How a “Holding Environment” Supports Psychological Growth

How exactly does psychotherapy help you grow, learn, and heal? For some schools of thought, the answer to this question is found in prescriptive tools or techniques, manualized treatments, and medications. In Depth or Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy which I practice, the answer to this question is found much more in the quality of the therapeutic relationship between therapist and client. What some people want when they enter the psychotherapy office is to have a kind of experience in a relationship, a new kind of experience they might have never had before, where they feel heard, understood, encouraged, and supported in a deep embodied way.

Some psychologists including Donald Winnicott and Thomas Ogden describe the kind of experience you can have in psychotherapy as an experience of “holding” (Ogden 2004). I think this description of holding does a good job of explaining the quality of experience that supports psychological growth and health, and is one that I turn to often to answer the questions of “how does psychotherapy help”. In this short article I’ll outline some of the fundamental elements of “holding” and how finding yourself in a safe holding environment can help support psychological growth.

Safety in relationship

Many people have never experienced a truly safe relationship where you can share whatever is on your mind without fear of being judged, ridiculed, or persecuted. A safe holding environment can take time to develop true safety in a therapeutic relationship, sometimes months or even years. Once that safety is developed, the experience of having your emotional experience “held” by a truly safe other can allow you to unpack and work through difficult parts of yourself that you would otherwise not be able to access. Many of us have been through relationships that have gone bad, whether it be by our primary caregivers, friends, lovers, or family. When relationships go bad or are “unsafe”, they can be the cause of some of our most painful memories. Finding yourself in a safe relationship with your therapist who can provide a holding environment can be the fertile ground within which new psychological growth can occur.

Encouragement, or “going on being”

“Going on being” is a phrase that Donald Winnicott used to describe what can happen in a healthy psyche when a proper holding environment is created . Winnicott was talking both about the type of experience a healthy child experiences when they grow up with attuned and mindful caregivers, as well as describing the type of experience you can have when psychotherapy goes well. In a supportive holding environment, you can learn to “go on being”, or find a way to persist in your life with mindful embodied cohesion and self confidence. When we have safe experiences in therapy they encourage us to find ways to navigate the trials and tribulations of life with poise and trust that things are going to be okay. 

Self Cohesion

Some of my clients remark that what they find so helpful about therapy is the ability to take all of the different parts of themselves and dump them out into the space of the therapy session in an attempt to sort through, organize, and eventually put themselves back together in a cohesive way. Clients can come into therapy feeling confused, fearful, and disparate, in that the different parts of themselves seem to be at war inside. They often have no safe space in their lives to “get it all out there”. When psychotherapy successfully provides a safe holding environment, you can feel like you can just talk out all the different, sometimes random, thoughts inside your head. Once everything is out on the table, it is much easier to make sense of what's going on and can fundamentally change your relationship with yourself. One client told me “it's nice just to have a space to say all of this, and once I say it outloud it feels much better”. By getting things out of your head and speaking them out loud to another person, you can fundamentally change your understanding of and relationship with difficult thoughts, emotions, and past traumas.

In Conclusion

Psychotherapy offers a holding environment which you can allow yourself to relax into. In this safe, encouraging, and cohesive space, new connections, insights, and experiences can emerge which promote psychological health and growth.

Reach out

I’m Connor Moss with Pacific Psychotherapy, I offer depth oriented therapy in Los Gatos, Santa Cruz, and online in California. I specialize in couples therapy, therapy for depression, therapy for anxiety, addiction therapy, and trauma therapy. Reach out to schedule a free phone consultation if you’d like to talk about the possibility of us working together.