Authenticity in Therapy - Free Association Clinic

People Pleasing and Losing Yourself

You agree to something you do not want, and what makes it painful is that you can hear yourself consenting as it happens. You say yes with a tone that sounds sincere, because part of you is sincere: you want the other person to stay pleased, you want the relationship to stay stable, and you want the moment to pass without consequence.

Then you are alone and the consequence arrives anyway, not as drama, but as something duller and more corrosive: irritation, dread, a low-grade anger with nowhere obvious to go, followed by the familiar question that is not really a question at all. Why did I do that again?

If you recognize this pattern, you have probably been told to set better boundaries. Sometimes that advice is accurate, but it often feels thin because it is aimed at the surface of the problem; it treats people pleasing as a skill deficit when, for many people, it is closer to a way of existing with other people, a posture toward life that can look like kindness from the outside and feel like self-erasure from the inside.

A woman sits solemnly on a bed holding a white mask, surrounded by crumpled tissues, symbolizing emotional vulnerability and hidden identity.

The private aftermath is the truth of the pattern

People pleasing is usually not the presence of generosity. It is the presence of a bargain.

The bargain is rarely stated out loud, which is part of why it keeps operating. It tends to sound like this: if you are disappointed in me, I am not safe; if you are angry, I have done something wrong; if you withdraw approval, I might lose you; if I ask for what I want, I will be exposed in a way I cannot tolerate. When that bargain is running, the yes is not really about your desire, and it is not even about your values; it is about managing the other person’s reaction so you can keep your footing.

Resentment follows for a simple reason. You are spending your life stabilizing the emotional weather around you, and even when you succeed, you succeed at the cost of disappearing. The anger is not a character flaw; it is often the part of you that still knows you traded yourself away for peace.

When kindness becomes self-loss

There is a version of people pleasing that is simply social intelligence, the ordinary tact of living among others. But the kind that leaves you resentful and unreal tends to have a different texture: it feels compulsory, and it keeps widening until it is no longer confined to a few situations. You begin to notice that you adapt before you think, that you apologize for taking up time or space, that you do not know what you want until you are finally alone, that you can sense what everyone else needs while your own desire feels quiet, distant, or embarrassing.

This is the moment many people say, “I don’t know who I am.” It can sound melodramatic until you take it seriously, at which point it becomes a precise description of what has happened: your life has become organized around being acceptable, and acceptability is not the same as being real.

When kindness becomes self-loss

Authenticity is not a trait, and it is not a hidden object

From an existential psychoanalytic view, authenticity is not a stable personality feature that you either possess or lack, and it is not a pure “true self” waiting underneath your social roles like a buried treasure. Authenticity is a way of existing, which means it is something you appropriate in the middle of real life, and it is something you can lose again and again, especially when you begin living by public opinion, by others’ expectations, and by the quiet tyranny of what you imagine you are supposed to be.

This matters clinically because it changes what you are trying to do. If you keep waiting to discover a ready-made identity, you may never do the harder work of taking up your own life in the presence of other people, where the risks are real and the consequences are not imaginary.

People pleasing is one of the most efficient ways to avoid that work, because if you become what others want, you never have to find out what you want; you can remain socially successful while privately absent.

A woman appears cheerful as she speaks to her reflection in a shattered mirror, which shows a somber expression, illustrating a divide between outward expression and inner truth.

Winnicott’s false self, or the self that keeps the relationship safe

Winnicott gives language that many people recognize immediately once they hear it, because it names the lived experience rather than offering advice. He described a false self that develops when a person learns, often early, that spontaneity is risky, that certain feelings are not welcome, and that the safest way to stay connected is to present what the other person can tolerate.

This false self is not simply “fake.” At its best, it is protective and socially useful; it helps you navigate a world that requires adaptation. In the best of cases, it can be a means by which a more intimate relationship is reached. The trouble begins when the false self becomes your primary way of being, when it stops serving you and starts running you, because then your life becomes a performance built around maintaining connection and avoiding rupture. However, the connection it affords is a catch 22, the relationship might be stable, but it is based on a lack of intimacy. You may look functional and agreeable while feeling internally strained, resentful, empty, or strangely unreal, as if you are living through a socially acceptable version of yourself while something more alive stays hidden, not because it is mystical, but because it has learned it is safer not to appear.

People pleasing often fits this picture with uncomfortable accuracy. It is compliance in the service of attachment, and it is frequently fueled by the fear that if you stop being good, you will stop being loved.

The paradox of being liked

People pleasing is often praised, and that praise can become part of the trap. If everyone experiences you as easy, reasonable, helpful, thoughtful, then the role hardens into identity, and identity becomes a kind of prison because you start defending the image you have created. You become allergic to disappointing people, not only because you fear their anger, but because their disappointment threatens the self you have built to survive.

The paradox is that the more you specialize in being liked, the harder it is to feel known, and the harder it is to feel real. Being liked can function like an invisibility cloak: you avoid conflict, and by avoiding conflict you avoid the moments that require you to take a stand, to state a preference, to risk being misunderstood, to tolerate someone’s frustration, and to remain present anyway.

Why advice fails, and what therapy changes

Most people pleasers already know the advice. They can recite it, sometimes with impressive sophistication. Yet when they attempt to follow it, something inside them reacts as if a boundary is not a sentence but a threat. That reaction is the point. It tells you that the pattern is not maintained by ignorance, but by fear, and fear does not yield to checklists.

Psychoanalytic and existential therapy take seriously that people pleasing often began as adaptation. It may have been how you kept connection, reduced threat, stayed in good standing, or found a place for yourself in a family or culture where approval felt conditional. Even when your current life is safer, the old bargain can remain in force, and the false self can keep doing its job long after it stops protecting you.

Therapy matters here because the problem is relational, and therefore the work has to become relational too. The impulse to be the “good patient,” to make the therapist comfortable, to hide anger, to soften your language, to say what you think is expected, to stay agreeable at the very moment you are not agreeable, is not a distraction from the treatment; it is often the treatment, because it allows the false self to become visible as it is happening, and it allows you to experiment with a different way of being in a relationship where the stakes are real but the goal is not approval.

In existential work, authenticity is not comfort; it is exposure. It is the willingness to let your desire, your anger, your limits, your grief, and your ambivalence be part of the relationship, not because you want conflict, but because a life without that truth is not a life you can actually inhabit.

Learn more about existential therapy: https://freeassociationclinic.com/existential-therapy/
Learn more about psychoanalytic therapy: https://freeassociationclinic.com/psychoanalysis-therapy/

A woman sits in silence at a table while faded, overlapping figures around her appear engaged in conversation, representing isolation amidst social noise.

Starting at Free Association Clinic

If your yes is keeping the peace while your private life fills with resentment, you do not need a more optimized personality. You need a different relationship to fear, guilt, and responsibility, and you need a place where the part of you that has been managing everyone else can stop performing long enough for something more genuine to appear.

Free Association Clinic offers in-person sessions in San Francisco and telehealth across California.

Request an appointment: https://freeassociationclinic.com/contact-us/
How we work / our staff: https://freeassociationclinic.com/about-us/

Insurance and practical logistics

The clinic is in-network with Aetna, Blue Shield of California, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Optum / UnitedHealthcare, and Cigna / Evernorth. If your plan is not listed, out-of-network reimbursement may still apply, and the clinic can provide a superbill.

Learn about insurance and superbills: https://freeassociationclinic.com/insurance/

Consultation: your first session is free if you choose not to continue. If you decide to move forward, payment is discussed during the meeting.

FAQ

Is people pleasing the same as being kind?
No. Kindness can include honesty and limits, and it can tolerate another person’s disappointment. People pleasing is often organized around safety and approval, which is why it can feel like care on the outside while feeling like disappearance on the inside.

Why do I feel resentful after I people please?
Because the relationship stayed calm, but it stayed calm by costing you something. Resentment is often the aftertaste of self-erasure, especially when you agreed out of fear rather than desire.

Why do I feel guilty when I set a boundary?
Because guilt can be the emotional price of breaking an old rule, even when the rule is destroying your life slowly. Guilt does not always mean you harmed someone; sometimes it means you stopped conforming.

Is people pleasing a trauma response?
Sometimes. Sometimes it is a learned adaptation to conditional approval, volatile relationships, or environments where being low-maintenance was the safest role. The label matters less than understanding what your people pleasing protects and what it costs.

What if I don’t even know what I want?
That is common, and it often makes sense. If the false self has been steering for years, desire can go quiet. Therapy can help you recover it without forcing quick answers, and without treating your life like a self-improvement project.

Schedule a first session: https://freeassociationclinic.com/contact-us/

The Crisis of Experience in Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Returning to Lived Experience

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

Thompson’s Chapter 6 names a problem that tends to hide in plain sight: many contemporary forms of psychoanalysis risk losing the very phenomenon they claim to treat, the patient’s capacity to have experience, to undergo it, to recognize it, and to speak it as one’s own. This is what he calls the crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: not a shortage of theories about psychic life, but a growing difficulty, culturally and clinically, in remaining answerable to lived experience in therapy itself.

People often come to psychoanalysis because something in their life is no longer coherent, not only because they suffer, but because their suffering has become strangely impersonal. They can describe what is happening with impressive clarity, sometimes even with moving candor, and yet they leave the hour with the faint suspicion that nothing has truly happened. Insight has been produced, but experience has not been reclaimed. Thompson’s wager is that this is not accidental. It is a consequence of how psychoanalytic technique and interpretation can drift, almost imperceptibly, toward commentary about experience, until the patient is asked to live in explanations rather than to re-enter what is being lived.

A therapist and patient sit in a dim, abstract room where experience seems to dissolve into swirling uncertainty.

Experience is not a concept, it is something you undergo

Thompson begins with a philosophical warning that becomes clinical the moment you take it seriously. Adorno suggests that experience is not simply a private event inside the head, but “the union of tradition with an open yearning for what is foreign,” and then adds the more disturbing thought: “the very possibility of experience is in jeopardy” (Adorno, 1992; discussed by Thompson, 2024).

What makes this relevant to the consulting room is that Adorno’s point is not merely that people are distracted, or that culture is superficial, but that experience itself can be thinned out until it becomes difficult to locate where, and in whom, it is happening. Thompson, drawing on Jay, underscores the conceptual difficulty that follows when “experience” becomes an empty password that everyone uses and no one can define without reducing it to something else, as though definition were always already a kind of betrayal (Jay, 1998; Adorno, 1992). In that light, the therapeutic risk comes into view. If experience cannot be defined without shrinking it, then a clinical method that treats experience as raw data to be processed will tend, despite itself, to process the life out of it.

Thompson’s etymological gesture makes the same point from another angle. “Experience” is linked to peril and to trial, to something tested and undergone rather than possessed, which means that experience is never guaranteed by the mere fact that something happened. It can be embraced or resisted, submitted to or evaded, and therefore it always implies risk, a willingness to be changed by what is encountered (Thompson, 2024). If you hold that thought and then listen to patients, you begin to hear why so many symptoms are not only expressions of pain but strategies for avoiding the peril of feeling what one’s life is doing.

Erfahrung and Erlebnis: being experienced and having an experience

Thompson’s Chapter 6 names a problem that tends to hide in plain sight: many contemporary forms of psychoanalysis risk losing the very phenomenon they claim to treat, the patient’s capacity to have experience, to undergo it, to recognize it, and to speak it as one’s own. This is what he calls the crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: not a shortage of theories about psychic life, but a growing difficulty, culturally and clinically, in remaining answerable to lived experience in therapy itself.

Why phenomenology matters for psychoanalysis

Thompson’s argument is ultimately a defense of phenomenological psychoanalysis, not as an academic specialization, but as a necessary correction to a drift in psychoanalytic practice. He is explicit that what he has been describing “sounds a lot more like phenomenology than psychoanalysis,” and his response is telling: psychoanalysis is phenomenological, at least in the way Freud conceived it, insofar as it attends to experience as it is lived and spoken, rather than treating the patient as a specimen whose inner life must be inferred from a theoretical grid (Thompson, 2024).

The tension, of course, is that Freud’s unconscious can be read in a way that becomes nonphenomenological, as though something were happening “in” the mind that the person can never experience, as though the unconscious were a parallel theatre whose drama the patient does not witness. Yet Thompson insists that awareness and experience are interdependent phenomena, and that even when a person is “unaware,” what is at stake is often not the existence of a second life but a failure of listening, a failure of being present to one’s own thinking as it occurs (Thompson, 2024).

Here Thompson introduces an important reframing of “unconscious experience.” From a phenomenological angle, the unconscious can be understood less as a hidden content that the analyst discovers and more as a mode of consciousness the patient is not experiencing as consciousness, because the patient did not “hear” themselves thinking it when it occurred. The analytic task becomes reacquainting the patient with that dimension of Being that is typically concealed, so that experience becomes claimable precisely through speech, through free association, through hearing oneself for the first time (Thompson, 2024).
This is where the crisis begins to sharpen. If psychoanalysis forgets that its object is experience as lived and suffered, then it will inevitably become tempted by a different object: correctness, explanation, interpretive authority, and technical mastery.

Interpretation that deepens experience, not explanation that replaces it

In Thompson’s framing, the point is not to abolish interpretation, but to return interpretation to its phenomenological vocation. If speech can deepen experience, then interpretation should participate in that deepening, not by supplying the patient with a superior explanation of what is “really” going on, but by drawing the patient back toward what is being lived and avoided in the act of speaking. When interpretation becomes primarily explanatory, it can function as a defense, not only the patient’s defense but the analyst’s defense against the anxiety of not knowing, against the discomfort of remaining with what is ambiguous, conflicted, or still in the process of taking shape.

This is also where Thompson’s language about degrees of experience matters. Experience is not all-or-nothing; there are levels, and those levels depend on whether we are prepared to undergo the suffering involved in determining what our experience is (Thompson, 2024). In the clinic, this means that the most decisive moments are often not those in which an interpretation is accepted, but those in which a patient, sometimes with surprise, realizes that they have begun to feel what they have been saying, and that feeling is now theirs, not simply a theory about themselves.

The crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: when technique outruns lived reality

Thompson’s critique is sharp because it is internal. He argues that not everyone approaches Freud’s conception of the unconscious phenomenologically, and that, as a result, psychoanalysis has “unwittingly contributed” to the broader cultural crisis of experience that has been unfolding since the close of the last century (Thompson, 2024). What is striking is his insistence that even earnest efforts to incorporate phenomenology into psychoanalytic theory have largely “fallen short” of reframing practice along phenomenological lines, which would require a more sustained emphasis on what experience itself entails as a psychodynamic event (Thompson, 2024).

His conclusion is uncompromising: the mainstream of psychoanalysis has, in effect, factored the phenomenological notion of experience out of existence, and even the turn to intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis often retains an empiricist account of experience rather than a phenomenological one (Thompson, 2024).

For patients, this is not an abstract dispute. It names a recognizable disappointment: the feeling of being spoken about, explained, even brilliantly interpreted, while one’s own experience remains strangely out of reach, as though the self were something the therapist can see more clearly than the person living it. For clinicians, it names a temptation that arrives precisely when a treatment becomes difficult, when the analyst begins to prefer the security of the conceptual apparatus over the vulnerability of staying with what is happening.

A solitary figure sits in a quiet room facing a hazy horizon, evoking reflection and ambiguity.

“Unconscious experience” and the problem of parallel lives

To make the crisis concrete, Thompson turns to Kleinian theory and to Susan Isaacs’ explication of “unconscious experience,” which he treats as a revealing contradiction: if something is unconscious in the strict sense, then in what sense can it be called experience at all (Thompson, 2024)? He follows Laing’s critique in Self and Others, where Isaacs is presented as implying that each person lives two parallel lives, one conscious and one unconscious, and that the unconscious life is never available to awareness (Thompson, 2024; Laing, 1969/1961).

If that is your theory of the psyche, then the technical consequences are almost unavoidable. You must infer what is going on “in” the unconscious, because the patient cannot experience it, cannot confirm it, cannot claim it. Isaacs, as Thompson presents her, insists that the unconscious has aims and motives that cannot become conscious and therefore cannot be experienced in the sense under discussion, which means that unconscious fantasy is treated as determining what can be consciously experienced (Thompson, 2024).

Laing’s protest, which is as ethical as it is conceptual, is that things become impossible when someone tells you that you are experiencing something you are not experiencing. As he puts it, “Things are going to be difficult if you tell me that I am experiencing something I am not experiencing” (Laing, 1969/1961; quoted by Thompson, 2024). The point is not that unconscious life is unreal, but that “unconscious experience” becomes a formulation that licenses a particular kind of interpretive sovereignty, in which the patient’s lived experience is treated as a disguise and the analyst’s inference is treated as reality.

Countertransference and projective identification: when the analyst becomes the arbiter

This is where Thompson’s critique of technique becomes especially pointed, because it touches the contemporary fascination with countertransference and projective identification. He argues that the Kleinian conception of projective identification has displaced repression as the prototypical defense, and in doing so has “virtually inverted” conventional notions of transference and countertransference, altering them so radically that they become “virtually unrecognizable” (Thompson, 2024).

The decisive shift is epistemic. Following this line, Bion concludes that the only means available to determine the patient’s unconscious experience is through the analyst’s experience of countertransference, a position that effectively relocates the evidence for the patient’s experience into the analyst’s experience (Bion, 1959; discussed by Thompson, 2024). Thompson quotes Bion describing how the analyst feels manipulated, as though made to play a part in someone else’s fantasy, and he presents this as a crystallization of the problem: psychoanalytic knowledge becomes increasingly grounded in what the analyst feels, rather than in what the patient can come to experience and claim.

None of this requires dismissing countertransference, nor denying that projective processes occur. The question is what kind of authority is created when the analyst’s felt experience becomes the privileged route to the patient’s truth, and what happens to the patient’s subjectivity when their own account is treated as secondary, suspect, or structurally incapable of reaching what is most real. The crisis of experience shows itself precisely here, where intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis can turn into a quiet conquest: the analyst becomes the one who experiences the patient’s life more fully than the patient does. Thompson’s insistence on phenomenology is, in this sense, a defense of the patient’s right to be the subject of their own experience, even when that experience is conflicted, defended against, or only barely speakable.

Two figures sit closely as their shared thoughts rise into a glowing form, symbolizing the intimacy and complexity of lived experience.

Returning therapy to experience: what changes in the consulting room

Thompson’s most concise description of psychoanalysis’ purpose deserves to be read slowly. The aim is “to return the analytic patient to the ground of an experience,” so that the patient can finally claim the experience as their own in the act of recounting it (Thompson, 2024). Once you take this seriously, the consulting room changes, not because technique disappears, but because technique is subordinated to the patient’s capacity to undergo, recognize, and speak what is happening, rather than to merely receive interpretations about what is supposedly happening.

In practice, this return to lived experience in therapy often looks deceptively simple, because it is less about dramatic interventions and more about a discipline of attention. The analyst stays close to the texture of what the patient is actually living in language, noticing where speech becomes a way of not feeling, where explanation substitutes for contact, and where a word is spoken with the body absent from it. Interpretation, when it arrives, is offered less as a verdict and more as a way of pressing experience downward, toward what Thompson calls the gravity of circumstances, toward the place where a patient cannot merely agree but must either encounter or resist what is being said.

For patients, the difference is often felt as a change in atmosphere: one is not treated as an object to be decoded, but as a subject being asked to re-enter one’s own life. For therapists, the difference is felt as a constraint on one’s own ambition to know too quickly, to be right, to do something impressive, because the analyst’s task becomes protecting the possibility that the patient might finally hear themselves, and be changed by what they hear.

If you are looking for this orientation in clinical work, Free Association Clinic offers psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy grounded in these phenomenological questions, where interpretation is kept in the service of experience rather than allowed to eclipse it.

What this chapter asks of clinicians in training

Thompson’s chapter does not flatter the clinician, and that is part of its value. The crisis of experience is not only a theoretical failure, it is also a temptation that lives inside training and practice, because uncertainty is hard to tolerate and theory offers a ready-made refuge. When the analyst begins to rely on speculative certainty, especially certainty grounded in their own countertransference as proof of what the patient “really” experiences, the analytic relationship risks becoming a place where experience is taken away from the patient under the guise of explaining it.

For clinicians in formation, this is not a call to abandon psychoanalytic knowledge, but to remember what psychoanalytic knowledge is for. It is for returning the patient to experience, and therefore it demands a kind of humility that cannot be simulated: a willingness to remain with not-knowing; to let the patient’s speech unfold without rushing to translate it; to hold one’s own experience as meaningful but not sovereign; and to keep asking, in every interpretive movement, whether the patient is being returned to the ground of their experience or being displaced from it by a more elegant account.

FAC’s training program in existential psychoanalysis is oriented around exactly these questions, because the point is not to produce technicians of interpretation, but clinicians capable of phenomenological listening, clinicians who can bear the anxiety of experience without replacing it with theory.

Conclusion

The crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis is not primarily a complaint that psychoanalysis has become too intellectual, nor a nostalgic wish for a more “human” therapy. It is a more exacting claim: that psychoanalysis risks reproducing, in the consulting room, the same impoverishment of experience that contemporary culture already encourages, replacing the dangerous vitality of lived experience with commentary, explanation, and interpretive mastery. Thompson’s insistence on phenomenology is therefore not a philosophical ornament, it is a clinical ethic. It asks whether psychoanalysis will remain faithful to the patient’s experience, including what is painful, resistant, and difficult to undergo, or whether it will trade that fidelity for a more comforting kind of knowledge.

If you want to explore therapy where lived experience in therapy is treated as primary, not as an afterthought, you can contact Free Association Clinic.

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociation.us)
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociationclinic.com)
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com (https://inpersontherapy.com)

References

Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.
Adorno, T. W. (1992). Notes to Literature, Volume 1 (S. Weber Nicholsen, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
Jay, M. (1998, November 14). The Crisis of Experience in a Post-Subjective Age (public lecture). University of California, Berkeley.
Laing, R. D. (1969/1961). Self and Others. Pantheon.
Bion, W. R. (1959). “Attacks on Linking.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.