Resistance

Resistance includes any and every manner of emotional pushback, decision trap, logistical difficulty, ability hurdle, pain point, friction, or psychological bias that causes people to stumble, get stuck, get frustrated, or flat-out quit along their goal journey. Resistance is the root of the Personal Disruption Conundrum, that sense that people know what they should be doing to change their behavior for the healthier, wealthier, and wiser but can’t seem to make themselves actually do it.

Every field of human behavior studies this resistance, though they all call it something different. Behavioral economists talk about fallacies and biases. Behavioral psychologists talk about the hurdles to habit formation and the hardness of willpower. Product designers and technologists talk about “friction” or “pain points.” Tim Ferriss calls them “failure points.”

Psychoanalysts, spiritual teachers, and philosophers talk about how the ego creates “psychological resistance” to our efforts to break dysfunctional patterns and build optimal, new ones. In 1904, Freud himself wrote that “psychoanalytic treatment may in general be conceived of as such a reeducation in overcoming internal resistances.” This concept only grew in its centrality to his work. By 1926, he had catalogued five different formats of resistance: repression, transference, gain from illness (secondary gains from dysfunctional behavior), the repression compulsion (repeating difficult, distressing, or traumatic behavior patterns), and self-sabotage—and characterized the work of psychoanalysis as a slow “working-through” all of these types of resistance.

The creativity guru and modern philosopher Steven Pressfield has written prolifically on what he calls Resistance, with a capital R, noting that it arises in reaction to “any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity.” In one of several books on how to release Resistance, he first describes it as a universal element of human experience. “We’re wrong if we think we’re the only ones struggling with Resistance,” Pressfield writes. “Everyone who has a body experiences Resistance.”

Pressfield goes so far as to personify Resistance, writing about it as a villain with human-like traits and motives, including one overarching goal. “Resistance,” he writes “aims to kill . . . our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on this earth to give and that no one else has but us.” This characterization is decidedly consistent with my personal and professional observations of how Transformational Consumers experience Resistance. Resistance is not futile. Resistance is fatal. In the minds of the Transformational Consumer, across a lifetime of unsuccessfully trying to make desperately desired life and behavior changes, Resistance can extinguish the spark of desire for the healthier, happier, more prosperous, more self-actualized life that these people want. Resistance can kill the dreams, beliefs, and bias toward action that are so elemental to the spirit of people who were once motivated and on a mission to be their highest and best selves and live their highest and best lives.

Being repeatedly stymied from reaching their most desired dreams by Resistance can traumatize people, especially those who run into it over and over again, without finding a way to overcome it, and especially when the dream is something as emotionally and culturally loaded as what you earn or how much you weigh.

In a post on the deep-thought blog Medium titled “How I Learned to Give Dieting the Middle Finger,” the radio journalist Jacquie Fuller shares an extraordinarily common, extraordinarily traumatic experience of Transformational Consumers who have butted up against Resistance to making long-term health changes repeatedly, over a lifetime. This particular experience is so common that it has a name in pop culture: the yo-yo diet.

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s and pretty much until the day I walked into The Emily Program, I was the poster child for yo-yo dieting. In the ’80s, I actually ate an AYDS bar (remember those? I didn’t think so.) I brought a lunch of plain tuna on rice cakes to high school for months. In the ’90’s, I took Formula One until my heart felt like it was going to fly out of my chest. Over two decades, I intermittently Weight Watched my way from Exchanges to Points to PointsPlus. I Slim Fasted, South Beached, Atkinsed, Paleoed. I saw holistic nutritionists. I did pretty much everything except that one diet that’s all cookies because that sounded fucking stupid. In addition to the countless diets, lapsed gym memberships littered my past like bodies on a battlefield. (If you could lay them end to end, you’d have two lifetime memberships.) . . .

Dieting. Then not dieting. Then dieting again. Dieting, but wishing I could just eat like everybody else—without counting, weighing, planning, always always thinking about food. I was obsessed with food, but didn’t want to be. I was in a constant state of restriction—declaring the food-villain-du-jour (fat, sugar, gluten) as off-limits, then pretty much falling face-first into a vat of it. I need a t-shirt that says “I spent a near-lifetime sprinkling steamed vegetables with Molly McButter, and all I got was this t-shirt and a general feeling of white hot rage.”

But then Fuller hit a turning point. As she told about the therapists that helped her heal from a lifetime of this Resistance-induced trauma, she wrote,

One of the first assignments given to me in treatment was to eat dessert. Sounds simple enough, but every cell in my body recoiled at the suggestion. It wasn’t until I did this—ate dessert because a licensed, trained psychologist told me to—that I realized it had been years since I’d truly enjoyed dessert. I baked a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies, sat at the table with a glass of milk, and ate them slowly. I felt a veritable parade of emotions march through me—elation, fear, panic, contentment, sadness. I may have cried. And at the end of it, I felt a fullness that was only partly physical. I felt like I didn’t need another cookie. In that moment, or for a long time. Someone had thrown wide-open the once-locked cookie cabinet, and suddenly knowing I could go in there any time I wanted, diminished my desire.

I probably owe [the program] my life. I definitely owe it my joy.

Fuller went on to describe the founder of the program that finally helped her get off the diet roller coaster. In doing so, Fuller explained that the founder was “sketch” and her fashion sense objectionable before adding, “I’d like to kiss her. Like, hard.” She went on: “This program works. (For me.) Despite 10 weeks of insufferable videos, I’ve lost weight with so little suffering, my spouse actually remarked upon it (“I haven’t heard you complain at all.”).”

When your product, service, or content helps a Transformational Consumer heal from that trauma and (finally) remove impeding Resistance from his or her journey, your brand becomes a Transformer. And the more Resistance you remove, the easier you make progress, and the more pain and friction you remove from the journey, the more love and engagement that person will have for your product or company.