“I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
Captain Ahab’s fury in his pursuit of the White Whale, Moby Dick, is not mere anger. It is vengeful rage, a contempt so total it would turn on God. Yet “all visible objects,” he tells his first mate, Starbuck, “are but as pasteboard masks.” His quarrel is not merely with the whale itself, but with what it represents, a world he experiences as malevolent and oppressive, and a self so injured, indignant, and grandiose that it cannot rest until it strikes back.
To understand resistance in therapy, we must look beneath activity to the deep personal belief systems that the behavior expresses. These largely unconscious meanings about self, others, and world, which the Existential-Humanistic Institute (EHI) calls self-world constructs, influence our experience, understanding, and behavior, how we feel, think, and act. Protective activity expresses those meanings.
Such constructs organize reality along three interwoven lines: who I take myself to be, what kind of world I take this to be, and who others are within that world. I may experience myself as weak or inadequate, the world as unsafe or demanding, and others as critical or abandoning. These are not isolated beliefs, but a lived organization of reality from which resistance or protective activity follows coherently.
When resistance is understood this way, the therapeutic task shifts. A goal is not to dismantle or strip away protection, but to recognize the self-world construct being expressed. As these meanings are illuminated in the living therapeutic moment, what once appeared obstructive can become more intelligible. With greater knowing, the construct may loosen, allowing for new contact, deeper freedom, and a wider range of response.
Related Blog Posts:
Read Scott’s other Existential Moment posts on “resistance” in Existential-Humanistic practice.
Explore self-world constructs, protections, and protective patterns in E-H therapy in previous posts.
Read more about working in the here-and-now and the therapeutic relationship .
View all the Existential Moment series posts on EHI’s blog.
Existential Moment Author: Scott Gibbs, LMFT, EHI Board Member-at-Large | Website: www.mscottgibbs.com | Twitter: @Novum_Organum
