Luke Row is a BACP registered psychodynamic therapist in Croydon, South London, with advanced training at Tavistock Relationships. He works with individuals who've tried managing their symptoms and couples tired of managing each other, people ready to understand what's underneath. Book a session →
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There's something paradoxical about the walls people build around themselves. They're constructed with meticulous care, each brick representing a moment someone decided safety mattered more than connection. Yet these fortifications, designed to keep pain out, often become the source of pain themselves.
The pattern shows up across countless therapy rooms: someone arrives charming, articulate, remarkably self-aware. They can explain their attachment style, map their triggers, describe their patterns with impressive precision. They answer questions thoughtfully but somehow the conversation never quite lands anywhere real. Something's missing, though it takes time to identify what.
What's missing is them.
The most sophisticated defences don't look like defences at all. They look like competence. Like being the person who asks the right questions, remembers everyone's details, shows up reliably for others. There's nothing obviously wrong with any of this, except that it creates relationships where being helpful substitutes for being present, where managing others' comfort replaces having needs of your own.
This isn't conscious deception. It's a survival strategy that worked so well for so long that it became identity. Somewhere in childhood, perhaps, showing up fully felt dangerous: too much, too needy, too likely to overwhelm or disappoint. Better to be useful. Better to be easy. Better to make yourself small enough that no one could object to your presence.
Years later, that child's solution has calcified into an adult's prison. The walls that once protected now constrict. But they're so familiar, so essential to how someone understands themselves, that dismantling them feels like dissolution.
Surface conversations work perfectly well for social lubrication. They fail catastrophically as substitutes for intimacy. Yet for someone operating from behind defensive walls, they become the only available currency: a way to participate in human connection without risking genuine contact.
The cost accumulates slowly enough that it's easy to miss. Each deflection, each time vulnerability gets redirected into humour or analysis or concern for the other person, represents a small foreclosure of possibility. Not dramatic. Just a relationship that might have deepened staying safely shallow instead.
What emerges over time is a particular kind of loneliness: being surrounded by people who genuinely like you while feeling profoundly unknown. It's possible to have dozens of friends and no one who's actually seen you. To be in a relationship for years while remaining fundamentally hidden. To be loved for qualities that aren't quite real.
The rage this generates often surprises people when it finally surfaces. Fury at having to be so endlessly manageable. At performing connection while starving for it. At the exhausting labour of being what everyone needs instead of who you are.
What makes these patterns particularly difficult to shift is that they're genuinely protective. They work. Someone who never shows neediness will never be rejected for being too much. Someone who never admits to hoping for something specific will never be disappointed by its absence. Someone who keeps every interaction light will never be crushed by emotional weight.
But protection from disappointment isn't the same as safety. It's just a different kind of danger: the danger of living a life so carefully managed that nothing real can emerge within it. The danger of reaching the end having been universally liked but never truly known.
The therapeutic work often centres on helping someone recognise this distinction. That what feels like safety is actually a sophisticated form of self-abandonment. That the walls aren't keeping other people out so much as keeping an essential part of themselves locked away: the part that wants, needs, hopes, risks.
The question therapy eventually raises isn't whether other people can be trusted not to hurt you. They can't be. Hurt is inevitable in any genuine relationship. The question is whether you can develop capacity to survive being hurt: to want something without guarantees, to show up imperfect and still believe you deserve presence, to be disappointed without concluding you should never have hoped.
This represents a fundamental shift from control to tolerance. From managing every interaction to ensure safety to accepting that real connection requires vulnerability, which by definition means you can't know the outcome in advance. It means letting yourself be inconvenient, difficult, needy: all the things you learned early were dangerous to be.
For many people, this feels like death. The self they've carefully constructed (competent, independent, low-maintenance) doesn't survive genuine vulnerability. What emerges instead is messier, more complicated, harder to package neatly. But it's also real in a way the performance never was.
Paradoxically, rejection often isn't what people fear most when they begin dismantling defences. It's acceptance. The possibility that someone might actually want them as they are (messy, needy, difficult) challenges the entire internal logic that necessitated the walls in the first place.
If someone can be loved while imperfect, while making mistakes, while having needs that aren't easy to meet, then perhaps all that protection was unnecessary. Perhaps they were worthy all along and simply too frightened to find out. This recognition can unsettle someone more than rejection would have, because it means the story they've told themselves about why they had to hide might not be true.
Dismantling defensive patterns doesn't happen dramatically. It's gradual renovation rather than demolition: carefully identifying which walls serve protection and which have become prison bars, then slowly creating space for something different.
It shows up in small risks at first. Admitting to wanting something specific rather than being endlessly flexible. Expressing anger instead of immediately converting it to understanding. Letting someone see confusion or uncertainty rather than arriving with everything pre-analysed. Each of these represents a moment of choosing connection over control.
The people who can meet someone in this space (who aren't put off by needs, who stay present with difficulty, who choose the real version over the polished one) were there all along. But they couldn't find their way to someone hidden behind walls. And someone behind walls couldn't risk believing such people existed.
This isn't work that completes neatly. The patterns that made someone hide in the first place don't dissolve just because they've been recognised. Stress, exhaustion, old triggers: any of these can pull someone back toward familiar defences.
But something shifts once you've experienced being seen and surviving it. Once you know that showing up imperfect doesn't end the world. Once you've felt the difference between being liked for a performance and being wanted for yourself.
The walls might still be visible. But they're no longer the only available architecture for being human.
What I do: Attachment Issues Therapy in Croydon
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