What We Resist, Persists - The Law of Reversed Effect

What You Resist, Persists

I want you to imagine I place a wooden board on the ground and ask you to walk across it. I imagine you could do it easily, with no hesitation. Now picture if I take that board and place it in between two 10-story high buildings. Would you be able to walk across it with ease like before? Or would you maybe start thinking of how important it is to not fall off and start feeling emotions such as fear and worry? The likelihood of you being so full of negative emotions might even cause you to stumble and fall off the board, and for that - you can blame your unconscious.

This example explains something called the “Law of Reversed Effect,” which states; “The greater the conscious effort, the less the unconscious response” or to understand it another way, “Whenever the will (conscious mind) and imagination (unconscious) are in conflict, the imagination (unconscious) always wins.” Simply put, whatever we resist, persists.

To help explain this further, imagine telling a small child that they can’t eat the cookie that’s sitting right in front of them. Once you leave them alone with that cookie, it is gone! They know they shouldn’t eat it, but then that child will start imagining how delicious that cookie will be and how happy it would make them and before you know it, they have caved into their unconscious mind and there’s nothing but crumbs in front of them. This goes to show how powerful our unconscious minds are and how logic and reasoning won’t always result in change.

Our unconscious minds work as our “inner protector," and work through emotion and imagination. Its primary function is to prevent us from getting hurt and it does that by storing all our previous experiences in which it learns and remembers rules and behaviours to protect us. Based on what we have experienced in life, it creates habits, beliefs, and behaviors from these experiences, many from childhood. Then, based on external stimuli, the unconscious mind will let the conscious mind know what is and isn’t acceptable. Also, the heavier an emotion felt in previous experiences, the heavier its imprint is in the unconscious mind, especially negative emotions which sends a big ‘red flag’ to the mind of not wanting to experience that again.

The Law of Reversed effect means that any conscious, will-driven attempts to change the habit (the unconscious automatic response), gets resisted, because that would mean abandoning the ‘rule’ (the unconscious learning) or feeling (emotion). That rule or emotion is so much more powerful than conscious thinking, even if it was a belief picked up from childhood that logical thinking can easily outweigh. If that belief still exists within the unconscious, it will always win over conscious thinking. The harder we consciously try to make change, the more the unconscious will resist.

The Law of Reversed Effect implies the more pressure applied, the more resistance is generated. That being said, it powerfully influences the way we speak to ourselves as well. Whenever we insist that we must or must not do, feel, or think something, our mind tends to create the opposite response. Telling yourself “I have to sleep” often leads to restlessness, and saying “I must not feel anxious” can actually heighten anxiety.

The wonderful thing with Hypnosis is that you can bypass the Law of Reversed Effect by making powerful and positive changes without trying through the use of suggestion and imagery. Imagine trying to find that previously familiar anxious feeling, but finding it has simply gone. In fact, the harder you try to find that feeling, the harder it is to remember what it actually felt like. By shifting the unconscious focus, we can easily start to utilise the Law of Reversed Effect in a new and positive way.

Each client that comes in for a session is presenting with a ‘unconscious’ problem. If the problem were a conscious one, they would have decided to change it there and then and be done with it. They might consciously want to pick up a new habit or quit one, but their unconscious has very different ideas based on its own set of rules and ideas. Change cannot happen when only the conscious mind wants change, the unconscious mind also has to accept it. We must get the unconscious mind to get on board with the changes the conscious mind wants in order to make change. Once we are able to do this, we are able to create new, strong neural pathways that replace old limiting beliefs or habits with more aligned, positive ones.