Knowingly or not, people come to therapy with what are essentially attachment issues, meaning problems with navigating closeness and distance with other people. These are often based on the early relationships we had, which now play out later in adult life (for example as intense “need”, emotional avoidance, or relentlessly chaotic relationships).
There are broadly three ways in which therapy can help.
The first is insight. Therapy helps you recognize that the way you relate to people is a pattern, a way you’ve organized your personality to navigate other people. By recognizing this, you can start to be aware of it as it happens in real time. To notice and think about what you’re feeling and why, and what other people might be feeling and why (a faculty called mentalisation). This sponsors the clarity that your patterns are a learnt response, rather than an immutable reality.
A second part of it is a (potentially unfamiliar) experience of another’s regulating reliability. Someone who is just there and provides a space that can receive and withstand the intensity of your emotions, your loneliness, or your need (via a dynamic called containment, coined by Wilfred Bion). If this has been a deficit in your life, its presence now can contribute deeply to a developing internal sense of okayness and security.
The third domain, the most subtle yet potentially transformative one, is that when you see a therapist, you may over time develop a sort of symbolic relationship with them (referred to as transference). In that unusually safe yet still relational space, your habitual patterns might play out in such a way that you again enact something of your old need, fear, anger, or whatever is that characterises your significant attachments. But this time, finally, in a way that can be brought into the room and into awareness. Actually discussed and acknowledged, repaired, and experienced as not destructive, not overwhelming, or not destabilising.
Over time, these three modes of change in therapy can help you replace your template for how you relate to other people. Entrenched patterns of, say, being desperately in need of someone else, or fundamentally terrified of closeness, or very confused by the presence of someone significant, can come to be replaced in your mind and body by a sense that it’s okay to be around them. That there’s a way to navigate relationships that hopefully contains both your need for them and your ability to feel secure in yourself alone.
Image credit: Dmitry Vechorko
