I think that being aware of my inner processes is empowering. I think resistance is an effort to maintain self-continuity, an effort to avoid being retraumatized. To be truthful, when I am stuck, I can feel inside what feels like resistance, it feels like I'm running into a brick wall. However, the key here, is that the felt resistance is within, it's not a choice I am making to not change. I do think it is an enactment between the patient and therapist, and the answer lies in both parties figuring out what is going on.

It isn't that I don't want to move forward, it is that I don't yet know the way to move forward without damaging myself. To me, it is empowering to know that I have yet to find a way out of being stuck, and it is empowering to me to be okay with that. The day when I force myself to move forward without heed to my inner self's fears, without heed to my structural dissociation that was put in place by me in earlier years in order to protect myself, is the day that I become traumatized beyond repair.

I am not saying that I don't work hard to move forward, it is quite the opposite. I need to be accepted for who I am at the moment no matter what, because I need to accept myself and understand that I did not choose to be dissociated (consciously), I did not choose to be emotionally dysregulated. I could own that, but that wouldn't be the truth, and it wouldn't be empowering.

Once I don't have a fear of the parts of me being rejected when others see them, (imo, this is best done in therapy), then that is when I can stop the intense hypervigilance and begin to let my guard down. At this point, hopefully I will be able to show my therapist my real self without shame and without the fear of it never being good enough.

I do the work by analyzing things, by using this site to better myself in different ways including accepting the kind words of others and by trying to work on things that I need to work on, and by going to therapy. Just the other day on here, I had I guess a cathartic event (?) that was terrifying, humiliating, but necessary. My therapist has helped me release shame surrounding a certain part of me, he is very accepting of me, and he has similar views that I do so this works. My past therapist helped me learn to trust, and it took a long time, but if he had labeled that as me being resistant and really not wanting to trust, I would have gotten nowhere.

Acceptance of one's self by a trusted other and by one's self, respecting one's structure of self (dissociative) and being patient with this, and continuing to work on things that are troublesome to a point where it isn't scarring, are all in my experience key components to my healing.

This is my truth and my way to healing. Bromberg states that labeling a patient as resistant (or anything else that is perjorative, imo) provides one with an illusory advantage in a countertransferential emergency.