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Why Healthy Relationships Can Feel Unfamiliar
The reasons why some people find a healthy relationship unfamiliar, uncomfortable or difficult are very broad. It is difficult to define precisely what the causal factors are, because every individual brings a different experience of life to the encounter. We differ in how we perceive our everyday activities, our surroundings and other people. Alongside our…
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Why We Sometimes See People as All Good or All Bad
Psychotherapy provides a particularly important setting in which these mechanisms can be observed directly. The patient does not merely describe their relationships outside treatment. Eventually they begin relating to the psychotherapist through the same internal mechanisms. A patient with little previous experience of psychotherapy may initially experience the psychotherapist in an intensely idealised fashion.
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Why We Sometimes Blame Ourselves for Everything
Blame, guilt and responsibility have occupied philosophers, physicians, psychiatrists and psychological thinkers for centuries. Psychoanalysis added a particularly important dimension by asking not only whether a person was responsible for something that happened, but also why somebody might feel responsible when the external reality does not justify that degree of blame.
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Understanding Projection in Everyday Life
Projection is one of the most familiar defence mechanisms within psychoanalytic thinking, although the term is now used so freely in everyday conversation that its original meaning can easily become blurred. People sometimes accuse one another of “projecting” whenever they disagree, become angry or appear to attribute motives to somebody else. In psychoanalytic terms, however,…
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Why People Sometimes Deny Difficult Reality in Psychotherapy
Denial is one of the psychological defence mechanisms that can become particularly visible during psychotherapy. At first, this may appear contradictory. A patient comes to psychotherapy because they already recognise that something is wrong. They may be experiencing difficulties in relationships, at work, within the family or in their general emotional life. They have actively…
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What Defence Mechanisms Really Are: A Psychoanalytic Understanding
The term defence mechanism is now widely used in everyday conversation. People speak of somebody being “in denial,” “projecting,” “acting out” or “intellectualising” as though a defence mechanism were simply a recognisable form of difficult behaviour. This popular use often removes the concept from its original psychoanalytic meaning.
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Understanding Emotional Numbness
Emotional numbness is a broad term that can describe several different psychological experiences. People may use it when they feel exhausted, disconnected, traumatised or unable to recognise what is happening emotionally inside them. It may arise after prolonged stress, painful relationships, severe trauma, psychiatric illness or the use of certain medications. Because the term is…
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Why Loneliness Can Exist Even When You Are Not Alone
Loneliness is often understood too simply. When somebody says, “I feel lonely,” the immediate assumption may be that they live alone, have few friends or spend very little time with other people. In reality, loneliness does not work in such a straightforward way.
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Why Some People Find It Difficult to Express Anger in Psychotherapy
Anger is one of the most complex emotions encountered in psychotherapy. Some patients express it openly and forcefully from the beginning of treatment. Others appear quiet, restrained or emotionally depleted, even though considerable anger may be operating beneath the surface.
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Understanding Shame and Its Emotional Effects in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life – Part 6
Patients often enter psychotherapy hoping that shame can be removed completely. They may want to forget what happened, stop thinking about how they behaved or reach a point at which the memory no longer produces any emotional reaction.