Rethinking Client Resistance: A Narrative Approach to Integrating Resistance Into the Relationship‐Building Stage of Counseling

This article presents a review of traditional definitions of resistance and then presents a conceptualization of client resistance from a narrative perspective. The author makes recommendations/or using techniques consistent with narrative therapy to address client resistance during the relationship-building stage. These recommendations are illustrated through 2 case examples. ********** The potential for client resistance has been acknowledged for as long as the practice of counseling has existed. The evolution of counseling or the "talking cure" has been paced by differing explanations for the client's unwillingness to talk or participate in that process--what has been labeled client resistance (Seibel & Dowd, 2001). Originating in Freudian analysis, resistance was thought to signal a particularly sensitive area of the client's history protected by layers of defense mechanisms (Brems, 1999; Butler & Bird, 2000; Freud, 1914/1957). Congruent with this notion, resistance symbolized the client's recollections of particularly painful events from which the client sought emotional protection (Cowan & Presbury, 2000; Wolf, 1988). Because most clients come to counseling with pain in some aspect of their lives, it logically follows that a counselor can usually expect a client to exhibit some form of resistance early in the counseling relationship. The counselor must then decide how to conceptualize, or make sense of, the client's resistance (Karon & Widener, 1994; Mahalik, 2002; Vernon, 2004). A counselor's inattention to the client's resistance may be viewed as a covert alliance with the client to protect both counselor and client from the explosive emotionality of past issues (Newman, 1994). Attempting to address the presenting problem without attention to the resistance could undermine the therapeutic intent (Otani, 1989). In this article, I discuss current definitions of resistance and then offer a narrative framework for intentionally integrating the client's resistance into the relationship-building stage. CURRENT DEFINITIONS OF CLIENT RESISTANCE In this section, I present differing theoretical perspectives on resistance to create a context for exploring resistance from the perspective of narrative theory. More specifically, I am presenting theoretical perspectives supporting five primary tenets of the narrative approach to working with client resistance that I recommend. These tenets represent conceptualizations of resistance found within the client-centered, cognitive, behavioral, and systemic schools of thought. These five tenets are as follow: 1. Resistance reflects a specific client script encompassing the roles of the helper and the person being helped. Consequently, the client enters the counseling relationship with preferences regarding the nature of these roles. 2. Because each client presents for counseling with such scripts, and the preferences of the counselor and client differ as a result of the client's personal experiences with being helped and the counselor's professional training in helping, resistance is an expected component of the relationship-building process. Accordingly, counselors should openly acknowledge resistance as a normal client response. 3. Such scripts may also reflect the behavioral limitations that interfere with a client's ability to fully participate in counseling. 4. Overt exploration of these helping scripts may direct the counselor to validate the client's past experiences in being helped and facilitate a negotiation of the present therapeutic helping relationship. 5. An inability to reauthor the client's narrative related to being helped and the counselor's narrative related to being an effective helper is a sound rationale for a client referral. In the following text, I discuss these tenets in more detail, including support from the literature on the concept of client resistance. …