#40: MBT Group Therapy > Between Feeling and Avoiding

🎙️ Group Session – “Between Feeling and Avoiding”

Welcome to this episode of the MBT podcast.

In this episode, we step inside an MBT group therapy session where a familiar dilemma takes center stage: what happens when you know there are feelings beneath the surface, yet everything inside you wants to avoid them?

For many people, avoidance feels like protection.

As if keeping emotions at a distance will prevent them from becoming overwhelming.

But what happens when avoiding those feelings becomes the very reason they never begin to fade?

Today, we listen to a group exploring how fear, anger, sadness, and injustice each shape the choices people make.

And perhaps more importantly:

When does avoidance protect you… and when does it begin to keep you trapped?

🧠 What is central in this episode

Being afraid of your own emotions

Sometimes we are not afraid of what is happening around us.

We are afraid of what might happen inside us.

In this session, group members explore how difficult it can be to allow themselves to fully experience sadness, anger, grief, or disappointment.

And what happens when those feelings are pushed away time and time again.

When injustice continues to hurt

A central theme in this episode is injustice.

What happens when someone says something about you that simply isn’t true?

When you feel unseen.

Or when you repeatedly find yourself defending who you are.

The group explores why some experiences of injustice cut far deeper than others.

Protecting yourself or avoiding yourself?

Everyone develops ways of protecting themselves.

But when does protection become avoidance?

And how can you tell the difference?

Throughout the session, group members begin to recognize how old survival strategies continue to influence their lives today.

Who decides who you are?

What happens when other people hold an image of you that doesn’t match who you truly are?

Do you have to defend yourself?

Do you need to prove who you are?

Or can you slowly begin to trust your own view of yourself?

These questions lead to some of the session’s most meaningful conversations.

Making room for your emotions

The session shows that emotions rarely disappear simply because we push them away.

Sometimes they remain present precisely because they have never been given space.

And perhaps healing begins not by solving a feeling—

but by allowing yourself to experience it.

🌟 The common thread

The common thread in this episode is that avoidance may create a sense of safety in the short term, but often prevents healing in the long term.

Mentalizing helps us stay curious.

Not only about what is happening around us.

But also about what is happening within us.

And perhaps it is there that we begin to discover the courage to try something different.

💬 Closing

This episode reminds us that personal growth does not begin when difficult emotions disappear.

It begins when we slowly discover that we may no longer need to push them away.

Not because feeling them is easy.

But because we are beginning to trust that we can carry them.

And sometimes change begins with one simple question:

“Am I protecting myself… or am I avoiding myself?”