by Christi Baker, AMFT

​​MANIC DEFENSE MEETS THE MOMENT

We are living in an era of brutal, authorized state violence. And yet in therapy, my patients and I rarely have words for our circumstances. Perhaps it feels too dangerous—or too overwhelming—to speak this reality into an existence that in fact already is. Or maybe we are locked in a treacherous dance of manic defense, denying what is really happening within and around us in a desperate attempt to feel safe. 

The backdrop of capitalism has honed our capacity for manic defense. Why feel anxious, helpless, or powerless—emotions both produced and exploited by capitalism—when we can stay busy cycling through consumption, overwork, and denial? Manic defense has become an almost invisible response to the trauma of our everyday. It makes sense that my patients and I might extend this defense to authoritarianism.

Yet silence does not mean the circumstances go unregistered. I see it in bodies and psyches: sessions thick with paranoia, anxiety, and dissociation. Many patients feel attacked and powerless. Others move through their days as if everything is “normal,” clinging to productivity and distraction.

As therapists do, I explore what my patients are feeling, and why. I look around. Could their distress be about our relationship? Their immediate world? The far world? I imagine it is all the above. One patient recently said there was no difference between their inner and outer worlds: What happens out there happens in me. If they feel anxious, the world must be anxious too.

In circumstances such as these, the “field”—the entire situation of a person, including their environment, social context, and the clinical relationship—can be hard to ignore but difficult to grasp. It saturates the air. Boundaries blur. The work grows heavier, as do I. The field I work in is also impossible to ignore but difficult to comprehend.

Recently, more patients have been asking how I am doing. Beyond the bid for connection, I sense a need for connection, for reassurance that we still inhabit the same world, still share similar dangers and losses. Clinicians in post-Katrina New Orleans noted how personal and professional lines blurred in just this way. Kathryn L. Nathan, Ph.D., reflecting on her clinical work there, wrote: “To be a therapist in the winter of 2005 was at once the hardest thing and the only thing possible” (Boulanger et al., 2013).

Violence. Abduction. Disappearing. Authoritarianism. Brutality. These are the conditions my patients and I face together now. Perhaps we can resist the manic defense by slowing down—by noticing our discomfort, naming what is happening, and staying in connection with one another—even when words feel dangerous.