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Psychoanalysis calls this resistance. A person can want to get better and fear knowing what is behind the problem at the same time, and can want to change while fearing it. The attachment to the old self runs deep.
Schools of therapy argue over insight versus tools, with some focused on tweaking present behavior and others on mining the past. Resistance is why neither works alone. A tool gives a person something to do, but resistance pulls against it, and an insight explains a pattern while the pull to stay the same continues. The two need to be integrated.
Treatment works in the gap between what a person wants and what they can tolerate, between their goals and whatever interferes with changing anything.
How did Freud discover resistance?
Freud began his career treating patients with hypnosis, but many could not be hypnotized. In the late 1880s, a patient he called Frau Emmy von N. told him to stop interrupting and let her say what she had to say. That episode is often cited as the origin of free association, in which patients speak whatever comes to mind. He then noticed that patients would break off, claim nothing came to mind, or avoid a certain subject, and he named that pattern resistance.
How do researchers describe being torn about change?
James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente proposed the transtheoretical model in 1983 after studying people who quit smoking. It describes stages that run from not yet considering change, through weighing it, to taking action and maintaining it. William Miller and Stephen Rollnick built motivational interviewing in the same era around the idea that ambivalence is a normal part of change. Miller first described the method in 1983 and the two authors published their book on it in 1991.
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