10 Ways to Use a Client's Resistance as Part of the Treatment

Resistance is not the obstacle to therapy. In strategic therapy, it is the material.

Most therapists respond to a resistant client the same way: increase rapport, adjust the framing, simplify the directive. When none of that works, the case stalls. The therapist waits. The client digs in. The sessions become a polite contest between what the therapist wants to happen and what the client will allow.

Jay Haley identified the problem with that approach decades ago. A client’s resistance is a move in the therapeutic relationship. It carries diagnostic information about the structure of the problem, about what the client needs from the treatment, and about what the therapeutic system needs to change before progress becomes possible.

10 Ways to Use a Client’s Resistance as Part of the Treatment is a clinical reference built on that principle. It covers ten specific techniques — from Haley’s symptom prescription and therapeutic restraint to Erickson’s pacing-and-leading and indirect suggestion — each one a way of incorporating resistance into the work rather than fighting it.

You will learn how to read a client’s resistance pattern before selecting a technique. How to formally prescribe a symptom so the relational contest that maintains it dissolves. How to use therapeutic restraint to produce more movement than encouragement does. How to build directives around a client’s known avoidance pattern. How to make indirect suggestion work when direct suggestion has failed consistently. The final chapter addresses what it takes to make utilization a default clinical posture rather than a last resort.

Worksheets included with this book — free for registered members:

• Resistance Mapping Tool — Document a client’s resistance pattern across sessions until its structure becomes readable and the right clinical response becomes clear.
• Utilization Technique Selector — Match a client’s specific resistance pattern to the right utilization technique before selecting a clinical response.
• Restraining-Change Planner — Design and script a therapeutic restraint intervention before delivering it in session.
• Avoidance-Informed Directive Template — Build a directive that incorporates a client’s known avoidance pattern rather than designing an assignment that will encounter the same resistance again.

Published by Strategic Therapy Institute.