109 - Resistance to Change (Part 2)

Mar 31

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Recover is not a pill > Recovery is a path.

Recovery is not a quick fix > Recovery is a lifestyle, lived one day at a time.

Recovery allows us to live with a “new set of glasses.”

People in recovery no longer see life through the “tinted glasses” that denial gives them, but they begin to live in clear reality.

A person no longer sees life through the “foggy” glasses of denial, but a person begins to live in reality.

While recovery has thousands upon thousands of personal benefits, the personal benefits do not mean that you’re the loved ones will change along with you, join you, or even be willing to participate with you. This reality is called resistance to change.

Resistant to change can be in the “main person” who has a clear and primary addiction, or it can be in the “co-addict,” or the one who has enabled, adjusted to, joined in, or “put up with” the primary addiction.

The condition of a “co-addict” is addressed in the Codependency Episodes, 32-44.

Resistance to Change

Resistance to change is not rooted in a negative motivation. The soil out of which it grows is about not being willing to be controlled by “forces” that may not want my good. For example, in World War II, the French RESISTANCE fought the German forces from behind enemy lines to keep them from taking over or controlling the French homeland.

However, resistance that is an unwillingness to grow or change will yield “negative” consequences. This negative fruit can come from roots of terror, toxic shame, fear of loss, and secrecy. Sadly, this resistance can lead to control addiction.

This control addiction can be in the “main” person or the “co-addict” as mentioned above.

The way to assess resistance as positive or negative starts with grasping the meaning of admission and surrender.

Admission in a positive form is the acknowledgement of a need for help with something a person cannot do alone.

Surrender is handing over the need to someone or something that can restore a person to “wholeness.” This is what the 12-Steps of recovery refer to as sanity in Step 2.

Step One:

We admit we were powerless over _________, and

that our lives have become unmanageable.

Step Two:

Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves

can restore us to sanity.

Unless a person can admit a “problem” and surrender to solution outside their control, change is limited, if it occurs at all.

A person who desires someone else to change does not have the power to create the result they seek. In fact, when a person in a recovering relationship or an addicted relationship wants change more than the other person wants change, the one who wants more than the other person will get “sick” with their own need to control.

A simplified version of this recognition is the following:

You cannot help someone who doesn’t want help.

When a person resists joining the one who seeks a better or closer relationship, four key components need to be assessed by the one who wants the other person to change (even for good reasons).

This person must ask himself/herself:

Am I crossing boundaries into another person’s life and confusing expectation with demands. Am I actually attempting to get my own feelings of pain “medicated” by demanding another person change in order to “fix” me.
Am I thinking that I am acting in love when I am actually avoiding my own inability to control (powerlessness) another person, which leaves me in a position of needing to “want and wait.” This delayed fulfillment of hope puts the person in a position of having to decide their own long-term tolerance levels.
Am I:

living the Six Freedoms (Free Resource at chipdodd.com)
postponing facing and “living” my own identity?
demanding that the other person change before I can live fully?

4. Am I willing to be fully self-aware of my own motivations, limitations, and “response-ability,” in such a way that I practice daily a mainstay of the

the recovery process, called The Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;

the courage to change the things I can;

and the wisdom to know the difference.

When a person does not submit himself/herself to a plan, process, or program of the development of self-awareness, they will often accidentally create the very resistance they are wishing would be different.

Self-awareness can be part of reducing resistance in others because “you” are not: