The depth psychology perspective that changes everything about how we understand anxiety, avoidance, and self-sabotage
Something happens in the first few sessions of therapy that I never tire of witnessing.
A person arrives convinced that their anxiety is a malfunction. That their avoidance is weakness. That the wall they have built between themselves and the world is a character flaw they need to demolish. They have been told – by well-meaning books, by previous therapists, by the culture at large – that they need to "break through" their defences.
Then we slow down. We get curious about the wall rather than attacking it. And something shifts.
The wall, it turns out, was built by a child who had no other way to survive.
The Intelligence of Symptoms
Depth psychology begins with a premise that sits uncomfortably with our fix-it culture: your symptoms are not the problem. They are the solution your psyche found when no better one was available.
The anxiety that keeps you hypervigilant? It was the early warning system that kept you safe in an unpredictable home. The avoidance that narrows your life? It was the withdrawal that protected you when connection meant danger. The dissociation that makes you feel unreal? It was the escape hatch when there was no physical escape.
These are not malfunctions. They are adaptations. Extraordinarily clever ones, often developed in early childhood when the nervous system had limited resources and overwhelming demands.
Donald Kalsched, whose work on the inner world of trauma has been foundational to my clinical thinking, describes these defences as a kind of "self-care system" – a part of the psyche that learned to protect at all costs, even when the cost is aliveness itself (Kalsched, 2013).
The Problem is Not the Defence. It is the Rigidity.
So if defences are intelligent, why do people come to therapy wanting to change?
Because what was adaptive at five becomes restrictive at thirty-five.
The hypervigilance that once detected genuine danger now fires in the supermarket queue. The emotional numbness that protected a child from overwhelming grief now prevents an adult from feeling love. The people-pleasing that kept an unpredictable parent calm now creates relationships built on performance rather than authenticity.
The defence itself is not pathological. The pathology is in its rigidity – its inability to recognise that the original danger has passed, that new responses are now possible, that the adult has resources the child did not.
This is what Jung (1966) would recognise as a complex: a pattern of feeling and behaviour that was once purposeful, now operating autonomously, beyond conscious control.
What This Means for Recovery
If we understand defences as intelligent adaptations rather than enemies to be conquered, the entire therapeutic project changes:
From elimination to relationship. The goal is not to destroy the defence but to develop a conscious relationship with it. To understand when it activates, what it is protecting, and whether its protection is still needed.
From confrontation to curiosity. Rather than "pushing through" resistance – a martial metaphor that recapitulates the very dynamic many clients are healing from – we approach defences with respectful curiosity. "What are you protecting? When did you learn this? What were you afraid would happen if you stopped?"
From speed to patience. Defences do not yield to force. They yield to safety. When the therapeutic relationship consistently demonstrates that vulnerability will not be punished, the nervous system gradually – on its own timeline, not ours – begins to experiment with new responses.
From pathology to meaning. Every symptom has a story. The person who cannot stop checking locks is telling a story about a time when safety was not guaranteed. The person who cannot cry is telling a story about a time when tears were punished or ignored. Understanding the story does not make the symptom disappear instantly, but it transforms the person's relationship to their own suffering. They are no longer broken. They are someone who survived.
A Clinical Illustration
The following is a composite illustration drawn from multiple clinical encounters. All identifying details have been changed.
Consider a woman in her forties who presents with what she describes as "emotional shutdown." She cannot cry, even at funerals. She cannot feel anger, even when boundaries are violated. Relationships remain pleasant and distant. She functions well professionally but describes her inner life as "beige."
Previous therapeutic approaches had focused on "accessing feelings" – encouraging emotional expression, challenging her to "let go." She had found these approaches re-traumatising, experiencing them as demands to perform vulnerability she did not feel.
From a depth psychology perspective, her emotional shutdown is not a wall to be broken. It is a sophisticated defence that a child built in response to a home where emotion was dangerous. Her mother's emotional volatility meant that any feeling in the household could trigger a crisis. The child learned: feelings are contagious, feelings are dangerous, the safest thing is to feel nothing.
The therapeutic work was not to force open the emotional floodgates. It was to sit with her in the "beige" – to honour the defence, to understand its origins, and to gradually create a relational context safe enough that the nervous system could begin to soften. Over many months, tears came – not through effort, but through the slow accumulation of safety.
The defence was never the enemy. The absence of safety was.
What This Means for You
If you recognise yourself in any of this – the shutdown, the hypervigilance, the avoidance, the patterns that restrict your life – consider this reframe:
You are not broken. You are defended. And the defences that served you then are not the ones you need now.
The path forward is not through force but through understanding. Not through demolition but through dialogue with the parts of you that learned to protect at all costs.
Depth psychology offers this dialogue. It takes time. It requires a therapeutic relationship that can hold complexity. But it offers something that quick fixes do not: genuine integration, where the old patterns are not destroyed but transformed into wisdom about who you are and what you have survived.
This article draws on themes explored in greater depth in my academic series on ego defences, complex trauma, and the depth psychology approach to clinical practice. Subscribers can access the full scholarly treatment of these ideas in the archive.
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For practitioners: How do you navigate the tension between honouring defences and supporting change? I would be interested to hear your clinical experience.