What Is a Portrayal in ISTDP?

A portrayal is a structured way of helping someone experience and express unresolved feelings that may still be contributing to psychological difficulties in the present.

When feelings within important earlier relationships were too overwhelming, painful or anxiety-provoking to experience fully, they don't necessarily disappear.

Instead, anxiety can rise and defences can develop to keep those feelings out of awareness. Feelings may be redirected, turned inward or avoided altogether.

Over time, this can contribute to difficulties such as anxiety, self-criticism, depression, relationship problems or a persistent sense of being stuck.

A portrayal is one way of helping those previously defended feelings become a lived emotional experience within the therapy room.

Why can unresolved feelings create symptoms?

In ISTDP, symptoms are often understood in relation to the ways a person has learned to manage feelings that have become associated with anxiety.

For example, anger that couldn't safely be experienced towards another person might instead become directed towards the self, contributing to self-criticism or self-attack.

Unresolved grief might be kept at a distance through emotional detachment or numbness.

The difficulty isn't simply that a feeling hasn't been expressed. It's that the person has had to develop ways of keeping themselves away from experiencing it.

A portrayal aims to help change this process. Rather than continuing to avoid the feeling, redirect it or turn it against themselves, the client is helped to experience what they actually feel towards the person with whom those feelings originated.

What actually happens during a portrayal?

A portrayal usually emerges once the defences blocking a feeling have been identified and begin to loosen within the session.

As the defences become less active, the underlying feeling can become clearer.

Feelings are experienced physically, but they can also carry an impulse towards action.

Anger might bring an impulse to confront, protest or push back.

Grief might bring an impulse to cry, reach out or mourn.

Love might bring an impulse to move towards, connect or be close.

During a portrayal, the client is helped to experience the feeling and explore its associated impulse in imagination, allowing an emotional experience that was previously interrupted to unfold more fully.

The feeling remains specific. Who is it towards? What happened between them? What is the person responding to?

The experience also becomes more immediate. Rather than only talking about being angry, for example, the person begins to experience the anger towards the person it belongs to.

The therapist helps them remain with that experience while noticing anything that begins to interrupt it, such as minimising what happened, explaining the other person's behaviour, apologising for the feeling or turning it back against themselves.

The aim isn't to create a feeling or manufacture emotional intensity. It is to help the person experience what is already there without automatically moving away from it.

An example of a portrayal in therapy

Imagine someone describing repeated criticism from their father.

As they begin to approach how they feel about this, they quickly start explaining why their father behaved as he did and minimising how much it affected them.

Therapist:"As we get closer to what this was like for you, do you notice how quickly you start explaining why it wasn't so bad? If you don't rationalise it for a moment, what feeling is coming up?"

The client's breathing changes. Their shoulders tighten and their voice becomes quieter.

Attention is brought back to what they are experiencing.

Therapist:"What do you notice happening in your body as you stay with this?"

Client:"There's something really strong in my chest. I'm angry."

Therapist:"Can we stay with that anger and notice what happens as you allow yourself to feel it?"

As the client remains with the physical experience, the anger becomes clearer.

Therapist:"As you feel that anger towards him, what does the anger want to do?"

Client:"It wants to push him away. I want him to stop. I want to tell him how wrong it was."

The memory of their father's criticism becomes more vivid.

Client:"I want to tell him, 'Stop talking to me like I'm worthless.'"

Therapist:"If he's there in front of you, how does that anger want to respond to him?"

Client:"I want to push him away and tell him to stop. You made me feel worthless. I needed you to stop. You hurt me."

At this point, the client isn't simply describing anger from a distance. The feeling is being experienced physically, connected to the person it belongs to and expressed through its associated impulse.

As the anger is experienced more fully, something else emerges.

Therapist:"What's happening now?"

Client:"I feel guilty. I don't want to hurt my dad."

This isn't necessarily a distraction from the anger.

Feelings towards important people are rarely simple. Anger can exist alongside guilt, sadness, love and longing.

As one previously defended feeling becomes available, other feelings within the relationship can begin to emerge too.

A portrayal is more than emotional release

This distinction is important.

A portrayal isn't simply an opportunity to "get anger out". Nor is it about encouraging someone to become as emotional as possible or say dramatic things to an imagined person.

Emotional expression on its own isn't the aim.

The work involves identifying what the person genuinely feels, recognising the anxiety and defences that interrupt those feelings, and helping them experience what has previously been difficult to tolerate.

What happens after the initial feeling is expressed can be just as important.

Anger may give way to guilt.

Grief may emerge.

Love may become accessible alongside pain.

Different feelings towards the same person may become possible to experience together.

The aim is not catharsis for its own sake, but emotional processing and integration.

What can change when unresolved feelings are processed?

The significance of this work isn't simply that someone has finally expressed something.

What matters is what may become possible afterwards.

Someone who automatically turned anger against themselves may become more able to recognise when they are angry with another person without immediately becoming self-critical.

Someone who detached when sadness emerged may become better able to remain emotionally present with loss.

Feelings that previously generated considerable anxiety may become easier to experience without immediately triggering the same defensive response.

Even the experience of a memory can sometimes change.

A person may know what happened while finding parts of the memory difficult to picture. A face may seem blurred, the surroundings unclear, or they may struggle to picture themselves within the scene.

After the unresolved feelings connected to that experience have been processed, the image can sometimes become clearer.

A person's face that had previously been blurred might come back into view, and with it the sadness, anger or love that had been difficult to experience.

The fuller image and the feelings attached to it can now sit together.

Resolution doesn't mean the feelings disappear

Processing unresolved feelings doesn't necessarily mean that someone stops feeling them.

A person may still experience sadness about someone they have lost. They may still feel anger about how they were treated. They may continue to love someone who also caused them considerable pain.

What changes is their capacity to experience those feelings.

The feeling doesn't have to generate the same anxiety or immediately be suppressed, redirected towards the self or avoided through an old defensive pattern.

It can be experienced as part of the person's response to something that mattered.

The past hasn't changed.

But the person may no longer need to protect themselves from their feelings about it in quite the same way.

And that can create much more freedom in how they respond to themselves and others in the present.