Resistance Has Something to Teach Us

Photo by Phil Robson on Unsplash‍ ‍

The American Kestrel is a small, fierce, intense hunter. Loud call. Fast. Built for the strike. When it was chosen from a deck of prairie cards as our team's guiding image this year, we had one collective thought: BUT we are therapists.

How can our theme be a bird of prey? 

Meet the Kestrel

The American Kestrel is North America's smallest falcon, roughly the size of a robin, but unmistakable. Its rusty-red back, slate-blue wings, and fierce focused stare mean it would definitely win in a stare down. It is a bird of open fields and wide skies, at home where the wind is not a visitor but a permanent resident.

The kestrel is known for its hover: nearly motionless in midair, riding the wind to read the landscape below with extraordinary precision. It doesn't seek shelter from the prairie wind. It uses it.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash‍ ‍

Resistance as Resource

That hover looks effortless. But it is only possible because of the headwind. The kestrel positions itself directly into the resistance and uses that force to stay aloft, to see the ground clearly, to do exactly what it was made to do. Without the wind pushing back, there is no hover. 

This is what good therapy understands too. Resistance isn't a problem to overcome. It's information. It points toward something worth paying attention to. Sometimes it's a form of self-protection that developed for very good reasons and may simply be ready to evolve. And more often than not, the thing we keep circling around, the thing that feels hardest to move toward, is exactly where the most meaningful change lives.

Resistance is often where the important work begins.

The Resistance to Even Beginning

If you've been thinking about therapy and keep finding reasons to wait, you are not alone. That hesitation is one of the most human things we encounter.

But what if it isn't a stop sign? What if it's a wind worth turning toward? The fact that you keep circling back usually means something. It means it matters.

At Prairie Sky Counseling, we meet people exactly where they are, including in the not-quite-ready places. You don't have to have it figured out to begin.

The kestrel doesn't wait for calm skies. It works with what's here.

So can you.