Monthly Spotlight - November

When belonging feels under threat

When it feels dangerous to disagree

There are families in which a person can ask an ordinary question and find, quite suddenly, that they are defending who they are.

The question might be: Why has the plan changed? The answer comes back: Why do you always have to make things difficult?

Something has shifted. A conversation about what happened has become a conversation about what is supposedly wrong with the person asking. And because it is happening in a family, the people arriving at that judgement may be the very people the person would ordinarily turn to for reassurance.

Through a psychodynamic lens, this is one way to begin thinking about persecutory anxiety (Klein, 1946). The phrase can sound rather severe. In everyday language, it might mean that someone begins to expect criticism, humiliation or rejection from people whose affection matters to them. They wonder what might be used against them next, or what will happen if they say what they actually think.

There may be a history behind that expectation. There may also be something happening now that gives them good reason to feel it. The two are worth thinking about together.

A family celebration

This is a fictionalised vignette. The setting and details have been changed.

An adult agrees to help organise a celebration for a parent. The family welcomes the offer. There are messages about who will do what, and the person starts making arrangements.

At a family gathering, an older sibling questions whether they are the right person for the job. Their mother says that it was already agreed. Their father says nothing. A second sibling sides with the first, and before long the family is discussing who will take over.

The person asks what has changed. They are told it is only a celebration and there is no need to make such a fuss. They ask again because the question still has no answer.

They had previously told the family they were neurodivergent and that it helped to have changes explained clearly, with time to take them in. Instead, the conversation speeds up. By the time they have worked out what they want to say, the family has moved on.

Later, a sibling sends a private message: I did think it was unfair. But please don’t bring it up again. Mum’s upset.

The celebration goes ahead.

The person can accept that someone else may end up organising it. What they struggle to understand is how an agreement could be withdrawn, how quickly their objection became a fault, and why the sibling who understood had nothing to say when it might have made a difference.

Through a psychodynamic lens: how a family creates the anxiety it wants to escape

Melanie Klein’s writing on persecutory anxiety is useful here because it pays attention to what happens when danger seems to come from within an important relationship. When fear is intense, it can be hard to hold together different aspects of the same person: the mother who defended the agreement and the mother who did not follow through; the sibling who understood privately and the sibling who stayed silent in front of everyone. Klein’s account of splitting offers a way to think about why these contradictions can be so hard to bear (Klein, 1946).

The family may simplify its story too. The sibling who seems to have things under control becomes the sensible one. The person asking what happened becomes the difficult one. Once those roles take hold, almost anything can confirm them. If the person insists on an answer, they are argumentative. If they go quiet, they are sulking. There is very little they can do that will be understood outside the story already being told about them.

This is how anxiety can build between people. Someone senses the room turning against them and tries harder to be understood. The family hears the urgency and becomes more impatient. That impatience gives the person further reason to believe their place is at risk.

Klein’s ideas help give language to the experience. They should never be used to tell someone that a real rejection was imagined, or to suggest that feeling under attack amounts to a diagnosis.

Bion: when one person does the thinking for everyone

Bion distinguishes between a group’s ability to work on what it came together to do and the emotional pressures that can take over while it does so. He calls the former work-group functioning. A family working together can look at the messages, remember the agreement and ask what has changed. It can hear an objection and take time to consider it (Bion, 1961).

But there is relief in letting somebody else decide, especially when disagreement might upset a parent or expose a rift between siblings. Bion’s (1961) idea of dependency helps make sense of this. An influential sibling speaks decisively, and others begin to rely on their judgement. The sibling’s power comes partly from what the family is willing to hand over. The mother’s initial objection fades. The father’s silence may mean several things, but it leaves the sibling’s account with one less challenge.

There is also something of Bion’s (1961) fight–flight idea in what happens next. At first, the difficulty is an unexplained change of plan. Then it becomes the person who keeps asking about it. Move that person aside and the arrangements can continue. The family may feel calmer, while the person left out has more reason to feel anxious.

Menzies (1960), in her study of a hospital nursing service, explored how habitual ways of working could protect a group from anxiety while making it harder to do its work well. A family is a different setting, but the idea offers a useful question: Who pays for the peace? If the quickest way to restore calm is for the same person to give way, the arrangement may feel settled to most of the family while leaving that person increasingly anxious about speaking.

Containment: making room for what happened

Bion’s idea of containment suggests what a different response might look like. Someone could have said, “We did agree to this. Something has changed, and we need to talk about it before giving the job to someone else.” A parent or sibling would still be free to disagree. Their intervention would make the disagreement something the family could think about together (Bion, 1962).

Bion’s (1959) paper on attacks on linking offers another way of thinking about what gets lost. He was writing about clinical experience. Applied cautiously here, the idea draws attention to what happens when a conversation repeatedly breaks the connection between an event and the feelings it produced. Mum’s upset may be true. But if that becomes the whole story, the change of plan, the public challenge and the question nobody answered all drop out of view. The person’s distress then seems to have appeared out of nowhere.

Therapy might begin by making room to recover those connections. The person can return to the parts of the story that still confuse them. They might notice how much changed when their mother stopped speaking, or how the private message felt comforting at first and painful later. There is time to find out why those moments mattered.

Mother, father and siblings: the loyalties underneath

The most painful part of the story might be different for each person reading it.

For one, it might be the mother giving some indication that she understood, then becoming the person whose upset everyone was expected to protect. For another, it might be the father’s silence. For someone else, it might be the private message from the sibling. It confirms that somebody saw what was happening, but it also asks the person who was hurt to help keep it out of sight.

These are positions people occupy in a particular family. A father can be the person everyone protects; a mother can be the one who goes quiet. A sibling can also be the person who makes a difference by saying openly what others will acknowledge only in private.

Bowen’s idea of triangles helps make sense of how quickly a disagreement can become a matter of loyalty. Instead of two people speaking directly, another person is brought in to carry a message, lend authority or absorb tension (Bowen, 1978). In the story, the sibling’s message carries both sympathy and a request to protect the mother from further upset. Asking for an answer now risks being heard as a refusal to care about Mum.

Edmondson’s (1999) research on psychological safety concerned workplace teams, but it suggests a useful question to ask of this family: What would it have cost the sibling to say in front of everyone what they later said in private? That leaves room to think about the sibling’s fears as well as the loneliness of the person who was left to speak for themselves.

If this pattern repeats, anxiety can arrive well before the next disagreement. A family message comes in and the person is already wondering what they have done wrong. On the way to a visit they rehearse an ordinary question. At the table they look from one parent to the other before deciding whether to finish a sentence.

Williams’s (2009) work on ostracism helps explain why exclusion can stay with someone: it can affect belonging, self-esteem, a sense of control and the feeling that one’s presence matters. The disappointment of losing a role is real. What may hurt for longer is discovering that a relationship felt more secure before it was tested.

Being neurodivergent in a family that thinks it already knows you

One of the difficulties of being known by a family for a long time is that people can feel quite certain they know what something means. A parent hears a direct question and recognises what they have always called an attitude. A sibling sees someone go quiet and assumes they are sulking. The family’s familiarity can make it harder for them to stop and ask whether they have understood.

The person in the story had already said what would help: a clear explanation and time to take it in. That was relevant to the situation. They were trying to reconcile a plan that had been agreed in writing with a conversation proceeding as though the agreement no longer mattered. At the same time, they had to follow several voices and work out whether the people they usually relied on would support them.

There is a particular frustration in needing an explanation just as everyone else is eager to move on. The more the person tries to clarify what happened, the more their questions may be heard as a refusal to accept it. A request for clarity becomes something the family thinks it has to manage.

A pause can be misread in much the same way. Someone may be working out which part of a conversation they need to respond to first. Others may assume they have accepted the decision. When the person comes back later with a clearer response, they hear, Why are you bringing this up again? From their point of view, this may be the first time they have been able to say what they meant.

Neurodivergent people differ in what they need. For some, a quieter conversation makes it easier to follow what is being said. Others may prefer a short written explanation, or the freedom to respond later without the delay being held against them. The important thing is to ask and take the answer seriously. Knowing that someone is neurodivergent does not tell a family what every reaction means.

Damian Milton’s (2012) account of the double empathy problem is useful here. He invites us to think about how understanding can break down between autistic and non-autistic people. In one study, Crompton et al. (2020) asked adults to pass a story along a chain. More detail was lost in the mixed autistic and non-autistic chains than in the chains made up entirely of autistic or entirely of non-autistic participants. Those sources concern autism specifically; they do not tell us how every neurodivergent person communicates. They do invite a question that applies to the vignette: What did the family do to make it possible for this person to understand and be understood?

Misunderstanding can go both ways, but people may have very different power to decide whose interpretation stands. If the influential sibling can call a question rude and bring the discussion to a close, the person asking has little chance to explain what they meant. Over time they may rehearse more, ask fewer questions or stop telling the family what would help. To everyone else, they may seem to be coping better. They may simply have learnt what it costs to ask.

A pluralistic perspective: what would help this person now?

Some people come to therapy wanting to understand why an encounter has affected them so deeply. Others want help with something immediate: whether to answer a message, how to manage the next gathering, or what to say if the story is repeated in front of them.

A pluralistic approach makes room for those different goals. Cooper and McLeod (2007) suggest working together on what the person wants from therapy, what might help them get there and how they would like to do that work. One session might involve untangling the sequence of events. Another might involve trying out words for a boundary. At another point there may be room to consider the disappointment beneath the anger: The person I wanted to stand beside me did not.

Through a psychodynamic lens, therapy can also help someone explore what they learnt to notice in their family and why. Their alertness may once have helped them recognise when closeness was at risk. The work can involve distinguishing what that alertness is telling them now from what they have learnt to expect. A person can carry an old fear and still be reading something accurately in the present.

The pace of therapy matters here. A person may want to write something down between sessions, ask for one question at a time or ask the therapist to be more direct. Someone who has often had their meaning decided for them may also need to discover that they can say, “That interpretation doesn’t fit,” and find the therapist still interested. That exchange can itself become part of the work.

An ethical perspective: being heard without having to perform calmness

The BACP Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions gives these questions a practical footing in therapy: communicate respectfully, attend to differences in power, avoid assumptions and consider reasonable adjustments. Its provisions on respect, C 1.1, and fairness, C 4.4, are especially relevant (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, 2026). The framework concerns professional practice. The family story helps show why those commitments matter when a person brings this kind of experience to therapy.

There is also a question of timing. In an experimental study, Lind, Kanfer and Earley (1990) found that people judged a process fairer when they could express their views, particularly when they were heard before a decision. In the story, a private conversation afterwards might help repair some of the hurt. It cannot give the person back the chance to be heard while there was still something to decide.

A therapist has influence too. It may be tempting to explain what a family encounter brings back from childhood. Offered too soon, that could repeat something familiar: another person in a position of authority deciding what the experience means before the person has finished telling it. Someone should be able to be upset, confused or slow to respond and still have what they say taken seriously.

Sometimes the work leads towards a conversation with a parent or sibling. Sometimes it brings grief about a relationship that may never offer the recognition the person has hoped for. Therapy can make room for that grief without making forgiveness or reconciliation a condition of feeling better.

The next family invitation may still bring anxiety. But there may be a little more space between receiving the message and feeling compelled to answer it. In that space, another question can emerge: What do I want from this relationship, and what would I need in order to take part?

References

Bion, W.R. (1959) ‘Attacks on linking’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 40, pp. 308–315.

Bion, W.R. (1961) Experiences in groups and other papers. London: Tavistock Publications.

Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from experience. London: William Heinemann Medical Books.

Bowen, M. (1978) Family therapy in clinical practice. New York: Jason Aronson.

British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (2026) Ethical framework for the counselling professions. Lutterworth: British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Cooper, M. and McLeod, J. (2007) ‘A pluralistic framework for counselling and psychotherapy: implications for research’, Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 7(3), pp. 135–143.

Crompton, C.J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C.V.M., Flynn, E.G. and Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020) ‘Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective’, Autism, 24(7), pp. 1704–1712.

Edmondson, A. (1999) ‘Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), pp. 350–383.

Klein, M. (1946) ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, pp. 99–110.

Lind, E.A., Kanfer, R. and Earley, P.C. (1990) ‘Voice, control, and procedural justice: instrumental and noninstrumental concerns in fairness judgments’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(5), pp. 952–959.

Menzies, I.E.P. (1960) ‘A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety: a report on a study of the nursing service of a general hospital’, Human Relations, 13(2), pp. 95–121.

Milton, D.E.M. (2012) ‘On the ontological status of autism: the “double empathy problem”’, Disability & Society, 27(6), pp. 883–887.

Williams, K.D. (2009) ‘Ostracism: a temporal need-threat model’, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 41, pp. 275–314.

*AI assisted with the preparation of this Spotlight.