On the road, 2016
The concept of psychological safety has become increasingly familiar in corporate discourse and, sometimes, also within organizations themselves.
Psychological safety is commonly defined as a shared belief that it is safe enough to take interpersonal risks within a team — to speak up, participate, ask questions, admit mistakes — without fear of humiliation or punishment. More recent research suggests that such perceptions may also be relationship-specific, varying from one interpersonal relationship to another.
Psychological safety is now clearly considered relevant not only to the practice of organizational coaching and consulting, but also to leadership development and impact.
Alongside psychological safety, related and interconnected conceptual lenses appear worth considering, especially holding environment and containment. Even though these dimensions can coexist and may at times overlap, distinguishing them allows for greater awareness and therefore a more nuanced approach to the complexity of lived experiences, and in particular to the emotional and relational dynamics of coaching relationships.
When working with executives and leadership teams, questions related to role, authority, competing expectations and organizational anxiety often arise. In such situations, creating a holding environment and providing containment may significantly support their capacity to think and act with greater agency.
The notion of holding was developed by Donald Winnicott (1896–1971), a pediatrician and psychoanalyst who also served as a surgeon-probationer in the Royal Navy during the First World War. He is remembered as a deeply human clinical practitioner and an independent thinker, delightfully witty.
Originally formulated in the context of the infant-mother relationship, Winnicott subsequently extended the concept to psychotherapy. In broad terms, a holding environment can be understood as a sufficiently reliable environment in which a person can experience difficult or potentially intense feelings without becoming overwhelmed by them. Holding is therefore not simply a matter of warmth, empathy or reassurance. It also depends on a consistent frame: trustworthiness, continuity and clear boundaries. Together, these conditions provide sufficient stability to remain in contact with difficult experience and explore one’s inner world without fear of judgment or rejection.
The concept of holding has subsequently found its way into the psychodynamic coaching literature. Yet the injunction to “create a holding environment” can sometimes appear both self-evident and rather abstract. What does holding mean when the relationship is between an executive coach and a corporate executive?
By holding, we do not mean removing discomfort. We provide sufficient stability and reliability for clients to remain in contact with intense feelings arising from their experience, rather than immediately defending against them, evacuating them, intellectualizing them, blaming others, or seeking an immediate solution. Holding thus makes difficult psychological work possible without taking the difficulty away.
This creates a paradox that is familiar in practice: a good holding environment may feel safe enough to permit discomfort.
Within such a relational context, clients can explore and begin to make sense of intense experiences while preserving spontaneity and creativity. This can, in turn, create space for increased confidence and greater independence, opening new perspectives and options and, eventually, a wider range of possibilities for action.
Psychodynamic holding therefore understands safety not as the absence of discomfort, but as part of the condition that makes discomfort thinkable.
Holding may overlap with the related but distinct concept of containment, particularly as developed by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897–1979).
Bion, a decorated tank commander in the First World War, was known as an eccentric and deeply conceptual thinker whose work has had a major influence on group relations and organizational consultancy. Animated by what could be considered an almost comical dislike of intellectual certainty, he was particularly interested in what happens when emotions or anxieties are too raw, intense, or confusing to think about.
According to Bion, the capacity to think about emotional experience develops through relationship. This capacity can continue to develop later in life when another mind is able to receive, make room for, and tolerate experiences that have not yet been thought about. What initially feels diffuse, overwhelming, or difficult to formulate can gradually become more bearable and available for thought. The aim is not simply to turn emotion into thought, but to transform an unprocessed emotional experience into something that can be borne and explored, with meaning emerging through the process. Bion called this transformative relational process containment.
While Winnicott’s concept of holding places greater emphasis on the facilitating environment and the reliability of the relationship, Bion’s containment focuses more specifically on the transformation that can take place within it. If holding concerns the conditions that make psychological work possible, containment concerns what happens to emotional experience within those conditions. In practice, the two often operate together and can be difficult to separate.
Bion also proposed reverie as an important capacity involved in this process. As a psychoanalytic concept, reverie describes a receptive state of mind in which emotional experiences, images, or ideas can be received without being immediately acted upon, explained, or resolved. It involves remaining open to what arises and allowing it to be experienced and explored.
In practice, this might mean noticing an unexpected feeling of irritation, anxiety, boredom, or urgency, or an image or association that appears spontaneously, without immediately treating it as information about the other person. Instead, we remain curious about the experience and allow ourselves to wonder what, if anything, it might mean.
In this sense, containment involves more than simply tolerating difficult emotions, and it is not a linear process of converting emotion into cognition. It involves staying with an experience long enough for something more bearable and thinkable to emerge. Bion’s reverie offers one way of understanding the mental capacity that can support this process.
The relational experience of psychological safety in a coaching setting can be facilitated through supportive behaviors such as non-judgment, empathy, encouragement, reassurance, and practical assistance, making it safer for our clients to speak openly, acknowledge uncertainty, or take interpersonal risks related to the task of coaching.
Supportive behaviors can be very valuable aspects of coaching. Sometimes support is what is most needed to transition through a difficult period. However, at other times or stages of the coaching relationship, psychological safety may not in itself be sufficient to create the conditions for deeper thinking and to address what is at stake. Indeed, too much reassurance may sometimes reduce the client’s opportunity to remain with uncertainty long enough to face what is not yet clear, and therefore come up with potentially novel options and solutions to experiment with.
As coaching practitioners, we may sometimes need to resist the understandable impulse to reassure our clients, leaving enough space for them to question recurrent aspects of their own behavior and leadership impact, even when this brings them face-to-face with ambivalence toward their role as a leader, or evokes anxiety, shame, or self-consciousness.
During a coaching session, an executive says: “I simply don’t understand why my team keeps resisting me.”
The supportive response might be to help the executive identify strategies for improving engagement.
A holding and containing response might first open up a different question: “What might be happening in the relationship between you and your team that makes resistance such a persistent experience?”
The latter does not necessarily feel more comfortable. It may actually increase uncertainty. But it may also create a more psychologically and systemically useful space for thinking, allowing for better choices and sounder decisions.
In team coaching, the challenge becomes even more complex. We are no longer simply working with an individual’s experience, but with a living system in which intense and partially unacknowledged emotions, projections, alliances, and defensive patterns may emerge between members, and also potentially within the relationship with us.
Here, holding clearly cannot mean making the team comfortable. Nor can psychological safety mean that every difficult interaction is softened or neutralized. What may be required instead is to create enough stability for the team to stay with what is happening between them long enough to acknowledge it and eventually think about it, especially when unrecognized emotional dynamics can negatively impact the organization and could even derail it. That may include helping its members tolerate disagreement, silence, not-knowing, frustration, uncertainty, or even moments of interpersonal discomfort without prematurely restoring harmony.
As a summary for our coaching and consulting practice, we may define holding and containment simply as follows: we do not seek to take the anxiety away, but help create the conditions in which our clients can bear the anxiety, begin to think about it, work with it, and eventually come up with informed, meaningful and considered actions.
This may involve:
We are therefore not simply providing support. We foster thinking about what might otherwise be difficult to think about.
Holding and containment do not happen in a vacuum. Our corporate coaching clients are embedded within an organizational system characterized by authority structures, role expectations, competing demands, and various unconscious assumptions.
The coaching relationship itself therefore becomes part of that system, potentially influenced by desires, frustrations, and anxieties originating elsewhere in the organization. These may become expressed or enacted in the relationship, requiring us to bear what is being communicated rather than simply react to it. We may experience intense pressure to rescue, provide certainty, or take sides. From this perspective, holding and containment are not simply something we do; they take form within the coaching relationship and its wider organizational context.
Our, hopefully good-enough, capacity to notice and reflect upon what is happening in the relationship with our client therefore becomes key, both to making sense of the wider system and to helping our clients make sense of their own experience.
The value of distinguishing psychological safety, holding, and containment is ultimately practical. As we familiarize ourselves with these conceptual lenses, we experiment with our own capacity to hold them in mind without collapsing them, allowing them to enrich one another through their specificities. Rather than rushing to simplify them in order to reduce the anxiety of not knowing or to fulfill our desire to remain fully in control, we practice thinking without prematurely resolving uncertainty, in pursuit of some relative precision. In this sense, the conceptual exploration becomes a learning experience in itself, one that is cognitive, emotional, and empirical, as it brings theoretical perspectives into ongoing dialogue with our own practice.
As we work with these conceptual lenses, we bring them together into a possible synthesis within our practice. This dynamic process may expand our scope of action and our capacity to intervene thoughtfully as coaching practitioners. It may also deepen our self-awareness and enable us to refine our practice with greater intention.
Working from a systems-psychodynamic perspective, these distinctions can deepen our awareness of relational dynamics and remind us of the complexity of human relationships. They also invite us to remain humble as we engage with the subtleties, nuances, and ambiguities they bring to light.
While holding and containment are central to clinical psychotherapy, they can also offer valuable conceptual lenses for coaching and consulting practice. For an outsider, they may at least help explain what a clinician or coach is actually doing when they appear to be doing very little.
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