The following week he showed up pretty downcast.
"Steve--I screwed up royally. I couldn't stop thinking about it. The daydreams started getting intrusive at work and even screwed with my sleep."

I patted him on the shoulder. He had done way more imaginal work than I thought necessary and had desensitized his target. Making conversation easily without tension came soon for this person. Oppositionalism was harnessed in this situation and utilized to gain his goal.

Personally tough love, with oppositionals, generally brings out their fighting colors. Unless you have a license to hunt humans I really doubt coming straight at these folks helps much. They will resist you tooth and nail. Their whole "self" hinges upon it. It is an ingrained lifestyle that strongly resists head on change. Toughlove inflames and inspires it. Surely you've tried arguing sense to an oppositional. Your beating your arms trying to get liftoff and you go nowhere.
Now how do you let an oppositional know they are behaving in a patterned and self-defeating way? Do you straight up tell a person, who has developed a defensive strategy for living, that they are defensive? Likely they will argue with you--and knock what you're saying. In some instances if you first describe this challenge in living as existing in another person you will be setting the stage for them. Especially if they have become interested in this other person. Other tacs are to tell vignettes or metaphors about the challenge itself. These metaphors better be appropriate to that person and engaging or their unconscious will miss it.

Tough love incites them to higher and higher spirals of fiestyness. Like I said unless you pull a gun on them, you're likely not to get anything near the response you desire.
Oppositionals or "rebels without a cause" require therapy with someone having a finger on the pulse of oppositional behavior and knowing how to bring it to the client's awareness.
The client will have to restructure their beliefs around control and interaction with others. This isn't easy work. Most oppositionals do not like therapy as their reality often comes into question and they tend to passively agress unless they are respected and seen as a person without the rebel label. The work can be done.

So in working with these folks we have to somehow bring their posture to them in a way that won't get reflexively batted back. They need to learn that they will not lose their self when someone asks them to do something. They should see the world out there is not peopled with adversaries, but others who may have wants and preferences too.
An oppositional lacks true freedom. They respond automatically and not out of real choice. In their defensiveness they are actually having their decisions dictated by a part of themselves outside the borders of awareness. Others are not our parents from childhood.

Part of overcoming oppositionalism calls on the oppositional to recognize:

*Their habitual responses.
*Their beliefs created in a subjugating past.
*Knowing the cost effectivness of maintaining this habitual and self-defeating style.
*Recognize truly who is taking advantage of you and who is not.
*Note passive-aggressive behaviors.
*Practice listening to what others say--you needn't agree with them, but have the freedom to hear them out.
*Notice when you are digging in and fighting.
*Notice what it is that you really want and see if it's simpatico with what others are requesting from you.

Here are some beliefs, subject to clearing, that folks with a kneejerk oppositional style may hold:

*No one tells me what to do.
*People want too much out of me.
*I'm not giving up anything.
*Screw them if they ask me to do something, I'll show them.
*If I give in or agree, I won't have any respect.
*I don't need to listen to them, screw em'.
*Who died and made them boss?
*I'll tell them what they want to hear so they get off my back.
*I must be vigilant for fallacies in whatever others say or write.
*I'm right and they're wrong.
*Nobody controls or restricts me.

Take care, Steve