growth and change or perfect your defenses?

Many people enter into therapy with the idea that they would like to make their lives better. They have discovered that some things they have been doing in life are no longer working, or in way or another they have reached a dead end or or a crossroad where things need to change. As I begin to work with someone, we find that sometimes even with the best of motivations,  they are far more conflicted about change than once thought. Change and growth--including more emotional freedom, enhancing relationships, relief from depression or anxieties, are appealing goals. But not long after, or sometimes even well into treatment, they find that another part of them is holding back. Often they hold onto the familiar. Unstable, un-gratifying, sometimes as painful as maintaining these old behaviors are, they have learned to count on them. The anxiety about positive change, strange as it may seem, about the unknowns of growth, of positive change is more anxiety than they can seem to bear. This gets negotiated in many ways, but often I have found it is as if an unconscious part of them does not really want to change, but wants to perfect their defenses, to be a new and improved version of their own self-defeating patterns!  It would be so much easier if everyone would accept us the way we are, including ourselves. But something betrays this notion. Our anxieties, holding back, and our struggles to function more positively seems to imply that we are not accepting something. Strange as it is, some persons, refuse to accept this. Their struggle to take new risks and try new potentially growth producing behaviors, as well as allowing themselves to feel previously unapproachable emotions, obstructs their attempts to change. Very often there is a fear of losing control at the base of this defensive maneuver.
Learning about how this operates and how it gets re-enacted in new life situations can be a huge step towards true and significant change. Often it has to build from one emotional truth at a time, with each session marching towards the sometimes more humbling, but also liberating and courageous steps of growth.  

---