On the surface, meaning seen through the eyes of the self caught up in a negative reaction, resistance to an unwanted revelation about oneself makes “sense” — as in when we “eject” an intruding pest from our house. But, as we’re about to discover, resisting our negative states doesn’t distance us from them, let alone remove them from our interior world; quite the contrary. Here are the three secret stages of psychological resistance, and why it is the “anti-change factor.”

Resistance separates, isolates, and finally crystallizes whatever is being resisted.

Now, here’s the key to changing our relationship with what’s ruining our wish to change: resistance to some unwanted psychological state does not distance us from its suffering…it attaches us to it. This kind of attention doesn’t just animate what it falls on; it actually helps manifest what would have no right to exist otherwise. So that the longer we attend to — resist — whatever makes us ache in this way, the more real it becomes.

Let me restate the above in summary form: psychological resistance fixes — makes as one –the self and the negative state it resists. This means that the solution to our unwanted suffering is in seeing our complicity with it. For only then are we willing to die to the part of us that believes it can free itself by not wanting to be itself.