Demand Resistance: What It Is, What Drives It, and How It Serves or Cheats Us

Originally published by: The Healthy Compulsive Project

Imagine a couple going through fertility treatment. They’re expected to make love at certain times to increase their likelihood of a productive outcome. One or both partners may find themselves suddenly short on libido and long on headaches, unconsciously resisting the doctor’s prescriptive intrusion into a very private space, even though this means not having kids or the ultimate sensual pleasure of conjugation.

Why?

In a previous post I wrote about demand sensitivity: the tendency to magnify, in our mind, what others hope for, expect or command from us. We can create an elaborate story about how serious those expectations are, and then make it our priority to prevent disappointing others by being perfect and controlling. But that may also mean disappointing ourselves because pleasing others may mean not getting our emotional and practical needs met.

In reaction to this we may adopt another position that’s just as self-denying: demand resistance. When you feel pressure from others you refuse to do what you think they want you to do. Your position becomes, “I must, therefore I won’t,” even though this means that you pass up benefits that you’d otherwise enjoy.

According to personality theory maven Theodore Millon, the defining conflict of those with obsessive-compulsive personality is the conflict between obedience and defiance. The more they try to please, the more they resent. And for some, the more they resent, the more they resist.

I wrote my thesis on this dynamic as part of my psychoanalytic training: Duty and the Death of Desire. I realized, having seen it all too often in my practice, that as soon as we think we’re supposed to do something, even something we had previously desired, we may lose the desire to do it, and stubbornly refuse to do what’s expected of us–our “duty”.

“No” raises a wall that may keep out unreasonable expectations, but it may also keep out things we need for fulfillment as well.

Demand resistance and setting boundaries are sometimes the right response to an overly-demanding situation. Sorting out when it is the right response requires that we examine the results of resistance (are our needs met this way?), and what our motivations are. What, or who, is really driving us to put up the wall? Rarely is the answer to that singular. And if you want to use resistance skillfully, you’ll need to understand as many of your motivations as possible.

That’s what we’ll explore in this post.

Demand Resistance in the Obsessive-Compulsive Personality

Resistance is particularly hazardous for people with obsessive compulsive tendencies: they’re already programmed to control, and it’s all too easy to slip into something more comfortable like resistance in order to maintain that control.

For some, the wall of defiance goes up only after a long period of compliance.

For others, defiance has been their preferred stance from the time they refused the potty. Forget how bad it feels to hold it in or carry it around in your diaper. Autonomy overrides all. “Nobody’s gonna tell me what to do!”

And, for still others, rather than choosing compliance or defiance, they sit, constantly and very uncomfortably, on top of the wall between the two. This results in more than a pain in the tush: the mind is never at peace because it’s always obsessing about which side of the wall to fall on: compliance or defiance. Behavior becomes reactive rather than proactive. Pursuit of what’s most fulfilling gets blocked.

Five Motivations for Demand Resistance

Here are five common motivations that drive people to build a wall of defiance. Yours may differ.

Motivation #1: Protecting Our Coping Strategies

How you handle the conflict between compliance and defiance will depend partly on your personality sub-type and your go-to coping strategy. Not everyone reacts in the same way.

I’ve previously described four different types of compulsives, four different ways of using control and perfection to handle insecurity. These can be adaptive or maladaptive. While each type has a different strategy for handling their anxiety, they are similar in that they may all become resistant when they feel that their coping strategy is threatened.

Let’s see how it looks in each of the four types.

Leader/Teacher/Boss. This type complies with principles, but defies the expectations of people. They are driven by the idea of “doing the right thing” and have no reluctance to tell everyone else that they should be as well. Others may want them to be “nicer,” but they will resist that so that they can answer to a “higher authority.”

Underneath their control this type of compulsive feels responsible for bringing order to the chaotic world around them. It’s part of the identity they use to deal with insecurity. When they refuse what others expect, their refusal may come not just from their principles, but also from a need to protect their identity of being knowledgeable and in charge that they don’t want to relinquish.

Tony was a teacher at a private high school. He had a reputation as a demanding and combative teacher, which worked well for some of his students but left many feeling disrespected and discouraged. He also insisted on being the teacher in the teachers’ lounge as well, which didn’t exactly make him the bell of the ball. Complaints were lodged against him by both students and faculty. The administration asked him to simply tone it down a little, but he refused to change. His ideas and principles were too precious to him, and, in his words, he would not be silenced.

But it wasn’t just his principles that were at stake here. Tony coped with his anxiety by dominating, and this strategy felt threatened by the school’s request to tone it down. He lost his job.

Worker/Doer. This type will neglect themselves and loved ones to meet real or imagined expectations by working, fixing or producing. They are less likely to engage in resistance, except when they use their work itself as a form of resistance to appeals from others to slow down.

Cecile had a demanding and rewarding job as an attorney. She genuinely loved the work, but she also desperately needed the kudos lavished on her at her firm. When her husband asked her to spend more time with him, she said, “I’ve got too much work to do. And you’re making it harder for me by asking me to come home earlier, go to your mother’s house for Sunday afternoon dinner, and watch Seinfeld reruns with you. You’re pressuring me too much.”

Cecile coped with her anxiety by eliciting praise at her job. Taking time away from that felt too threatening to her security. They eventually divorced.

Server/Friend/People-Pleaser. Demand and expectation sensitivity is especially strong in this type of obsessive-compulsive. They tend to deal with it directly by trying to please personally. Their fear of disappointing others leads them to try to pre-empt it by imagining the worst demands and expectations possible, and meet them so that they don’t let others down. They tend to worry about what others think about them more than how they themselves feel.

They are dependent on the approval of others, and they enlist their perfectionist, planning and precisionist tendencies to reach that goal. But such devotion can eventually lead to defiance, and to denying themselves the deep pleasure of relationships, the gratification of generosity, and the satisfaction of seeing a project through to completion.

Sarah had tried to be what she thought was a good wife and mother. She knew it was old-fashioned, but it meant a lot to her to make the people around her happy. But after 15 years of this, with what she felt was little appreciation and lots of presumptions, she exploded. “I haven’t done a damn thing for myself since I can’t remember when, and I won’t keep sacrificing myself. If you want the house perfectly clean, hire a cleaner. I’m not doing it anymore.”

Sarah coped with her insecurity by trying to please everyone. And while her own internal craving for freedom felt threatening to her, she knew that there was something important in it. As she set more boundaries the family went through a rocky period, but they got past it, and Sarah got past her own fear of not pleasing. She learned to find a balance between autonomy and love.

Thinker/Planner/Obsessor. This type may become paralyzed just thinking about how they can perfectly complete projects.  Their fear of not reaching their goals actually leads them to fall short, because they fear not getting it right, and get stuck chasing their tails in perfectionist circles. Other thinker/planners end up isolating to avoid demands and expectations. Their avoidance might look like procrastination, but it can actually be defiance.

Sam worked as an estimator for a construction firm. He had a reputation for accuracy and meticulousness, as well as for being slow and late. When the owner of the company started pressing him to be on time and more productive, Sam fell behind. Badly. The demands were higher, but not unrealistic.

He fell behind partly as a sort of strike protesting the new demands, but also because he feared not being able to use his coping strategy, planning, obsessing, and executing his tasks perfectly. When he had to work more quickly and effectively, his strategy of being meticulous felt threatened. He eventually quit and found a job that didn’t pay as much, but didn’t pressure him either.

Motivation #2: Managing Burdens

One source of demand resistance is the compulsive’s already heavy burden of self-imposed shoulds; whenever anyone else piles additional expectations on them, it’s too much to carry, and the otherwise compliant good boy or good girl drops everything. “Can’t you see how hard I’m already working?” And since compulsives may exaggerate what others expect of them, this is not an uncommon pattern.

The motivation here is simply to keep from taking on too many demands. This can be adaptive if done consciously and with good communication. But the danger is that the wall they build is fixed rather than flexible, and it may exclude activities that would meet emotional needs such as connection with others and the satisfaction that comes with completing a challenging project.

Motivation #3: Preservation of Autonomy and Cultivation of the True Self

It might appear that a primary motivation for resistance in compulsives is to maintain control and power. This may be the case, but a deeper motivation may not be so much control or power but autonomy. Resistance may be enlisted when we feel that our independence is being taken from us. This isn’t necessarily maladaptive, but it can be if done unconsciously.

Our expert in this field is Tommy the Troublemaking Two-Year-Old, famous, of course, for his ability to take down a household with his adamant and steadfast “NO!” As infuriating as this is to parents, such stubbornness is an essential stage in his psychological development. There are a few important steps he accomplishes by doing this:

• He embarks on early stages of separation-individuation—the process of developing an identity as a whole person separate from his parents. If Tommy doesn’t accomplish this, he will fail to launch and instead look to his parents for a free lunch. Saying “NO” is how he begins to develop a separate identity and the skills that come with it.

• He learns what he does and doesn’t like.

• He experiments with having some control (and responsibility!), for his own life.

So there is something instinctual about his defiance, a necessary ingredient in psychological maturity for all of us: separating from our parents and cultivating our unique individual self.

A deep need to be true to ourselves often motivates resistance. When we feel that our independence, authenticity or autonomy is threatened by the expectations of others, we fight like our existence depends on it. Being true to ourselves is the foundation of individuation, the deep urge to realize our unique potential and become whole, which, as Carl Jung has written, is a deep, compulsive instinct.

If some of us didn’t have this fierce commitment to our unique perspective and the resulting creative benefits for human adaptation, we’d still be hunting and gathering, suffering excruciating toothaches, and never having chance to hear Pink Floyd’s The Wall, watch Game of Thrones, or tenaciously root for the White Sox for just one more season.

But separation and individuation don’t always go smoothly, and some get stuck in their stubbornness, never reaching the point where they can be more conscious and flexible. Their resistance might feel necessary to protect against the theft of their soul, a theft that isn’t necessarily happening. But then many needs, both practical and emotional, don’t get met because interpersonal cooperation is a necessary ingredient for many of those needs.

Motivation #4: Passive-Aggressive Revenge

If you feel that others have been unrealistic in their expectations, you may feel angry at them. And a questionable way to get back at them is to not do what they want you to do—which is the definition of passive-aggressive. Take out the garbage? No way. Show up on time? Forget about it. Lose or gain weight? I’ll show you!

Sometimes we imagine that if we withhold behavior this way, the demanding party will get the message, don their sackcloth, repent, and treat us like the kings and queens we really are. It rarely works that way, but that doesn’t keep us from trying.

At other times our motivation is not just to get them to drop their insistent demands, but to punish them for having had such demands, regardless of the consequences for ourselves.

Motivation #5: Protest Against an Imperfect World

Demand resistance may be enlisted to protest a stupid and unjust world. It may be justified as a refusal to cooperate with an idiotic world and what it demands of us. This may be either noble or nonsensical, courageous or cop-out. The danger for compulsives is that they feel the world should be a certain way (Perfect, of course) and they refuse to engage when it doesn’t meet those standards. This could manifest in parking in a no-parking zone, not paying taxes, or making it a point to be unhappy in a cold, cruel world that, paradoxically, overvalues happiness.

Protest through resistance can be very constructive. It’s part of what keeps society, parents, and unrealistic managers who have no idea what your job entails from going overboard in their demands. The key to using it skillfully is learning to consciously sort out which motivations are driving us.  Otherwise we’re like a kid in a push car stroller, feeling delighted that we’re in charge, when really, our mother complex is driving us where it wants us to go.

Here’s an example of what could be a self-destructive protest that would really be motivated by an expectation that we’re taken care of (which is one type of mother complex) rather than foster change.

I’d love to protest the health care system I use by just up and cancelling all my appointments. While the medical care itself is usually good once I get in the door, getting into the door pits me against abysmal communication, lack of consideration, and more mistakes than one would expect from such a respected institution. They demand three times the work from me to get in the door than they should. It’s infuriating! It shouldn’t be this way! They should be taking care of me! 

But it’s the same everywhere, and I’d only be cutting off my nose to spite my face if I dropped out. Then where would I go? I ‘d like to think that I’d be communicating something valuable that way, but I know perfectly well that no-one would notice or care. My real motivation would not be to improve the situation, but to express my anger at not being taken care of. And then my medical needs really wouldn’t be met.

Using Resistance Wisely

Here are some suggestions for using your resistance wisely:

• Personify your Inner Resister. Ask what they need. But don’t let them take over completely.

• Question your coping strategy. Is it adaptive or maladaptive? Is it really threatened?

• What’s your individuality for? Would that purpose would be blocked if you didn’t resist?

• Will being passive-aggressive get you what you want? Will the other person come to respect your autonomy if you resist or punish them? Is there a more effective way to communicate?

• Identify your motivations for protest. The danger is that you want to preserve personal control or simply express frustration rather than advance a just and realistic cause. Expecting the world to always be intelligent and just may not be realistic. Choose your battles.

• Deploy a flexible wall. Construct a wall that you can easily open and close, rather than one with no flexibility.

• Does resistance block your needs? Is there anything you deprive yourself of if you put up that wall too rigidly?

References available in original article on The Healthy Compulsive Project.