Category: On Psychotherapy

There is no shortage of talk about the value of psychotherapy, yet it remains surprisingly difficult to say, in plain terms, what therapy is actually meant to achieve. Part of the confusion comes from the profession itself: practitioners disagree amongst themselves about their purpose, and many training programmes leave the most fundamental questions curiously unaddressed. What follows is an attempt to name, with some precision, what a competent therapist ought to be doing — so that we might recognise it when we encounter it, and know what to ask for when we don’t.

1. Uncovering Our Early Adaptations

Children exist almost entirely at the mercy of the adults who raise them. They cannot file a grievance, appeal to an outside authority, or simply leave if their needs go unmet. Instead, driven by a fierce instinct for survival, they organise their whole being around one task: winning as much of their caregivers’ love as possible, by whatever means will secure it. Every family, even a loving one, attaches unspoken conditions to its affection. In healthier homes, adults bend toward the child’s true nature; in more troubled ones, the child must contort itself to satisfy the peculiar, often damaged needs of the grown-ups around it. These accommodations happen as invisibly and automatically as learning to talk, and by adulthood we’ve usually forgotten we ever made them — even though much of our personality is built from exactly these old compromises.

A therapist’s first task is to help a person see, gently and without judgment, what shape they had to twist themselves into to survive childhood: perhaps excessive obedience, chronic underachievement, compulsive success, or a fixation on money. There might have been a parent who needed us to stay small, or one who couldn’t tolerate our happiness. Good therapy helps us recognise the intelligence in these old strategies — how astute it was to stop feeling, if feeling meant confronting a parent’s despair; how sensible to grow hyper-alert, if someone nearby could never be trusted.

2. Letting go of What’s no Longer Needed

Once these patterns are visible, the next task is realising how obsolete most of them now are. The failure that once kept us safe now only wastes our gifts. The silence that once placated an angry parent is no longer required. What was necessary in childhood can be released in adulthood — not because we were foolish to develop it, but because its purpose has expired. We were never bad or broken for adapting as we did; we can even feel a certain tenderness toward our younger selves for their ingenuity. What remains is simply the task of choosing a different way to live.

3. Bringing the Unconscious Into View

Effective therapists work from the understanding that most of our behaviour operates entirely outside our awareness — not because we lack intelligence, but because emotional patterning, like grammar, is absorbed long before we can examine it. The therapist’s role is to illuminate these connections carefully: the link between present-day emotional distance and the vigilance once needed around an unpredictable parent, say, or between a fear of happiness and a parent’s old jealousy. The underlying issues often surface within the first few sessions; the real skill lies in pacing their revelation to what the client can actually tolerate.

4. Loosening Rigid Inner Rules

Many of us arrive in therapy governed by compulsions we can’t explain: why we can’t stop working, why we keep choosing unkind partners, why our bodies seem perpetually unwell. A skilled therapist traces these compulsions back to their origins and gently questions whether they still serve any purpose. Was constant worry ever optional? Was accepting insecurity in love truly a rule, or just an old habit? Many of us are living by conclusions a frightened child once drew — I must feel guilty, I must stay alone, I must please everyone before myself — and these rarely survive honest adult scrutiny.

5. Revising Our Sense of Self

Our self-image is largely inherited from how the important people in our early lives regarded us. Without ever being told outright, we may have absorbed damaging beliefs: that we’re unworthy, excessive, unlovable, repulsive. No parent needs to state such things directly for a child to draw these conclusions from neglect, favouritism, or coldness. The therapist offers a compassionate outside perspective, gently testing these old assumptions against reality — are you truly as unworthy as you assumed? — and in doing so may open the unfamiliar possibility of self-regard, alongside genuine sorrow for what was endured.

6. Easing Isolation

Because no one properly understood us in the past, we often conclude, unconsciously, that no one ever could. This belief can quietly thin out our adult relationships, since we withhold the parts of ourselves we assume would overwhelm or repel others. But once a therapist proves trustworthy enough to follow us into difficult and unguarded territory, we may find ourselves able to bring more of who we are into contact with other people — and be met there.

7. Mapping Unexplored Regions of the Mind

Why can’t this work be done alone? Because it’s often another person’s genuine curiosity that gives us the courage to keep exploring when the material feels strange or unbearable. Their quiet attentiveness — “go on, I wonder why that is” — creates the conditions in which we keep talking rather than retreat. And because they understood the last difficult thing we said, we find the nerve to go further still, until territory that once felt submerged becomes navigable.

8. Rupture and Repair

If we are fortunate, the therapist will eventually get something wrong — misread us, say the wrong thing. And if we are fortunate still, when we point this out, they won’t grow defensive or accuse us of “resisting,” as an earlier generation of analysts might have. Instead, a well-trained therapist will take the correction seriously, apologise, and adjust. This gives us something many of us were starved of growing up: the experience of an authority figure hearing us, admitting fault, and changing course — what’s known clinically as rupture and repair. It teaches us that relationships can function this way generally, and that we needn’t simply absorb hurt in silence.

What this Demands of the Therapist

Given all this, the qualities required are considerable. A good therapist needs real warmth — a manner that convinces us our pain genuinely registers with them, which in turn requires a therapist reasonably at peace with themselves. They must be free of any impulse to moralise, since clients sense judgment instantly and close down in response; the well-trained therapist understands that every troubling behaviour is an adaptation to a difficult past, not a moral defect. They need to combine deep compassion with real intellectual rigour, able to trace the threads connecting a passing comment weeks ago to a present-day pattern. And they need exquisite timing — knowing, like a skilled improviser, exactly when to press forward and when to hold back, so that difficult truths land only when the client is ready to bear them.
Given how demanding this combination is, it’s little wonder that truly excellent therapists — and fully successful therapies — remain rare. But this shouldn’t discourage us. If anything, understanding what good therapy is actually for should sharpen our resolve to seek out the kind that can genuinely change a life.

If any of this resonates and you’re considering therapy for yourself, I’d be glad to talk. I offer remote psychotherapy sessions working with clients across the world. You can reach out to me through e-mail or call to Get in Touch for an initial session or ask any questions about My Approach before committing.

There are things we know, and then there are things we know but cannot yet bear to know. Somewhere between the two lies a vast, quiet machinery of the mind — one that works around the clock, mostly without our permission, to keep certain truths at a manageable distance. We call these defence mechanisms.

It’s easy to hear that phrase and think of defensiveness in the everyday sense — someone getting prickly when criticised. But what we’re describing here is something both more ordinary and more remarkable. These are not signs of weakness or dishonesty. They are the mind doing what minds have always done: protecting us from more reality than we can absorb at once. A certain amount of self-deception, it turns out, may be the price of staying functional. The trouble starts not when we use these strategies — we all do, constantly — but when we get so attached to one that it starts running our lives instead of helping us survive a difficult moment.

Below are ten of the more common ways we do this. None of them are pathological in themselves. Most of them, we’ll recognize from our own lives — often with a wince.

One: Denial

Pretending it isn’t true

The immediate defensive maneuver – the primitive instinct to feel right about oneself – is to pretend that there is no problem. We think things like we don’t have a drinking problem, or that we couldn’t have helped things going wrong even when we could have.

We do this because admitting to the problem would mean that we’re going to have to do all sorts of difficult and awkward things to change it. Things that we aren’t prepared to do, at least in the short term.

Two: Projection

Seeing our own feelings in someone else

We recognize a negative feeling, but instead of owning it or seeing it as one of our own dark emotions, we attribute it to or ‘project’ it onto someone else. This can sound very complicated but it happens a lot.

We’re certain that a certain colleague resents us or we feel that our partner would be disapproving of us if we don’t make enough money while in truth, the colleague doesn’t resent us at all and the partner is very sympathetic towards our failings.

There’s a particular relief in believing that the anger, the desire, or the contempt belongs in the other person and not in us. It’s a strange kind of trade: we locate an uncomfortable feeling in someone else and receive, in exchange, the comforting sense that at least it isn’t ours.

Three: Rationalization

Explaining it away

We are remarkably talented at making reasonable-sounding excuses to explain what we do (or what others do to us), and it’s carefully tailored to make ourselves believe that we’re innocent, nice and worthy.

If we get rejected for a job or a promotion, we tell ourselves that we didn’t want it anyway because the company wasn’t that good, now that we think of it again. We ended the relationship because they “were emotionally unavailable” — not because closeness itself frightened us. The explanations aren’t entirely false, exactly. They’re just not first in line.

Four: Reaction formation

Acting the opposite of how we feel

This involves doing the opposite of our unacceptable feelings. A child might be being mean to their classmate because they’re embarrassed about their attraction towards the classmate instead of admitting it to themselves. The person consumed by envy becomes their rival’s loudest cheerleader.

We can see this as a kind of over-compensating behavior; there’s often something faintly excessive about these reversals — a warmth that’s a little too bright, a meanness little too pointed and a generosity that seems to cost the giver more than it should.

Five: Displacement

Taking it out on someone safer

The boss who humiliated us gets a polite nod on the way out the door; the family gets the fallout that evening. This is one of the mind’s oldest maneuvers — redirecting a feeling toward a target where it’s less dangerous to express. It explains a great deal about why the people we love most sometimes bear the brunt of what strangers provoke in us.

Six: Turning Against the Self

Directing the blow at ourselves instead

If we become defensive to protect ourselves from psychological suffering, it could sound paradoxical to think that hurting, being angry on or loathing oneself could be a defence. However, it’s a matter of what we find more frightening; there can be things that can appear more frightening than disliking ourselves.

When a child, for example, is abandoned or hurt by a parent, they might think that they are bad and worthless. So the conclusion goes — I still have a good parent. It’s painful but less painful than the truth: that one is actually at the mercy of someone who doesn’t care enough.

It can look like humility, even virtue — we seem hardest on the person who “deserves” it most. But underneath, it’s often the only place the feeling could go without costing us the relationship we couldn’t afford to lose.

Seven: Fantasy

Dissociating from the reality by daydreaming

Fantasy avoids problems by imagining them away. We manifest a range of different scenarios in our head: the person feeling ignored might imagine being famous and adored by others or the poor may imagine enjoying the material comforts they cannot afford. The mind generates a hallucination of its solution.

Eight: Splitting

Thinking of people as all-good or all-bad

This defence is often seen at work in romantic relationships: at the beginning of a romantic relationship we tend to think of our partner as perfect or flawless. But soon enough as their flawed, human side becomes all too apparent we turn our perception of them on its head: we go from idealising them to demonising them.

This has little to do with their inconsistency and more to do with our inability to tolerate their complexity. Nuance is not our strongest point or natural resting place: It is a temptation of the human mind to declare things to be either all-good or all-bad.

Nine: Regression

Going back to what once felt safe

Under enough pressure, we sometimes retreat to older, more childlike ways of coping — sulking, needing constant reassurance, losing the capacity we normally have to tolerate frustration. It’s not really about age. It’s the mind reaching for whatever strategy once kept us safe, even if we’ve long since outgrown it.

A tantrum is a common regressive defence mechanism. Rather than look for a solution to a problem, one tries to solve it by getting upset.

Ten: Sublimation

Turning frustration into something constructive and worthwhile

Not every redirection is destructive. Sometimes grief becomes a work of art, restlessness becomes a business, rage becomes activism. This is one of the few defenses that tends to leave something behind worth having — art, achievement, purpose — even though what’s driving it underneath may be pain we haven’t looked at directly.

Sublimation involves redirecting unacceptable thoughts or emotions into ‘higher’ and ideally more constructive channels.

A Note on How We Outgrow These Defences

Because these defenses exist to protect us, they don’t respond well to pressure. We don’t argue our way out of them, and we certainly don’t scare ourselves out of them. We put our guard down for the same reason we put it up: safety.

It’s only when we feel steady enough that we can afford to be more honest — about what we’ve done, what we’re avoiding, and where we fall short. This is really what good therapy offers: not a confrontation, but enough safety that we no longer need the old defenses quite so badly, and can risk learning something truer instead.

There’s a common misconception that therapy is only for crisis moments — a breakdown, a breakup, a diagnosis. In reality, most people who could benefit from therapy never quite hit a single dramatic turning point. Instead, they live with a quieter, ongoing sense that something isn’t working, without always being able to name what.

If any of the following sound familiar, it might be worth exploring what’s beneath them.

1. You keep having the same conflict, in different relationships

Maybe it’s a pattern of choosing partners who eventually feel unavailable. Maybe it’s recurring tension with authority figures at work. When the same dynamic shows up across different people and contexts, it’s rarely a coincidence — it usually points to something unresolved that’s replaying itself, often outside conscious awareness.

2. You’re going through a major life transition

Grief, a relationship ending, becoming a parent, immigration, a career change — even transitions we choose can destabilize our sense of who we are. Therapy isn’t only for loss; it’s also useful when you’re trying to make sense of change and figure out who you’re becoming on the other side of it.

3. You find yourself avoiding certain thoughts or feelings

If there are topics you notice yourself steering away from — in conversation, in your own thinking — that avoidance is worth curiosity rather than dismissal. What we push away often has more influence over us than what we face directly.

4. You’ve been told (or you suspect) you’re “too much” or “too closed off”

Feedback about being overly emotional, overly detached, hard to read, or hard to please can sting — but it’s also information. It often reflects a way of relating that developed for good reasons early on, and may no longer be serving you.

5. You’re curious about yourself, not just trying to fix something

Not everyone comes to therapy in distress. Some people are simply drawn to understanding their own mind more fully — their patterns, motivations, and blind spots — the way one might pursue any other form of self-education. Curiosity is a legitimate enough reason on its own.

6. You’ve achieved what you set out to, and it doesn’t feel like enough

Sometimes the people who most need support are the ones who look, by every external measure, like they’re doing well. Reaching a goal and still feeling empty or restless afterward is a common and often under-discussed reason people seek therapy.

7. You’re asking bigger questions about meaning and purpose

Not all therapy is about symptom relief. Some of the most valuable work happens when someone is simply trying to figure out what a meaningful life looks like for them — especially during periods of uncertainty, disillusionment, or quiet dissatisfaction with a life that looks “fine” from the outside.

What these signs have in common

None of these require a diagnosis or a crisis to justify seeking support. Therapy is less about being “broken” and more about wanting to understand yourself with more depth and honesty than everyday life usually allows for.

If any of these resonate, it might be worth a conversation — not necessarily a commitment, just a first step to see if this kind of exploration feels right for you. To schedule a consultation Get in Touch.