The Friction Therapy
A way of thinking about change
The Friction Therapy is a framework I’ve developed to understand how personality forms and how people change. It isn’t a separate company or a separate service. It’s the thinking behind much of my writing, and it may shape how I approach our work where it fits.
The idea, in plain words
Many of the struggles that stay with us aren’t isolated problems. They sit at a point of friction: the place where what we understand, want or are trying to do runs into older patterns we’re not fully aware of. Those patterns might be expectations, beliefs, emotional habits or ways of protecting ourselves, learned over a lifetime.
That friction is often felt as avoidance, shame, guilt, perfectionism, procrastination, numbness, anger or conflict with the people close to us. The Friction Therapy sees these as resistance. Resistance isn’t a flaw. It’s a way of protecting something.
So the question changes from “How do I get rid of this?” to “What is this trying to protect?”
Where it comes from
The Friction Therapy is rooted in psychodynamic psychology. It draws on Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby, Nancy McWilliams, Otto Kernberg, Viktor Frankl and Irvin Yalom, and it also learns from attachment theory, object relations and existential psychology.
It isn’t meant to be a new school of therapy. It’s a way of organising those ideas around one practical thread, friction, so that you and I have a shared language for talking about change.
What it doesn’t claim
The Friction Therapy doesn’t say that every difficulty has a single cause, that everything begins in childhood, that insight alone ends suffering, or that medication is unnecessary. It offers one way of understanding patterns that persist, alongside other kinds of care when they’re needed.
Read more
I write about these ideas in The Friction Therapy Digest, my newsletter on LinkedIn.
If you’d like to explore the friction in your own life, you’re welcome to book a session.