality
constellations that form the basis for lifelong inner conflict.
When the counselor attempts to address developmental ar-
rests by accurately mirroring the client’s affective experi-
ences, this serves to build self-regulating functions and acts
as an introject or internalization. As mentioned, the client’s
willingness to engage in the counseling process is related to
the counselor’s accuracy in responding to affectively loaded
material, with the client manifesting a negative reaction, or
resistance, in response to “mal-attunement.”
Wolf (1988) defined resistance as an activity motivated by
fear of injury to some important aspect of self and the func-
tion of which is to protect the self’s structure and bound-
aries from disintegration and fragmentation. Similarly, from
a humanistic “dialogical” view, Hycner (1988) described
resistance as the residue of an attempted dialogue cut short
in midsentence and asserted that the counselor must be able
to appreciate the wisdom of resistance as the client’s way of
preserving some important aspect of self or identity.
Stolorow and Atwood (1992) asserted that resistance is
embedded in the transference activity of the client and that
it is a response to some activity of the counselor that the
client experiences as potentially retraumatizing. The authors
see counselors and clients as participating in a mutually regu-
lating phenomenal field to which neither can be objective.
Within this relational field, both client and counselor bring
their subjective experiential worlds and participate in a
reciprocal and mutually influencing encounter. Stolorow
and Atwood argued that the client cannot distort the seem-
ingly objective behaviors and interpretations of the coun-
selor because the counselor cannot be said to embody any

objective reality or perspective, because each is bound by his
or her subjective frames of reference. All meaning-making
activity, therefore, occurs within the transference, which is
understood as encompassing how each participant under-
stands and experiences the other. Again, what the counse-
lor perceives as resistance actually signals that the client
anticipates some retraumatization by the counselor. That
is, when the client’s experience of the therapeutic relation-
ship is organized and interpreted by expectations or fears,
then the result is likely to be that the client’s emerging
emotional states and needs will meet with the same trau-
matic responses from the counselor as they received from
early caregivers (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992). Resistance,
therefore, is always evoked by some activity of the counse-
lor that signals for the client an impending recurrence of
traumatic developmental failure and overwhelming affect
(Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987). The client perceives
this overwhelming affect as potentially destructive to a sense
of enduring self-organization, and measures are taken to
prevent this fragmentation and impending annihilation. Thus,
when the counselor is experienced as attuned to the expres-
sions of the client, the anxiety that fuels the resistive dimen-
sion of the client’s organizing activity in the therapeutic
encounter recedes, and the hidden developmental longings
may be revealed. However, when the client senses that the
counselor is “mal-attuned,” he or she fears a traumatic rep-
etition of loss, and the resistive, protective dimension moves
into the foreground of the interaction, and the fragile devel-
opmental longings go into hiding. Thus, there is a constant
shifting in figure and ground between the repetitive (resis-
tive) and the engagement dimensions of the transference de-
pending on the level of counselor ability to stick with the
client’s experiential world (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992).
In all these relational models, the therapeutic endeavor
involves recognizing and articulating the client’s internal
organizing principles, making explicit and open to exami-
nation the self-structure from within a relational context.
The counselor provides opportunities for engagement that
do not confirm the client’s expectations of retraumatization.
The intent is to provide new, affect-integrating experiences
that remediate developmental deficits and create alterna-
tives to old patterns of coping. Alexander’s (Alexander &
French, 1946) description of a successful therapeutic out-
come as a “corrective emotional experience” (p. 2) is one
objective of counselors who recognize and use the thera-
peutic relationship itself as a vehicle for healing.
CASE STUDY
In light of the preceding, one could argue that clinical
case studies should make explicit the relevant aspects of
the counselor’s subjective interpretive systems as well as
the client’s. If such an idea seems ridiculous, it is only be-
cause the objective-observer bias is so deeply embedded in
our notions of legitimate inquiry. Much has been made of
the challenge to logical positivism in recent decades by sci-
entific philosophers who reference Heisenburg’s Uncertainty
J O U R N A L O F C O U N S E L I N G & D E V E L O P M E N T • FA L L 2 0 0 0 • V O L U M E 7 8
Meeting Client Resistance and Reactance With Reverence
Principle, relativity theory, and the apparently chaotic mis-
conduct of obstreperous bits of matter and energy described
by particle physics. However, challenging the primacy of
the “received view” of scientific empiricism is not new. Many
of the assumptions that inform contemporary contextual
models trace their ancestry to German philosopher Wilhelm
Dilthy. Dilthy (1926/1961) asserted that in the “human
sciences” the investigator’s values and assumptions must
interact with and influence the field of study and will
relativize the data in any case. Why not, he argued, acknowl-
edge and describe the impact of this influence? The aim of
such investigation is not a statement of objective fact but
the illumination of contextual meanings, which also include
the contribution of the investigator. We have presented
models of resistance that rest on this assumption and offer
the case of Chloe as an illustration. Chloe was seen by the
lead author of this article (Cowan). Standard ethical prac-
tices were followed in reporting this case (American Coun-
seling Association, 1995).
Chloe
Chloe sought help under conditions that every counselor
silently dreads. This 18-year-old daughter of divorcing up-
per middle-class parents was “forced” by her parents to seek
treatment; I was the third professional counselor she had
seen in 6 months. In my conversation with her second coun-
selor, I heard the rather loosely applied appellation “bor-
derline,” along with a few other vaguely diagnostic judg-
ments that are often more descriptive of counselor frustra-
tion and feelings of ineffectiveness than of a client’s psy-
chological organization. I braced myself for tough going.
Chloe had surprised everyone in her family by transform-
ing from a compliant, attractive but invisible third sibling,
who always received good grades, into an oppositional, ir-
responsible, and self-destructive “terror.” Her “emotionally
cold” and “controlling” mother complained that she stayed
out drinking at parties, was indiscriminately sexually active
(“acting like a slut,” her mother said) and that she had no
plans or goals beyond wanting to move out of the house,
which her mother opposed. Her father was a successful
businessman but in his family relations seemed “ineffec-
tual,” “needy,” and “bewildered” by his lack of influence re-
garding his impending divorce. In the past, he had consis-
tently used Chloe to obtain the emotional support missing
in his arid marriage. He had frequently complained to Chloe
about her mother, and of her rejection of him, and had con-
vinced Chloe that she was the only one who really loved
and understood him. She had come to deeply resent this
“emotional incest” and had recently expressed this to her
father, who then accused her of acting like her mother.
Chloe had committed many self-destructive acts, such as
cutting herself with razor blades, and had made one serious
suicide attempt. Her parents said that she had become so
difficult and unmanageable that she seemed like “another
person” and not the daughter for whom they had always
had such high expectations.
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Cowan and Presbury
To my surprise, although Chloe proved to be aloof, she
was cooperative during our initial sessions. Just as impor-
tant, she knew how to use words; she was articulate in her
unhappiness. She spoke of her parent’s imposed expecta-
tions for her future, their approaching divorce, and her lack
of emotional connection with them. She seemed to increas-
ingly welcome having a listening ear, especially regarding
her complaints about her mother who “never has a real
conversation,” and her “clueless former therapists,” none of
whom understood her, she said. She described her parents
as alternately disinterested or overcontrolling and invasive
and said they disapproved of her interests. She wished to
become an illustrator and artist, but her parents considered
this impractical and would not support her emotionally or
financially in this endeavor. She claimed to be in favor of
her parent’s divorce, but it was clear that she was resentful
about it. Their marriage, she said, was as rife with misun-
derstanding as her relationship with both of them.
She was talking. She seemed to be engaging in counseling.
I secretly prided myself on my empathic skills and thought
of Chloe’s other “therapists” with sympathy. Things were
getting better, and I had yet to make an interpretation!
My goals for counseling included the following:
1. To make an agreement with Chloe that she would
make no suicide attempts and that she would sign a
contract to this effect.
2. To help her stop the self-mutilating behavior and
understand how this self-defeating behavior worked
against her recovery.
3. To establish a therapeutic alliance that would help
her to explore the conflicts underlying these behav-
iors and come to greater self-understanding, integra-
tion, and self-differentiation.
4. To help her articulate the destructive effect of her
family’s dynamics on her sense of self-efficacy and
loss of a sense of belonging.
These seemed like reasonable goals that expressed my care
and concern for her, and I tried to win her support for them
as guides for our work together.
Over time, however, in contrast to her initial cooperative
behavior, she became increasingly hostile, punitive, insulting,
defensive, and unwilling to examine how she might create
change in her life. I tried to discover what could have dis-
rupted our alliance. I had been unwaveringly empathic, ready
to listen to whatever she wanted to tell me. I had passed no
judgment, made no unreasonable demands, been supportive
of her obvious struggle to differentiate from her parents and
come to terms with her disappointment in their shortcom-
ings. I had also wanted to help her give up her self-destructive
behavior, which was clearly hindering her own ability to reach
her expressed goals and desires. She continued to refuse to
contract with me that she would not injure herself and would
not agree to inform me of any suicidal intentions. Like a “typi-
cal teenager” (as I now described her to myself as my frustra-
tion mounted), her refrain was that I “just didn’t understand.”
416 J O U R N A L O F C O U N S E L I N G & D E V E L O P M E N T • FA L L 2 0 0 0 • V O L U M E 7 8
Things got worse. Over time, I looked back on our initial
conversations as her just “using” her sessions to have a fo-
rum to complain, and I began to give up hope of ever mak-
ing progress, anticipating our upcoming appointments with
displeasure. I came to see her as resistant and entrenched,
so caught up in a negative self-image and expectation that
it rendered her incapable of the kind of self-reflective ca-
pacity necessary for effective counseling. Despite the op-
portunities before her, she refused to even look at how her
self-destructive acts undermined everything I, or we, were
striving to achieve.
She started refusing to talk . . . especially if she had en-
gaged in cutting herself—I would just see a new bandage.
When pressed to explain why she might cut herself, she
would respond sarcastically, “Because it feels good,” which
I regarded as a cynical and aggressive rejection of my help.
I began secretly to panic. My displeasure turned to dread
in anticipation of our meetings. I said to myself, “What do
you expect with her borderline tendencies?” Despite my
best efforts at entering her world, understanding her as she
wished to be understood, she let me know at every meet-
ing, directly or indirectly, that I had failed. I began to think
of her as “untreatable.” I thought, “This is the most resistant
client I have ever seen . . . every intervention is deflected.”
This was true except for one thing. For 6 months, she came
every single week—on time. I realized she must be getting
something, if only the experience that I could tolerate and
not abandon her.
At this midpoint in the sessions, something happened in
my own life that changed my perspective on Chloe and
made me mindful of the subjective frames of reference that
I brought to my sessions with her. My sessions with Chloe
occurred during a year of postdoctoral residency. Years
before, I had made a big sacrifice and left a lucrative career
to attend graduate school, and this was the end of a time
when stresses were high, finances were strained to break-
ing, and one of my children was doing poorly in school. I
felt overwhelmed. I remember that I had that sense of frag-
mentation and diffusion one experiences when emotional
resources are completely depleted. Sadly, it looked as if I
might have to sell my one remaining asset to make ends
meet: my old 30-foot sloop, which had been my project,
my pride, and my solace in rough times and rough seas,
sailing on the Pacific. She had been the family boat, and my
father and I had invested a lot of “sweat equity” in bringing
her back to life. I hated to think of selling her, yet there was
no way to afford her. I had discussed it with my wife, and
we decided what had to be done. I would have to give the
boat up. I reluctantly agreed to post an advertisement at
the chandlery. However, when I left the chandlery the next
day, it was not after having posted a notice for the sale of
the boat but with a new anchor for her that had cost $468.00
(plus tax). And, I felt better . . . a lot better! I went home to
share my joy with my wife; she was somewhat less enthusi-
astic. In fact, she was downright critical! Why, she asked,
would I purchase an anchor for $468.00 (plus tax), when I
could not even afford the boat it was supposed to anchor?

I explained to her the beauty of the anchor—that this was
an anchor that could hold you in any storm, could keep
you off the rocks despite the fiercest gale. I even showed it
to her and invited her to appreciate how its form followed
its function, to see it as a work of art. How could she not
appreciate the necessity of protecting and securing me and
my boat with a strong, invincible anchor? In California, I
explained, the holding ground is different—sand, rock and
coral—it’s different terrain under there, not like the Chesa-
peake mud my father and I had anchored in. In California,
I would sometimes wake up on the boat to discover myself
drifting out to sea or toward some danger on shore. I needed
this anchor.
She thought I was missing the big picture. She began mak-
ing highly rational arguments to my increasingly irrational
and defensive justifications. The more she pushed me to
admit that I should not have bought the anchor, the more
beautiful and necessary that anchor became, and the less I
felt that she understood me. About the time in the argu-
ment when the anchor was beginning to possess “magical
powers” for me, she stunned me with, “You’re in denial. We
can’t pay our rent this month unless you charged ‘that thing’
on our credit card.” “So what,” I argued, “we can live on the
boat.” It disorganized me when she started accurately throw-
ing around psychological terms, and I had not had time to
regroup. She threw up her hands. On her way out of the
room she said, in one final accurate interpretation, “Well, I
guess sometimes an anchor is more than just an anchor.” I
had not realized she had picked up so much while editing
my dissertation.
That night I slept on the boat, feeling hostile and resent-
ful that she was so right. I knew I had been feeling adrift
and ungrounded, about as fragmented as a boat on the rocks.
Sailing had always been my way of healing and soothing
my own fragmented soul, as well as a connection to those
sustaining experiences of time on the water with my father
or my children. I had thought of replacing the traditional
old sloop with a smaller, cheaper, modern boat that had no
wood to varnish, but there was no room in my imagination
to put such a thing. It was just not me. Irrational and self-
undermining as it was, buying that anchor for the boat made
me feel better. My boat was in order, well equipped for any-
thing the weather might throw at me. Seeing the anchor
up on the foredeck, in all its functional and self-defeating
beauty, I thought of Chloe.
By our next session, I had decided to take a gamble. I
resolved to share with Chloe my experience of buying the
anchor: How it was so irrational, and how it had made me
feel so much better when I had felt so overwhelmed. I also
decided to tell her—and here was the risk—how I now
understood why she felt the need to cut herself when she
felt completely overwhelmed. Far from being ultimately
self-destructive, for her it was a way of coping, of tempo-
rarily pulling back together, of getting the overwhelming,
unbearable feelings outside of her—her way of externaliz-
ing her despair. Pain has a startling way of focusing one’s
attention, much different from the pervasive and diffuse
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Meeting Client Resistance and Reactance With Reverence
threat of self-disintegration. I wanted her to know why I
now understood her refusal to sign a suicide contract—that
it would be like getting her to agree that her pain was bear-
able, when what she wanted to communicate to me was that
her pain was unbearable. I wanted her to know that I could
see that she had refused to disqualify that message.
I realized that I had been unwilling to accept that Chloe’s
self-cutting, paradoxically, was her attempt to achieve a
sense of wholeness after experiencing complete disintegra-
tion and a feeling of annihilation. Most important, I also
realized that my attempts to coerce her into giving up the
behavior for more adaptive ways of coping communicated
to her that I did not understand her inner world. It meant
that I could not accept that she lived in an experience in
which cutting is actually a move toward cohesion. It meant
to her that her inner world was too unpleasant a place for
me to want to go there—that I could not accept it. And she
was right. I did not want to enter a world in which irratio-
nal cutting was a step toward feeling better. It became ap-
parent to me that imposing my treatment goals reflected
my own organizing frames of reference, an effort to bind
the anxiety evoked by Chloe’s self-destructive behavior.
I was concerned that she would not accept my story on
its own merits because she might feel patronized by the
qualitative difference between my buying an anchor for my
sailboat and her contemplating her own demise. But I
wanted her to see that I was now ready to accompany her
wherever she might wish to take me in her inner landscape.
Her resistance had been in response to my unwillingness to
fully meet her on her own terrain in a world I could not
accept. She feared being retraumatized by me, the one who
wanted her to change, the one who wanted to help pull her
up out of the mire, the one who did not want to get his
shoes muddy. I hoped she would realize that I now saw
that she had been willing to come to me every week, on
time, but that I had been unwilling to completely come to
her. Most of all, I just wanted her to allow me to have a
second shot at understanding her world as she understood
it. I made an offer hoping she would accept it.
She did. I never even got to all those explanations. She
needed no interpretations about the parallels; she was way
ahead of me. She just put her face in her hands and cried
for a long time and then, to partly remove herself from that
moment of vulnerability, observed, “It’s about (expletive
deleted) time” and “Did you think that signing that stupid
paper would keep me from offing myself if I really wanted
to?” Things changed after that. I do not mean to imply that
it was all “smooth sailing.” But, by deepening the level of
empathy, involving not only the affective but the struc-
tural/experiential aspects of our meeting, we did get past a
fundamental resistance created by the intersection between
our two subjective ways of experiencing the world and
found a common meeting place. Still, she never cut herself
in the 13 months that I continued to see her. She never
signed any contracts—I never again asked. By the time we
ended counseling, she was applying to art schools. She had
moved out of her parents’ house and gotten a job. She was
417
Cowan and Presbury
partly paying for her own counseling. And she came, on time,
every week. Once, she related that when she felt like cut-
ting herself, she thought of our meetings. She imagined us in
the customary setting and replayed the conversations we
had and that somehow this helped her to pull together. She
said that during these times she could summon up my voice
and hear it clearly, and she could hear her own voice re-
sponding. In that imaginary dialogue, she explained, she
could often discover the multiple levels of what she was
experiencing and what she needed to do to help herself. I
hope she still can.
Summary
Chloe’s case illustrates well the previously outlined prin-
ciples summarized as follows:
1.Self-experience always takes shape within a particular
relational context. In Chloe’s case, the intersecting subjec-
tive worlds of client and counselor at first prevented Chloe
from experiencing and expressing in the sessions the inter-
nal states that caused her such distress. She became defen-
sive because she rightly perceived that the counselor’s
organizing frames of reference did not accommodate the
value or meaning of her attempts to cope.
2.The internalization of relational events serves to create
the structure, or organizing principles of self-architecture, espe-
cially affective experience, which shape a person’s subsequent
experience of others and the world. Chloe’s developmental
experiences with caregivers indicated a deficit in sustained
and reliable empathy, or “mirroring.” She lacked the kinds
of structure-building experiences with others that would
have enabled her to modulate and regulate her emotional
life, leaving her open and vulnerable to overwhelming emo-
tional states. Furthermore, she expected that others in her
life would fail to provide this empathic responsiveness, yet
she longed to be heard and understood.
3.Therapy is a new kind of relationship in which the dis-
owned and hidden affects and developmental aspirations
emerge in the relationship with the counselor, depending on
the level of accurate empathy. When Chloe experienced the
counselor as empathically attuned, she was increasingly able
and willing to reveal her inner world. Developmental
longings reemerged that involved the need to have her inner
world reflected and confirmed by means of a resonant
response. The new responsive relational climate opened
up to her the possibility that she could construct new con-
figurations of self-experience as she internalized aspects of
these relational events as being sustaining.
4.Resistance is not merely a defense against the emergence
of unacceptable impulses across an internal repressive barrier.
Rather, resistance is evoked in the relationship between
counselor and client when the client interprets the behavior
of the counselor to mean that a repetition of injury may
occur. Resistance serves to protect a core area of self-
experience from usurpation or fragmentation or to shield a
sensitive archaic injury. Resistance diminishes when the
418 J O U R N A L O F C O U N S E L I N G & D E V E L O P M E N T • FA L L 2 0 0 0 • V O L U M E 7 8
client perceives the counselor as attuned and therefore he
or she has no need to import a substitute reality of the
counselor.
It is clear from Chloe’s case that empathy in the counsel-
ing setting is not merely a matter of technique, or good
intentions, or even the counselor’s acceptance of the client.
All of these were present in the initial phase of Chloe’s
counseling without lasting beneficial effect. With Chloe,
empathy meant the counselor’s willingness to give up famil-
iar and comfortable frames of reference and to enter into a
landscape that had to be navigated with Chloe’s help. This
meant allowing Chloe to be the guide and accepting the rules
that governed the cartography of her experiential terrain.
Chloe brought to her counseling a need and a fear that
are common to most counseling relationships. The need is
to be received and accepted, as is, without having to at-
tenuate or disown one’s reality to meet the needs or gain
the approval of the counselor. The fear is that this will not
occur and that one will need to give up something funda-
mental to be accepted. To be forced to “get” the counselor’s
reality as a condition of a successful and stable relationship
would have been a repetition of the many injuries that Chloe
came to counseling to address.
LIMITATIONS OF THE RELATIONAL MODEL OF RESISTANCE
We have presented a descriptive model of resistance
grounded in counseling experience. Like all models, one
size rarely fits all, and it is important to reflect on the limi-
tations inherent in this approach to therapeutic impasse.
What conditions are necessary for this model of resistance
to describe what actually takes place between counselor
and client?
One assumption of the model is that a client has the ability
to respond to the sustained empathy of the counselor. Clearly,
for clients who have fixed representational systems of self and
others that are impervious to engagement and adjustment,
such a model may fall short of eliciting the client participation
necessary to remediate developmental frustrations with new
relational experiences. Thus, the model may not be effective
for clients across a broad spectrum of personality organization
or diagnosis who are uninterested in or incapable of a more
elaborated therapeutic dialogue.
Similarly, many settings and treatment approaches may be
antagonistic to this level of trust in the efficacy of the client–
counselor relationship. For instance, as we have presented these
ideas at professional conferences we have had some counse-
lors observe that they are required to have a “suicide contract”
in hand if counseling is to proceed. Many settings require a list
of specific treatment goals and progress markers that should
take place in a limited number of sessions. These restrictions
may impose significant arbitrary structure on the relational
process of counseling.
Finally, although the ability to demonstrate sustained
empathy and self-knowledge are fundamental to virtually
all counseling activities, questions pertaining to the person
and training of the counselor are relevant. For instance, does

the counselor have sufficient self-awareness and understanding
of his or her own frames of reference and how they are
evoked in the counseling relationship? If so, does the coun-
selor have sufficient skill and training to actively incorpo-
rate these into the counseling process? Finally, does the
counselor have sufficient comfort with, or tolerance for,
the level of ambiguity inherent in such highly “process-
oriented” counseling? The answers to these questions affect
whether our model will be used to good effect.
ROGERS REDISCOVERED
It is not unusual for a person-centered counselor to attend a
workshop or conference where people are speaking with great
enthusiasm about a new theory or technique that has been
developed in their field, only to realize that it is right out of
a Carl Rogers theory of practice. Often, without credit to
Rogers, the new approach has been given a new name and
declared a new discovery; much like Columbus “discover-
ing” America despite the fact that people were already living
there. Rogers’s ideas have become so pervasive that their
influence is felt in nearly all of the newer forms of counsel-
ing and therapy. What initially had seemed to be his simplis-
tic, overly optimistic, and naive ideas are now appreciated
for their “profound beauty and importance” (Kahn, 1991, p.
35). The importance of carefully listening to clients is a topic
that pervades all of Rogers’s writing, but perhaps no passage
is more poignant than the following:
One thing I have come to look upon as almost universal is that
when a person realizes he has been deeply heard, there is a moist-
ness in his eyes. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It
is as though he were saying, “Thank God, somebody heard me. Some-
one knows what it’s like to be me.” In such moments I have had the
fantasy of a prisoner in a dungeon, tapping out day after day a
Morse code message, “Does anybody hear me?” And finally one day
he hears some faint tappings which spell out “Yes.” By that one
simple response he is released from his loneliness, he has become a
human being again. There are many, many people living in private
dungeons today, people who give no evidence of it whatever on the
outside, where you have to listen very sharply to hear the faint
messages from the dungeon. (Rogers, 1969, p. 224)
Although Kahn (1991) did not see Rogers’s methods as
sufficient for a complete therapeutic approach, he consid-
ered their relationship aspects to be indispensable. He wrote,
[I]t seems to me that whatever view one holds of the human mind
and however one chooses to conduct therapy, there is much to be
learned by paying careful attention to Rogers’ advice about the
relationship between therapist and client. (pp. 35–36)
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