The Door You Keep Walking Past

By Hannah de Boer · 2 min read

There is something I notice, again and again in the therapy room. People arrive having already done a great deal. They have named their patterns, learned to breath through the hard moments, built routines that help. They are, by most measures, managing.

And yet something keeps coming back.

The anxiety returns, a little quieter maybe, but still there. The way they feel about their body hasn't really shifted. The same pattern shows up in their relationships, wearing a slightly different face. There is a sense, often unspoken, of: what am I missing?

The image that comes back to me, again and again, is a door.

Anxiety, body image struggles, the way you shut down or cling in relationships. These aren't the problem. They're the door handle. They're how the deeper wound announces itself.

The handle is real. It matters. But when we spend all our time trying to manage it, loosen our grip on it, sand it down, replace it with something prettier, we never ask: what's behind the door?

In my experience, behind the door is almost always something older. Pain. Loss. Grief. A moment, or many moments, when you learned that the world was not quite safe, that connection was not quite reliable, that you, in some small and devastating way, might not be quite enough. And your whole system, in its extraordinary wisdom, organised itself around surviving that.

The anxiety? Your nervous system on guard, still watching for the thing it once had to watch for. The way you restrict, or shrink, or armour yourself against your own reflection, a protection that made sense once, even if it's costing you now. The pushing away, or the holding too tight in your relationships, the echo of something that needed to be held and wasn't.

In a training I attended, someone said: unless our strategy is revised, our protection becomes our prison. I have carried that with me ever since. Because it is exactly what I see. These aren't symptoms, not really. They are survival strategies. Intelligent, loyal, exhausting ones.

There are many good approaches to therapy, and skills and tools absolutely have their place. But the work I am most drawn to is what happens when we turn toward the door itself. When we slow down enough to get curious about what's actually there, to feel it in the body, to give it language, to let it be witnessed. Not to be overwhelmed by it, but to finally, carefully, be with it.

When I sit with someone in this work, I am not listening for the symptom. I am listening for what's underneath it. The moment the door handle starts to tremble. Because that is usually where the real story begins, and where, slowly, something starts to shift.

You don't have to keep standing in front of that door, managing the handle, pretending you can't hear what's on the other side. The thing behind it has probably been waiting a long time. And in my experience, it isn't nearly as monstrous as we feared.

It's just a part of you that never got to be held.