The person in this coaching session couldn’t be with their inner voice and another person at the same time — because they were constantly managing and resisting the voice. Joe points out that the resistance itself is what gives the voice its disruptive energy. When you stop resisting and simply receive the voice — even thank it — the struggle dissolves.
“The resistance to it is the thing that gives its energy.”
This is an undoing, not a doing. You don’t have to actively welcome or process the voice. You just stop fighting it. The person found that when they thanked the voice instead of resisting it, they felt “really fucking good.” The energy they’d been spending on resistance was freed up, and the voice became integrated rather than adversarial.
The practical challenge is that not resisting feels like it will make you dysfunctional — slower to respond, unable to track conversations, scrambled. Joe normalizes this: some people can’t speak from their authentic place for a week after finding it. The disorientation is temporary; the resistance was the real dysfunction.
Related Concepts
- Resisting inner critic strengthens it
- Resistance creates the feared outcome
- Welcoming, not just accepting, emotions
- Intensifying a feeling moves you through it rather than trapping you
- The inner critic prevents the rest needed for nervous system integration
- Bullying yourself into action creates resistance
- Saying ‘ouch’ to the inner critic creates distance from it