Why do people come to therapy?

What prompts someone to step into the therapy room?

It can be because they want support with a major life event – a bereavement, illness or divorce – but often, it’s because their old defence mechanisms and coping strategies are starting to fail.

Defence mechanisms are anything that stands between you and really feeling and experiencing.

You might use humour, to defend against humiliation or a sense of failure.

You might protest too much – “I’m fine, really, it’s all completely fine!” – a defence known as reaction formation.

You might suppress your feelings – that nagging sense of inadequacy, that lonely belief that something is wrong with you – or channel them into work or exercise.

Perhaps you avoid your difficult feelings such as rage, shame and despair through keeping busy, or you mask them with drink and drugs. Maybe you deny that they exist at all. (Whenever a client tells me they had a wonderful childhood, I immediately wonder if this is the defence of denial.)

Anxiety can also be in the mix, part of a triangular psychological process, designed to keep you out of contact with difficult feelings. It goes like this:

Feelings trigger anxiety, anxiety activates defences, defences repress feelings.

Anxiety can be triggered when dark, difficult feelings or impulses begin to rise up from the unconscious. This in turn activates defences. The defences attempt to regulate that anxiety – some soothing online shopping, some mild dissociation – and simultaneously avoid a confrontation with those murky, dangerous feelings. You might be raging at your mother, for instance, but because that feels like an existential threat to that most essential of relationships, you feel anxious and this activates a defence to squash that feeling.

Over the years, defence mechanisms and coping strategies can impact our health and relationships. Midlife in particular can be a time of great reckoning and crisis. Defensive strategies begin to collide with the unavoidable shocks and pressures of age. If exercise has always helped keep your demons at bay, what happens when you are injured or simply too old to hit the gym? Drinking will always hurt your health and loved ones, shopping will hurt your wallet, working hard will exhaust you while retirement will ultimately rob you of the distraction of work. Anxiety, over time, can leave you exhausted and estranged, from both yourself and your loved ones.

Signs that your coping strategies are failing

Physical symptoms – disturbed sleep, burnout, digestive problems, auto-immune disease

Emotional symptoms – numbness, anxiety, panic attacks, obsessive thoughts and compulsions

Why therapy can help

Suppressed feelings are only suppressed. They have not gone away and will continue to act in you. By exploring your life with a view to reclaiming the feelings that got squashed down and hidden, you can begin to regain agency. Once you are in touch with all that dark, repressed ‘stuff’ you can work through it, with the help of a supportive therapist, and effectively decommission it. The need for defence mechanisms drops away, and the possibility of living more flexibly, spontaneously and contentedly opens up.

I offer a free 15-minute initial consultation over the phone or online. Please email me and we can set something up.