Agency vs. Coercion

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Or, Why Telling People What to Do Almost Never Works

(Including When You’re Right)

I have spent a good portion of my adult life sitting across from people who desperately want their lives to change.

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They want less anxiety.

Less chaos.

Less pain.

Better relationships.

Better boundaries.

Better choices.

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Just to feel better…

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And—this is important—they want someone else to tell them what to do and how to do it.

This is where things get tricky.

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Because my favorite coping skill is “being right,” and it turns out that’s not the same as being helpful.

 

My Dirty Secret

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Here’s something they don’t tell you in graduate school:

 

If I could fix people by giving good advice, I would have retired early and bought a boat.
Maybe two.

 

I thought I gave excellent advice.
Thoughtful advice.
Beautiful, well-structured advice.
 

Advice supported by research, experience, and a deep desire to be helpful.

And it almost never works—
and when it does, it sometimes feels like it worked by accident.

 

Not because the advice is wrong.

But because coercion dressed up as care is still coercion.

 

And people don’t respond well—even to compassionate coercion.

 

I’ve learned you can wrap control in a greeting card, but it still opens to the same thing.

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Agency Is Annoying That Way

 

Agency means people get to choose—even when they choose badly.

 

No matter how smart I think I’m being in the moment.
 

No matter how supported the evidence is.
 

No matter how clearly the conclusion seems to line up.

 

They make the choice.

 

That’s not a bug in the system.
 

That is the system.

 

Which is rude, because I brought charts.

 

Every therapist learns this the hard way:

• You can’t make someone quit drinking. (I tried.)

• You can’t make someone leave a bad relationship. (I tried.)

• You can’t make someone stop sabotaging themselves—no matter how logical and well-presented you are.

• You can’t even make someone want to want change. (Sheesh.)

 

If you try, you don’t get results.

You get compliance.

 

I got agreement.
I got thank-you’s.
I got promises. I got compliments. 

I even got that special look that says, “This time it’s going to stick.”

 

But compliance is a temporary hallucination.

 

It’s the emotional equivalent of “Sure, I’ll start Monday.”

 

Coercion Feels Efficient (At First)

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Coercion is seductive because it feels like progress.

• “Just do this.”

• “You need to stop that.”

• “Trust me, I know where this leads.

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Just ask anyone who has been to rehab. Compliance turns confrontation and consequences into Vacation. 

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Sometimes people nod.
Sometimes they agree.
Sometimes they even improve—for a while.

 

Then they relapse.
Or rebel.
Or disappear.
Or come back angry that you “made” them do something.

 

I actually stopped calling it relapse.

A person has to change first in order to truly relapse.

Otherwise it’s just the same movie with different snacks and a slightly stronger opinion.

 

That’s because coercion creates movement without ownership.

And movement without ownership doesn’t last.

 

The Difference in Plain English

 

Agency looks like:

• Choice, even when it’s uncomfortable

• Responsibility without humiliation

• Insight arriving late—but sticking

• Progress that’s slow and uneven

• People surprising you (sometimes pleasantly, sometimes not)

• Someone “quoting me” by telling me what they heard… not repeating what I said

 

Coercion looks like:

• Compliance followed by resentment

• Short-term gains, long-term backlash

• “Success” that collapses under stress

• Moral certainty replacing feedback

• Someone else being blamed when it fails

• And yes: this can happen even when they swear it’s what they want

 

As a therapist, I learned this rule:

 

If I’m working harder than the client, something is wrong and I am working too hard.

 

Usually I’m trying to steal their agency “for their own good.”

 

I’m not proud of it, but I’ve tried to save people with the verbal version of a cattle prod.

 

Eventually I gave up pushing clients toward the direction I thought they wanted—
even when they said they wanted it.

 

I gave up advice-giving.

 

Personally, I made a friend of Socrates and started asking questions.
 

Just questions.
 

Thousands of hours of conversations made almost entirely of questions.

 

Because it turns out advice is often just me talking myself into believing I’m in charge.

 

This Is Where Public Life Gets Weird

 

Not to change the subject, but the exact same dynamic shows up in public life.

 

When people feel unsafe, they ask for coercion.
 

When people feel unheard, they justify coercion.
 

When people feel morally certain, coercion starts to feel like virtue.

 

And suddenly:

• Force becomes “care”

• Control becomes “compassion”

• Compliance becomes “progress”

 

This isn’t because people are evil.

 

It’s because agency is slow, messy, and emotionally unsatisfying—
and coercion promises relief.

Immediate relief.

And usually someone to blame.

 

Blame is the comfort food of uncertainty—and I’ve eaten it right out of the carton, more than once.

I apologize to all those I have blamed for what turned out to be my choices.

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The Curmudgeon Observation

 

After enough years in therapy rooms, you start noticing patterns.

People don’t usually fail because they lack information.
 

They fail because someone tried to change them faster than they could integrate the change.

 

That applies to:

• families

• relationships

• institutions

• governments

• revolutions

• and yes—therapists who talk too much

 

I learned to say this more often:

 

“I could tell you what to do.
But then it wouldn’t be yours.
And you’d only be committed… to me.”

 

That sentence ends a lot of conversations.

 

It also starts better ones.

Outside and inside the therapy room, asking questions became my default plan. It is really annoying I hear. 

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The Cost of Agency (No One Likes This Part)

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Agency isn’t free.

It costs:

• time

• frustration

• failure

• regret

• ambiguity

• discomfort

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That’s why coercion keeps coming back—it feels cheaper.
More efficient.
Quicker.

But coercion just moves the cost downstream, where it’s harder to see and more expensive to fix.

 

In therapy, coercion creates relapse—
or whatever we’re calling that.

 

In families, it creates rebellion.
In politics, it creates backlash.
In systems, it creates brittle stability.

 

I pointed out to families that the best way to make sure that you son, daughter, husband, wife… whoever you love goes back to using drugs or drinking, or fighting or running  is that you try to control them. Weird, eh?

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Why I Still Choose Agency

(Even When I Don’t Feel Like It)

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Because the only change that lasts is owned change.

People don’t need to be controlled. ( i will come back to this later when I talk about restraint)
 

They need space, structure, feedback, and restraint.

And every time I forget this—
every time I push, persuade, or pressure—
I end up doing cleanup later.

 

Agency is slower.

It’s also real.

It was one of the reasons I decided to retire.

 

Victor Frankl decided in a Nazi concentration camp, that they could constrain his body, but they could not constrain his mind, and he used that time to gather data for future teaching of his trade.

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The Closing Thought

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I don’t trust systems—personal or political—that promise improvement by overriding choice.

And I don’t say that from a distance.

I’ve watched myself do it in real time:
trying to push someone toward what I was convinced was “best,”
because uncertainty makes me itchy and control looks like relief.

 

Not because choice always leads to good outcomes.
It doesn’t.

 

But because coercion eventually turns against the people who thought they were using it for good.

 

And after a few decades as a therapist, that pattern stops being theoretical—

because I’ve caught my own fingerprints on the glass.

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Video coming soon: Agency vs. Coercion
A therapist’s-eye view of why telling people what to do feels helpful—and why it usually fails.