Most of us believe we are afraid of pain, yet more often than not we are afraid of the feelings that might come with it. In psychoanalysis we learn that resistance is not simply stubbornness; it is a protective force, an unconscious attempt to shield ourselves from emotions we imagine would undo us. As Hyman Spotnitz observed, “the patient resists not because he will not change, but because he cannot yet tolerate the feeling that change will awaken”. Like the Israelites in the wilderness longing for Egypt, we cling to familiar suffering rather than risk the freedom that awaits on the other side of our inner desert. The known pain feels safer than the unknown mercy that might follow it.
In the analytic process, this becomes visible. A patient may sense, dimly, that a change of course is needed—perhaps to leave a harmful relationship, to confront an addiction, or to speak a forbidden truth. Yet they circle around the same self-destructive pattern, terrified of what lies beneath. The analyst does not push him forward but stays with him, quietly, offering a steady presence until he can bear to enter the “dark room” of his feelings. Wilfred Bion said that the analyst must work “without memory or desire”, not to direct but to contain, to help the patient think what before could only be felt as chaos. In that shared stillness, something begins to breathe. Paradoxically, it is by enduring the shame, the grief, or the rage that healing begins. Avoidance prolongs the suffering; surrender starts the ascent. And in time, what once felt unbearable begins to take shape, to find words, to find meaning. What was once a wound becomes a passage.
The Bible offers its own version of this insight. In the Psalms we read, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” (Psalm 23:4). Notice that the promise is not to avoid the valley, but to walk through it — the company here referring, of course, to God. Psychoanalysis, too, is a kind of accompaniment—a covenant of presence while the analysand confronts what has been hidden. Winnicott once said that therapy happens “in the space between two people when it is safe enough to play”. It is in that shared space that the patient slowly discovers that they are not alone in the darkness.
True courage, then, is not the absence of fear but the willingness to stay present with difficult feelings until they reveal their meaning. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The patient who dares to face weakness in the analytic hour begins to discover a new kind of strength: not the brittle defense of the false self but the quiet resilience of a heart that has known its own depths.
And beyond the valley, there is always light. Faith, hope, and love—the greatest of these, still, is love—await not as rewards for avoiding suffering, but as fruits of having walked through it without turning away. For only the one who has known the dark room can truly recognize the dawn.