E.2-7: You Have Been Trying to Force This Part of You to Change. That Is Why It Will Not.
Season 2: Episode 7
You Have Been Trying to Force This Part of You to Change. That Is Why It Will Not.
listen by clicking the audio player here:
In this episode you will learn:
You have been fighting the same part of yourself for years, and losing. There is a reason, and it is not weakness.
In this episode you will learn:
• Why a part of you refuses to change, and why that part is not lazy or disobedient but a frightened protector still doing a job no one told it was finished.
• Why force, willpower, and shame make a resisting part stronger rather than weaker, and what Scripture and Carl Jung both saw about it.
• How to work with a resisting part instead of against it, so the long inner war can finally give way to durable change.
Episode Length: 21:00
can’t get enough? sign up for free 5-day email series here
Transcript
I built a plan at the start of this year that I am genuinely proud of. I kept it faithfully for twelve weeks. And then I abandoned it in the space of about eighteen hours, and I have not been able to get back to it since. For a long time I called that a failure of willpower. I was wrong about what it was. And what I learned instead is the whole of today’s episode.
INTRO (0:25 to 2:45)
I am Angela Meer, and I welcome you into the sacred meeting place where the timeless patterns of Scripture meet the deep symbols of the soul. This is The Christian Jung Podcast. This is week seven of the shadow arc, and the title of today’s episode is You Have Been Trying to Force This Part of You to Change. That Is Why It Will Not.
Now, before we go in, let me name the resistance I can already feel in some of you, because it is a fair one. When I start saying that a part of you which refuses to change is afraid, and that you should be gentle with it, something in the serious Christian tightens. Because that can sound like excuse-making. It can sound like I am about to let you off the hook for sin, to swap repentance for self-compassion, obedience for understanding.
I am not. And here is the floor we are standing on, and it is Scripture. The seventh chapter of Romans is the apostle Paul, the most spiritually serious man in the New Testament, saying that he does not do the good he wants to do. And Paul does not answer that with “try harder.” He comes to the absolute end of his own willpower, and he cries out, who will deliver me. Repentance is real, and obedience is real, and today does not touch either one. But the engine of change was never your willpower. It never was. We are going to talk today about what the engine actually is, and we are going to use Carl Jung to see the machinery more clearly. But Jesus is the one who heals the divided self, and the way He does it is going to surprise you.
[pause]
It is time to awaken holy wonder.
[music]
WHY THIS MATTERS PERSONALLY (2:45 to 7:30)
Let me tell you the whole of the story I started with.
At the start of 2026, my husband and I both knew it was time to make a serious change in our health, and we decided to give it a full year. And because we know ourselves, we did not just announce a goal. We built a real plan, one that accounted for our actual weaknesses. We know we reach for dessert when dinner is too early. We know we choose badly when we are tired. We know that with no plan in place, we will not choose well at all. And it had to work for both of us, because my husband is a type 1 diabetic, and my own health needs require a great deal of protein. I spent weeks getting us ready for day one.
And then day one came, and we were off. The weekly weigh-ins were genuinely exciting. Every week gave us data, and the data let us tune the plan. By week twelve the numbers had moved into double digits, and we were proud of ourselves. It was working.
And then I received a letter. I am not going to tell you what was in it. But it was devastating, and in the space of one envelope, every hope I had built for 2026 crashed and burned.
I stayed on the plan, after that letter, for about eighteen hours.
That was ten weeks ago. And in the ten weeks since, I have not gained the weight back, but I have not lost any either. I have only maintained. And here is the part I most want you to hear, because it is the whole of this episode. The plan is not gone. My husband and I still sit down at the kitchen table every single Monday and plan our meals and do the grocery shopping. The system is completely intact. It is right there in front of me. And week after week, with the system sitting right there, I have made choices that do not serve me.
For ten weeks I called that a failure of willpower. Laziness. A part of me that just will not do what I have told it to do. But I want to reconsider that out loud, with you, because I no longer think it is true. What if the part of me that put up that blockade is not lazy at all. What if, after a hope that big crashed that hard, some part of me is simply afraid to hope again, and the blockade is the only way it knows to keep me from being devastated a second time.
I am still inside this one. I do not have the resolution for you today. But I have stopped believing that the part of me that will not move is my enemy. And that one change, that single change, is the door this whole episode walks through.
DEFINING THE CONCEPT (7:30 to 12:30)
So let me define it plainly. We are still talking about the shadow. We have been all arc. But this week we are looking at one specific thing the shadow does, and the thing is this: parts of the shadow resist.
For the first weeks of this arc, it was easy to imagine the shadow as a kind of storage room. A dark place where the wounds were kept, and the gold was kept, and our job was simply to go in with a light and sort through it. But that picture is missing something, and the missing thing is the whole of today. The shadow is not only storage. Parts of it are alive. Parts of it have a will. And some of those parts do not want to be sorted, and they will push back, hard, against the light.
And here is the definition I most want you to carry. A part of you that resists change is not lazy and it is not disobedient. It is a protector. Every resisting part of you was hired, and it was hired during a hard season. Somewhere back there, something happened, or something kept happening, and a part of you stepped up and took a job. It learned to numb the feeling. Or to control everything in reach. Or to keep you small so you would not be a target. Or to stop you from hoping, so a crushed hope could never level you again. Or to reach for food when the hard emotion came. And in that season, that job genuinely protected something real in you. The part was not foolish. It was, at the time, exactly right.
The trouble is only this. The season ended, and nobody told the part. It is still standing at its post. It is still defending you against a danger that, in most cases, is years in the past. It is loyal, and it is faithful, and it is afraid, and it is guarding a door that no longer has anything dangerous behind it.
REAL JUNG (12:30 to 18:00)
I want to bring in Carl Jung here, carefully, and only on this one thing, because Jung spent his whole working life with the part of people that will not move.
Jung was clear about two things, and both of them matter to you this morning.
The first is that the shadow cannot be willed away. It is not reached by good intentions. It is not argued out of existence. Jung said that genuinely facing the shadow takes hard and honest effort, the kind of effort most people will do almost anything to avoid, because it is so much easier to keep the resisting part out of sight than to actually turn around and look at it.
But it is the second thing that I really need you to hear, because it will reframe a war you have probably been fighting for years. Jung observed that a shadow which is condemned and suppressed does not disappear. It is not destroyed by being pushed down. It goes underground. And underground, out of sight, it does not weaken. It grows stronger. It becomes more autonomous, more its own thing, and it begins to run the person’s life from behind, unseen and unaccountable.
Sit with what that means for you. It means the war you have been waging on the stuck part of yourself, the war made of shame, and force, and suppression, and white-knuckled resolve, has not simply been failing. It has been doing the opposite of what you wanted. Every time you shamed that part and shoved it back down, you did not shrink it. You fed it. You made it stronger, and more hidden, and more in charge. You have been, with the very best of intentions, arming your own resistance for years.
I am not telling you Jung was a Christian. I am telling you he looked very honestly at one specific thing, the part of us that resists, and what he saw lines up exactly with what Scripture has been saying the whole time. So let us go there now.
SCRIPTURE (18:00 to 27:30)
Romans 7. I want you to really hear who is speaking. This is Paul. Not a baby Christian. Not a backslider. The apostle Paul, near the height of his spiritual life. And here is what he says. “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” And a few lines later, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” Romans 7, verses 15 and 19.
That is the divided self, named with a precision no psychology has ever improved on. There is a part of Paul that wants the good. And there is another part that will not do it, and will not stop doing the other thing, and Paul, the great apostle, cannot make it obey him. Now watch, very closely, what he does next, because this is everything. He does not say, I simply need more discipline. He does not say, I will draw up a stricter plan. He comes to the very end of himself, and he cries out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Romans 7, verse 24. And the answer, the next line, is not a technique and not a strategy. It is a Person. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The deliverance of a divided self has always been relational. It comes through being met by Christ. It has never once come through finally mastering yourself.
And then look at how Christ actually meets a stuck person. John chapter 5. There is a man who has been an invalid for thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years. He is lying by a pool that he believes can heal him. And Jesus comes and stands in front of him, and asks him a question that, on the surface, is almost cruel in how obvious it sounds. “Do you want to be healed?”
Of course he wants to be healed. He has been lying there for thirty-eight years. But Jesus does not ask pointless questions. He asks it because Jesus knows something true about human beings. He knows that after thirty-eight years, a person has built an entire life around the condition. The man knows who he is as a sick man. He does not know who he would be as a well one. And some part of even the most desperate person on earth is not certain it wants to find out. So Jesus asks. He goes straight to the will, the real will, the divided one, and He opens a conversation with it. He does not heal over the top of the man. He heals with him.
And one more. Israel, in the wilderness. They have just been delivered. Ten plagues. The Red Sea. They are free, for the first time in four hundred years. And almost immediately, they begin to ache to go back. Listen to this. “Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full.” Exodus 16, verse 3. They are standing in their freedom, remembering the food of their slavery, and missing it.
That is the resisting part of you, exactly. It is loyal to Egypt. Not because Egypt was good. Egypt was bondage. But Egypt was known. And the resisting part of you would genuinely rather have a familiar misery than an unfamiliar freedom, because at least the familiar one is predictable. At least in the familiar one, it knows how to keep you safe.
MID-EPISODE (27:30 to 29:00)
I want to pause here for a moment. If this episode is naming a war you have been losing for years, I want you to come and find me. Go to Substack and search for The Christian Jung. The free article this week walks through all of this in a form you can sit with slowly. And inside The Inner Room, the paid companion, I teach the three practices for working with a resisting part instead of against it: how to stop at the body’s resistance instead of bulldozing through it, how to pray Romans 7 and the question from the pool as a person with a genuinely divided will, and how to interview a resisting part, on paper, until you find the fear it has been guarding all along.
The episode shows you why the war has failed. The Inner Room shows you how the war ends. Go to Substack and search for The Christian Jung, or come to angelameer.com.
Now, the three things to carry out of this.
THREE TEACHING POINTS (29:00 to 39:00)
Movement One: The Part That Will Not Change Is Not Lazy. It Is a Frightened Protector.
This is the reframe everything depends on. The thing in you that will not move is not a character flaw and it is not a discipline problem. It is a part of you that took a protective job in a hard season, and has been faithfully working it ever since. When you can see it that way, your whole relationship to it changes. You do not hate a frightened guard. You do not shame a loyal protector who simply never got the message that the war was over. You begin, instead, to feel something for it that you have never felt for it before. Something closer to compassion.
Movement Two: It Is Loyal to a Danger That Is Already Over.
The resisting part is not tracking the present. It is tracking the past. It is still defending you against the thing that hurt you back when it was hired, and it does not know that the season has changed, that you are older now, that you are not as powerless as you were, that the danger has, in most cases, long since passed. This is why you cannot simply argue with it. It is not being unreasonable by its own logic. By its own logic, set years ago, it is being faithful. What it needs is not a rebuke. What it needs is news. The news that the danger is over.
Movement Three: A Resisting Part Is Never Forced. It Is Only Reassured.
So here is what to actually do, and it is the opposite of everything you have tried. You stop fighting it. Not the behavior, you can still be completely unwilling to keep the behavior. But you stop fighting the part. You turn toward it, and instead of issuing it one more command, you get curious about it. You ask it what it is afraid of. You ask it what it is protecting you from, and when it started, and what it would need to believe to trust that the danger is finally over. And then you bring what you find to Christ, and you let Him speak the truth over that specific fear. You change a resisting part the way you would calm a frightened child. Not by overpowering it. By staying close, and being patient, and telling it the truth, gently, as many times as it needs to hear it.
RECAP (39:00 to 41:00)
So let me bring it home. Three movements. One, the part of you that will not change is not lazy, it is a frightened protector. Two, it is loyal to a danger that is already over, and it needs news, not rebuke. Three, a resisting part is never forced, it is only reassured.
And if you carry one practice out of this episode, let it be this. The next time you move toward the thing you have not been able to change, do not start with the behavior. Stop the moment you feel the resistance in your body, the brace, the heaviness, the flinch. Rest a hand on it. And say, inwardly, with no contempt at all: I know you are there. I know you are afraid. I am not going to force you. That is not surrender. That is you, finally, after all these years, speaking to the part that was actually in charge the whole time.
PAUSE, PRAY, HEAL (41:00 to 44:00)
Let us end this time with a moment to Pause, Pray, and Heal.
First, take a deep breath, and rest into the material you have heard today.
[longer pause]
Pause. Bring to mind the part of you that will not change. And instead of resolving, one more time, to defeat it, ask it a single question, and then wait, without arguing with the answer. What are you afraid would happen if you stopped.
[longer pause]
Pray. This week’s prayer is from Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century reformer and mystic. These words were found written in her own breviary. They are sometimes called simply “Nada te turbe.”
Let nothing disturb you, Let nothing frighten you, All things are passing away: God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices.
[pause]
Heal. Here is the question to carry into your journal this week. Where in my life have I mistaken a frightened, loyal part of myself for an enemy, and what would it look like to be patient with it instead?
[longer pause]
FINAL CTA (44:00 to 45:00)
Subscribe to The Christian Jung Podcast wherever you listen. Share this episode with someone who has been at war with the same part of themselves for years. Find me at angelameer.com, or on Substack as The Christian Jung, where the free article and the Inner Room companion for this episode are waiting for you.
You are not lazy, and you never were. You have been fighting a frightened part of yourself with the only weapons anyone ever handed you, and you are allowed to put them down. Next week, we bring all of it, the wounds, the gold, the parts that resist, to the only place it was ever meant to go, and we look at how Jesus Himself meets the hidden self.
Until then. Heal Deeply. Walk Holy.