In Gestalt psychotherapy, a person is understood as a being who adapts to their environment in the best way available to them at that moment, in order to ensure their survival. When a child grows up in a suffocating family environment that punishes, rejects and criticises, often the only way to preserve the relationship with their parents — who for a child are their entire world — is to restrict their own healthy, spontaneous development.
Seen in this light, rigidity develops as a way of protecting oneself in very closed environments — what in Gestalt we call a creative adjustment. In order to cope with environments that forbid mistakes, spontaneity and childlikeness, a child forms a survival mechanism that does not allow them to deviate from strict, predetermined limits. Absolute, dogmatic thinking becomes protection against a deep existential fear and insecurity. The more fragile someone feels inside, the harder and more uncompromising they need to appear outwardly — both towards themselves and towards the world.
Excessively rigid rules, high expectations and conditional love from the parental environment teach a child from a very young age what is permitted and what is not if they are to exist. If parents punish anything different from themselves — not only through violence but also through a disapproving look or the withdrawal of their love — then a child may adopt dichotomous thinking. This involves absolute convictions about what is right and wrong, good and bad. Rigidity thus becomes a source of safety and protection, since past experience was that as long as they followed the rules they stayed protected. And so every change or new experience is not experienced by the organism as development but as a threat to its very existence.
This defence, as an adaptation to a very closed and restrictive parental environment, inevitably also results in the child being cut off from feelings and sensations. Flexibility would require being open to all emotions — but that is dangerous. So the organism deadens its contact with its feelings in order to bear things and manage to survive.
The more a person identifies their survival with a particular, static image of themselves, the more they refuse to change, seeing change as the “death” of that side of them. But development requires adaptability. When an organism is unable to evolve, whole parts of it are deadened.
Rigidity cannot and should not be broken abruptly. We cannot violently remove a defence that helped a person survive. Therapy aims at restoring the person’s connection with their needs and feelings, so that they can experience the world more authentically and more fully.
Central to this process is learning to recognise the difference between “I want” (an inner need) and “I should” (an introjected rule). At the same time, self-observation is strengthened by attending to bodily signals — tightness in the body, or restricted breathing — which usually signal that a psychological defence has been mobilised.
A person needs to learn to bear what they could not bear back then: uncertainty and the risk of daring and trying — that is, of living. At the same time, cultivating a supportive rather than a critical inner voice helps us dare to experiment without the weight of guilt and punishing thoughts.
