Seeing a line of windmills as ominous giants, Don Quixote lowers his lance and charges, unable to sense that the world long passed him by. Living in an age of commerce and gunpowder, that of 17th-century Spain, he remains faithful to a medieval, chivalric order that had faded into legend centuries earlier. What appears as resistance to reality is, in fact, fidelity to a map of meaning shaped by an earlier time.
In psychotherapy, “resistance” and “defenses” are often understood as an obstacle, something the client does that impedes progress or blocks change. From an existential-humanistic perspective, however, the deeper concern is not resistance itself but the ways in which entrenched patterns of self-protection quietly shape a person’s way of living.
When protective patterns become rigid and unexamined, they can narrow a person’s capacity for presence and possibility. Life is increasingly organized through familiar meanings and behaviors rather than lived immediacy and authentic choice. Contact with primary experience, such as felt emotion, embodied sensation, gives way to habitual stances that promise safety but limit vitality. These patterns often persist long after the conditions that required them have passed, operating automatically and outside awareness.
The cost of this constriction is not merely clinical stagnation; it is existential. Choice becomes constrained. Emotional and relational life is diminished. Intimacy, creativity, agency, and meaning are often diminished when a way of being no longer allows full participation in life as it unfolds.
Consequently, the aim of E-H therapy is not to “overcome” resistance, but to transform the person’s relationship to it. The work seeks to restore awareness, expand presence, and reopen choice within real limits, allowing individuals to encounter how they are presently living—and how they may now be willing to live.
Related Blog Posts:
Read other Existential Moment posts on Existential-Humanistic practice.
Explore protections and protective patterns in E-H therapy in previous posts.
Read more about working with resistance in 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
