Removing the Barriers that Keep Clients Stuck

By John Pryor, PhD, LCPC, ACS 

In my work with LGBTQ+ clients navigating the intersection of sexual identity and spirituality, I’ve sat with people who have done courageous inner work but still found themselves repeating painful patterns. Although they’ve named the wounds and understood, intellectually, why certain beliefs about themselves no longer served them, something kept pulling them back toward the familiar.

This isn’t resistance, stubbornness or a lack of motivation. The barriers to change are often strategies rather than failures of insight. These were deeply intelligent protective strategies that helped someone survive in an environment that wasn’t safe enough for them to be fully themselves. The problem is these strategies tend to outlive their usefulness.

Here are three common barriers I’ve encountered in my clinical work and practical ways for counselors to meet clients where they are:

Accommodating Everyone’s Needs

Some clients have become extraordinarily skilled at reading the room and can anticipate what others need. They soften their requests and say yes when they mean no. On the surface this can look like generosity. However, underneath it, they are trying to make themselves easy to be around so they’re less likely to be rejected.

For clients raised in families or communities where belonging was conditional — where their identity, religion or sexuality was tolerated only if they stayed compliant — conflict was uncomfortable and a genuine threat to safety. Consequently, their nervous system learned to stay small.

The clinical challenge is that this pattern often feels virtuous to clients, who describe themselves as low maintenance with quiet pride. A counselor shouldn’t shame that mindset but can curiously ask what it has cost them. You can ask whether their accommodating mindset was about extending generosity or managing fear. In my experience, this distinction rarely arrives quickly, but it tends to be food for thought for the client.

Always Assuming Responsibility

Another pattern I see regularly is a client’s tendency to assume — quickly, almost automatically — that interpersonal conflict is primarily their fault. Whether a partner is distant or a boundary is crossed, the client wonders what they did wrong and apologizes.

Our brains are, in part, belief-confirmation engines. Researchers who study cognitive consistency have long noted that once a core belief is established, the brain seeks evidence to confirm it. When a client has spent years absorbing messages that they are “too much,” fundamentally flawed, or their desires are inherently wrong, the brain files those away and keeps looking for proof. These messages tend to arrive with particular force in communities that condemn queer identity. 

The irony is that assuming responsibility can actually feel stabilizing for clients because by claiming the conflict as their fault, they can have some control over it. Conversely, if the harm was done to them, that requires sitting with helplessness they were never permitted to acknowledge.

Experience has taught me not to rush clients out of self-blame before they’re ready. Instead, I slow down the narrative and ask them to consider what it would mean if the blame wasn’t theirs to carry? For some clients, that question brings relief and permission to set down a weight they didn't know they were carrying. For others it brings grief, as they realize how long they've blamed themselves for things that were never theirs. Both responses are progress because the client is finally examining the belief instead of automatically obeying it and weighing whether it actually belongs to them. 

Feeling Unsafe During Change 

Perhaps the most underappreciated barrier is one operating beneath our conscious awareness: the nervous system’s tendency to register change as dangerous.

Clients often expect that once they understand a pattern, change will follow relatively smoothly. However, what they frequently discover is that even positive change — leaving a draining job, ending an unhealthy relationship or allowing themselves to be truly known by someone safe — can trigger anxiety, disorientation and doubt. They feel worse right when things are supposed to feel better.

This isn’t a sign that change is wrong. Neuroscience research on threat detection explains that the brain’s alarm systems don’t differentiate well between unfamiliar and unsafe. Even familiar, painful patterns have a known shape the brain has mapped. Change disrupts that map, and the disruption registers as risk before the benefits of new terrain become clear.

For clients who grew up in environments where unpredictability was genuinely dangerous, this threat response is even more sensitized. Their nervous systems learned, correctly at the time, to treat the unknown with suspicion.

Counselors can help clients build vocabulary to distinguish between the discomfort of growth from a genuine warning signal. Encourage them to understand that their brain isn’t telling them this change is wrong; it’s telling them this feels unfamiliar. Those are different messages even when they feel identical. 

Counselors can help to gently dismantle strategies that no longer serve the client and help them build enough safety and self-trust that old habits become optional and not automatic. Something shifts when clients become curious about change and can question how past habits have protected them. That small shift is where the real work begins.

Note: Opinions expressed and statements made in this blog do not necessarily represent the policies or opinions of ACA and its editors.