As Developing Success turns its attention to Psychodynamic Coaching in the next couple of weeks – I thought I’d share some of ideas from Psychodynamic theory and how it applies to coaching.

The psychodynamic model comes from Sigmund Freud’s theory that human beings are influenced by thoughts and feelings outside our awareness. These thoughts and feelings are seen as moving back and forth between the conscious and unconscious parts of our minds, hence psychodynamic. Despite our rational brains, emotions are the invisible drivers of much of our behaviour. When these emotions become too painful or threatening, they are pushed below the surface.

Emotions then are the invisible drivers of our behaviour. Human beings are programmed to seek a sense of psychological safety, yet we all experience difficult emotions including fear, anger, guilt, jealousy, envy and shame. These feelings are normal but can be painful and threatening, especially if they conflict with how we think we should feel, and this creates anxiety which undermines our sense of safety.

We try to reduce anxiety by banishing unacceptable thoughts and feelings from our conscious awareness through a range of psychological defences. Common psychological defences include denial, rationalisation, displacement, idealisation, projection, and splitting. Defences help us to manage anxiety and to feel safe – they are a normal part of life. All of this may be helpful to us, HOWEVER, defences also create ‘blind spots’ – they put us out of touch with some of the thoughts and feelings that are driving our behaviour. This can cause problems for ourselves and other people and effect our performance at work.

Consider the manager who has experienced too many strong emotions as a child and finds them very threatening. In order to cope with this ‘overwhelm’ she rationalises hers and others feelings/ and reduces them all to rational thought (the defence of rationalisation); not allowing any place for emotions at work. Her team feel ‘shut down’ by her and not seen or heard. They feel she doesn’t understand them or isn’t able to connect with them. What served her as a child (to protect her and keep her safe), isn’t working for her now (not able to connect with her team in an emotionally intelligent way). And because it is out of conscious awareness, she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.

In the next blog I’ll talk about how you might start to work with coachees in a Psychodynamic way.