ABSTRACT
The chapter offers an account of the challenges therapists face in working with adolescents and young adults who seem very fearful and have little to say in treatment. The two adolescents and the young adult whose struggles are summarized in this chapter sought to escape from a persecutory reality by avoiding contact and finding safety in a state of resignation and retreat. The risk of such defensive stance, however, is that it often elicits responses and contributes to enactments that are likely to confirm a persecutory view of the world and the need to further isolate oneself from others. Being com-passionate towards such individuals, being willing to suffer with them, as the word com-passionate means in Latin, enables a therapist to make sense of emotional realities and psychic states that clients like the three young individuals are fearful of and unable to express with words. The therapist’s willingness to take in the young clients’ experiences of themselves and the world and stay with the emotions they evoke in him or her can be a major step in bridging the divide between the clients’ fear of engagement and their wish to be engaged with.
