Containment

In psychology and therapy, containment is a foundational concept referring to the process of safely holding, managing, and processing intense thoughts, feelings, and experiences, either by a therapist for a client or by an individual for themselves. Popularized by psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, it involves creating a mental “container” or a sense of being “held” to tolerate distress, allowing for emotional processing, fostering safety, and preventing overwhelming reactions.

Therapeutic Containment

The Therapist’s Role: A therapist helps a client by tolerating and metabolizing distressing emotions projected by the client, then reflecting them back in a more manageable way. This dynamic builds trust and teaches the client how to process their own feelings over time.
Empathic Understanding: The therapist offers empathy and a calm presence, allowing the client to feel understood and supported.
Creating a Safe Space: The therapeutic relationship itself provides a safe environment for clients to express raw emotions without being overwhelmed.
Metabolizing Distress: The therapist’s internal processing helps to modify painful emotions into something tolerable, which the client can then re-introject and understand.

Self-Containment

Managing Intense Experiences: Involves creating internal boundaries to hold disturbing thoughts, memories, or images until one is ready to process them constructively.
Practical Strategies:Journaling: Writing down distressing thoughts and feelings.
Containment Box: Decorating a physical box to symbolically hold difficult experiences
Mental Vaults: Imagining a secure vault where one can temporarily place overwhelming sensations or memories.
Purpose: Self-containment is not about avoiding emotions but about gaining the space and skills to work through them gradually and safely.

Key Principles

Attunement: The ability to be present and responsive to another’s emotional state.Boundaries: Establishing clear limits to understand where one person’s emotions begin and end.
Metabolization: The process of transforming raw, distressing material into something that can be tolerated and understood.
Re-introjection: The client internalizes the modified, processed emotions from the therapist or their own self-containment practice.

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[1] https://lindsaybraman.com/attunement-containment-attachment/

[2] https://www.creativelyllc.com/blog/therapy-skills-containment

[3] https://www.oxfordcbt.co.uk/emotional-containment/

[4] https://www.glassmanpsyd.com/containment-strategies

[5] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01062301.2023.2296689