**🔼 Up:** [[Change Without Force]] **⏺️ With:** [[Change Agenda]] **\#️⃣ Tags:** #Psychotherapy #Healing #Relational > **🌱 Planted:** Wed 9 July 2025 --- > [!quote] > "Can you coax your mind from its wandering and keep to the original oneness?... Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light? Can you love people and lead them without imposing your will? Can you deal with the most vital matters by letting events take their course? Can you step back from your own mind and thus, understand all things?... This is the supreme virtue.” ― Lao Tzu Many of us in the West are unable to do what Lao Tzu suggests here. We've been [[Shaped to Grow Straight|conditioned]] to do something, to apply force to achieve change, and to control ourselves, others and our environment. Many parents apply force "for the child's own good" and many therapists (particularly the pathologising ones, often without any awareness) apply force "for the client's own good". If we believe a therapist, coach or someone else around us is up to something, is judging us or has a [[Change Agenda]], we will invariably feel unsafe and we will automatically resist. When that happens we can't be [[Mindfulness|Mindful]], and when we can't be mindful we can't [[Organisation of Experience|study how we organise our experience]]. Why? Because it's incredibly hard to focus on our inner landscape when we've got one eye facing inward and one eye facing outward. We relate this way because we're typically not aware of important principles that govern life itself, like [[Mutual Arising]], which essentially says everything that arises has an opposite. As in, when we have light, there can't be any dark. When working with someone developmentally and relationally (like in therapy or coaching), when we use force, we are asking for resistance. Using force in therapy is a form of violence. It is when we are going against the nature of a [[Change Without Force#Living Systems|Living System]]. It is very subtle and unobvious to those of us raised amongst the authoritarian power structures in our culture in the sense that at first, what we're calling violence here would just seem absolutely normal and not like violence at all! To be clear, we aren't talking about physical harm here. Violence when we're working with someone developmentally is essentially a failure to accept the whole person, with their unique ideas, stories, traumas, projections, needs, wishes, capacities and pace. It is a failure to accept them as a whole being. That's why it is incredibly important to know what violence is when we are working with someone developmentally. Because when we're violent, we're too much in ourselves to actually be truly healing for someone else. When we assume we know what's best for someone else, we are using violence. We don't want to be poking around someone's Psyche and pushing up against their adaptive/protective strategies that have kept them historically safe. If we encounter violence when we're working with a therapist or coach (unless we pick a really good therapist or coach), which inevitably we will due to the pathologising system we live in, we might accept their suggestions and appear to be compliant going along with things, but something inside of us feels resistant and wrong. Instead, what we are looking for is safety in relationship and a container that is accepting and non-judgemental. Rather than push against someone's adaptive strategies, we want to actually support them so they have a safe space to unfold and be explored. We want [[Cooperation of the Unconscious]] so the other person's emotional armouring can slowly soften and we can make contact with [[Core Material]]. Then, we naturally encounter opportunities to provide the [[Missing Experience]], and that's how deep and long lasting change is possible. We achieve this by practicing **Nonviolence**, which is a core tenet in Buddhism and Christianity. > [!quote] > "Nonviolence is an attitude of trust in the creation. It is a commitment not to interfere with the processes of life, but to celebrate their spontaneous, organic intelligence. Nonviolence promotes a respect for the subtle, almost imperceptible movements of mind, body, and spirit, and gives rise to a yielding or softness that follows and nourishes these movements rather than correcting or conquering them". — [[Grace Unfolding by Greg Johanson and Ron Kurtz]] Nonviolence has a deep respect for someone's process and developmental journey. It welcomes them exactly where they are, exactly how they are for exactly who they are, without judgement, and it doesn't place any force or agenda to change any aspect of them. It is therefore an active [[Poetic Attunement]] to the way things naturally unfold.