The Paradoxical Theory of Change in Gestalt Therapy: Why Forcing Change Often Backfires

Paul Whitehead
Apr 4
6 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

"Change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not. Change does not take place through a coercive attempt by the individual or by another person to change him, but it does take place if one takes the time and effort to be what he is - to be fully invested in his current positions." Arnold Beisser

The paradoxical theory of change is a key cornerstone of Gestalt therapy, but its message is radical and deeply unintuitive. We live in a culture driven by the idea that, in order to change, we must strive. The paradoxical theory of change turns that idea on its head. Beisser’s central thesis is not that we should never make an effort, but that effort so easily becomes a kind of coercion and self-rejection – a rejection of our actual experience.

What Is the Paradoxical Theory of Change?

When I am working with the paradoxical theory of change in therapy, I encourage my clients to draw on the support they need – from me, from their own embodiment, and from friends and family – in order to stay with their experience, and even turn towards it, whatever that experience may be. Whether it is joy, happiness, deep depression, or something else. Beisser goes so far as to suggest that change becomes possible precisely when the therapist refuses the role of "changemaker" and instead helps the client to be what they are in that moment: to feel their body, notice what they are seeing and hearing, and attend to what they are feeling.

Why We Try to Force Change

Sometimes, in my own therapeutic practice, people come in feeling like they are failing at life. Maybe they are facing the after-effects of trauma, or are feeling anxious all the time, or grieving. And not only that, they feel terrible about their inability to cope. It’s the "secondary suffering" that is often the hardest – the self-attack, the shame about being anxious – that makes the whole experience heavier, more overwhelming, and more constricted. The temptation is always to resist, to try and subtly move away from the difficulty; to sidestep it; to apply some technique, some acrobatic move that will enable them to leapfrog over the challenges.

Staying With Experience in Gestalt Therapy

What does it mean, as Beisser says, to be fully invested in our current positions? Does it mean that if we’ve grown up being abused, or we’re fundamentally uncomfortable with the body we’re in and the life we have, we should just accept this? In this framing, the paradoxical theory of change becomes a kind of grim fatalism: "this is your lot in life and you should just accept it". I don’t think it means this. Accepting what is here is not agreeing that it should have happened, nor is it consenting to ongoing harm. It is a theory to be practised in each moment.

The experience we have in this moment has arisen in dependence on the experience we had a moment before that, and especially on what we were doing about it. So, if we’re full of bitterness and regret in this moment, that has likely arisen from the bitterness and regret we were experiencing the moment before, and from the way we met it. Were we chastising ourselves for falling, "yet again", into bitterness and regret, or were we simply trying to open to the feeling and let it be felt for what it is?

Acceptance Is Not Giving Up

The paradoxical theory of change could perhaps be summed up like this: whatever you’re experiencing in this moment is what you’re experiencing. It’s here - there is no point trying to pretend it isn’t. The point is what we do with it. And yet the difficulty arises when we really feel into the tenor of the experience. If it’s a feeling of dread, fear, or terror, then it can be hard to sit with this.

There is good reason this matters clinically. Research comparing acceptance and suppression suggests that suppression can intensify anxiety, whereas acceptance can reduce avoidance and increase willingness to re-engage. At the same time, "stay with it" doesn’t mean "flood yourself". For trauma especially, turning towards experience has to be paced and supported so that the nervous system stays within something like a tolerable window, rather than tipping into overwhelm or shutdown.

When Suffering Becomes Harder to Bear

Of course, there is a reality to suffering and tragedy. People we love get sick and die. Life often doesn’t go in the ways we want it to. There is disappointment. We have finite and fallible bodies. Living can, at times, be really, really difficult. And there is also the culture we live in: a culture that says that if we’re suffering, we’re failing. In public health, this moralisation has been described as "healthism": the belief that health is a personal duty, and that failure to be well can be read as a failure of character or effort.

Maybe this is why chronic disease can seem like such an aberration. We look to apply some fix to our problem, as we might fix a broken car, but it doesn’t work. The disruption is not just physical; it can fracture our assumptions about the future and about who we are.

The Pressure to Fix Ourselves

We live in a culture typified by the heroic; everything can be changed and morphed. Any problem can be conquered with time, energy, and a persistent "can-do" attitude. This makes the whole situation so much worse: "it shouldn’t be like this", we think; "why is this happening to me?" And then comes the inevitable catastrophising: "maybe it will get worse"; "maybe my partner will leave me"; "maybe I’m dying".

Unfortunately, parts of the therapy marketplace don’t help with this. In their efforts to sell hope, they promise instant healing, some magical technique that can "heal trauma" or "make up for what was lacking in our childhood development".

As much as these narratives can feel empowering, there can be something dishonest here too: they suggest that all problems can be solved on their own level, like that car being fixed. But as Carl Jung, the founder of Analytic Psychology, once said, "The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown."

Linked to this wilful desire to apply our will in order to create change is the equally wilful desire to suppress our problems. Let’s pretend it’s not there, not real; let’s carry on regardless. We deny that we are held back by anything. We ignore the stone in our shoe and continue trying to run.

Jung, Hillman and the Value of Staying With What Is

What I’d like to argue for here is a fundamentally different approach. We need to recognise the stone in our shoe, whether that is the body that is behaving in ways that we wish it wouldn’t; the parents who were anything but "good enough"; or the career that hasn’t delivered on its initial promise. These problems need to be nursed, soothed, and taken care of. We need to change our relationship with the chronic conditions of our lives.

James Hillman, the Archetypal Psychologist, says, "Redemption would not change a condition, but blesses it for what it is." Hillman has a beautiful way of describing how we might do this:

"The first step of blessing the state-as-it-is leads to a second, interest in it, curiosity about its nature, desire to stay with it longer (becoming chronic oneself), that chronicity we call fidelity, to move it to show itself further, let it speak, enact, grow its wings. In other words, the ground of love is in the very irremediableness, its chronicity."

From Coercion to Contact

So perhaps the real turn here is not from suffering to triumph, but from coercion to contact. We move from a position where we are rushing to find a fix, to one of care and support: "what support do I need in order to stay with this honestly?"

The paradoxical theory of change is not suggesting that we should accept abuse, or pretend that tragedy is fine. Instead, it asks us to stop trying to fight with our experience - with what is already here - in the body, in the breath, in the dread, in the grief. We need to notice how much energy we spend trying not to be where we are. And, furthermore, we need to continue to notice the cultural backdrop that makes suffering feel like moral failure: healthism, heroic self-overcoming, the promise that the right technique will finally make life manageable.

Hillman’s blessing and Jung’s idea of outgrowing ask us to refuse any simple and false moral consolation. This is not a grim fatalism, but a kind of fidelity to our immediate, moment-to-moment experience.

Conclusion

Real change, from this perspective, is not something we force through self-improvement, effort, or self-attack. It comes when we become more honest about where we are, more able to stay with what is happening, and less invested in trying to move away from or outrun our experience. This is what makes the paradoxical theory of change so simple and yet so effective: it doesn’t require any special skills or preparation, just an openness and willingness to explore your experience as it unfolds.