What Is a Portrayal in ISTDP?

A portrayal is a structured way of expressing unresolved feelings that are driving psychological symptoms in the present.

When feelings from earlier relationships were too overwhelming, too dangerous, or too painful to experience fully at the time, they don’t just disappear.

They get defended against. They get redirected. They get turned inward.

And often, they show up later in ways such as anxiety, self-criticism, depression, relational difficulties, or a persistent sense of being stuck.

A portrayal is one way of helping those feelings finally come into the open, as a lived emotional experience in the therapy room.

Why unresolved feelings create symptoms

In ISTDP, we often see that symptoms are not random. They are the cost of emotions that couldn’t be fully processed.

It might be that anger that couldn’t be directed outward becomes self-attack, or unresovled frief that becomes numbness or chronic flatness.

A portrayal aims to help the client express those previously blocked feelings toward the original figure involved, rather than continuing to turn them against themselves.

What a portrayal actually involves

A portrayal usually emerges after the client’s symptom-producing defences have been brought into focus and begin to loosen in the session.

As those defences are blocked or drop away the underlying feelings start to come through more clearly, that those defnces had previously blocked.

As the emotion is felt in the body it also links to an impulse of action.

Anger may come with the urge to confront, to protest, to push back.

Grief comes with the urge to cry out, to reach, to mourn.

Love comes with the urge to move toward, to connect, to be close.

A portrayal is the part of the work where the client is helped to experience that feeling and express the impulse directly, in a way that matches what the emotion wanted to do at the time it was originally blocked.

Practically, that means three things are happening.

First, the feeling is kept in context. Who is it toward? What was the situation? What is the client actually reacting to? This matters because once feelings rise, the mind will often try to generalise or drift back into explanation. A portrayal keeps it specific and relational.

Second, the expression is brought into the present tense. The client is encouraged to speak as if the person is there, rather than narrating from a distance. This helps the client move from observing the experience to being in the experience, wha tis the feeling towards that person? What does the feeling want to do? And how do you feel once that feeling has been felt?

Third, the therapist helps the client match the words to the intensity of the feeling, without diluting it. Many clients automatically soften what they say, justify the other person, apologise for the feeling, or turn it against themselves. A portrayal helps the client stay with the feeling and express it cleanly.

A clinical vignette of a Portrayal

Therapist: “As you notice what’s happening in your body and mind right now, I’m also noticing how you immediately soften and start explaining why it wasn’t so bad. If you don't rationalise what is the feeling coming up?.”

Here the therapist is naming what is actually happening in the session so the client stays with lived experience instead of drifting into explanation.

The client’s breath becomes shallow, the voice quietens and the shoulders tighten. These are physical signs that defences are coming up.

Therapist: “Notice what this feeling is in your body. Just stay with the sensation.”

By directing attention to internal experience rather than thoughts about the event, the client begins to feel the sensation more clearly.

There is a heavy, charged sensation in the chest and throat.

Client: “I feel angry. It is strong in my chest.”

Therapist: “Yes. Stay with that feeling in your body.”

Now that the feeling is present in experience rather than thought, the next step is to help the client connect to the impulse inside the feeling.

Therapist: “Now that you can feel the anger in your body, notice what that anger wants to do.”

This question is about the impulse attached to the feeling rather than the story about the situation.

Client’s voice becomes firmer: “It wants to push back. It wants to say stop. It wants to tell someone how wrong it felt.”

As the client connects to the impulse, the memory of a parent’s criticism comes up naturally in their mind without being suggested.

Client: “It's towards my Dad. It wants to say stop talking to me like I’m worthless.”

Therapist: “And how would that anger do that?"

The client begins to speak in the present tense with emotional energy:

Client: “It want sto push him and tell him that you made me feel worthless. I needed you to stop. That hurt.”

This expression is the beginnings of a portrayal. The client is feeling the anger in the body, identifying the impulse of the anger and then expressing that impulse in the here and now with precise language. The feeling is not being described from a distance. It is being lived and expressed in the session.

As the anger is expressed, another feeling arises. The client’s voice softens.

Therapist: “Notice what’s coming next.”

Client: “I feel guilty for being angry, I don't want to hurt my Dad.”

This movement from anger to guilt is common. Once the initial impulse of the feeling has been experienced and expressed, other related feelings that were held down by defence are now able to come into awareness.

Because these previously defended feelings have been felt and expressed, the old symptom in this case chronic self-criticism and anxiety begins to lose its force.

The emotional energy that drove those symptoms no longer needs to be defended against. It has been acknowledged and processed in the present moment.

Conclusion

A portrayal is one of the clearest ways ISTDP helps a person move from symptoms to source. It takes what has been kept out of awareness through defences and helps it become conscious, specific, and expressed in the room, with the impulse that belongs to it.

When that happens, the symptom is no longer doing the same job. The client isn’t forced to manage unresolved feelings by turning them inward, numbing them out, or staying in constant anxiety.

Over time, portrayals help people discover something simple but life-changing: the feelings they’ve been organised around avoiding can be experienced, expressed, and integrated. And once that becomes possible, the whole system starts to shift.