Through the Narrows: The Meaning and Enactment of Interpersonal Holding

Abstract

Helping practices that focus on returning members to their work tasks amid significant distress do little to attend to how they may be severely hindered by their own self-limiting responses to that distress. The focus of this study is on helping that attends to individuals limited in their responses to distress—individuals who inhabit, metaphorically, the narrows, a place of diminishment in which individuals are made smaller by accessing only specific parts of their selves. Through in-depth interviews with professionals working with individuals suffering from various distressing conditions, events, and situations, I develop generalizable theoretical insights about interpersonal holding as a specific form of helping dedicated to surfacing, expanding, and integrating aspects of individuals’ selves that have receded amid distress. The findings indicate a sequence of holding behaviors marked by three overlapping phases: holders coming alongside, linking up with, and guiding individuals in distress through narrowed intrapsychic spaces. This sequence is enabled, first, by the availability of individuals to interpersonal holding and second, by aspects of the holders that stabilize them during the complicated work of attending to the agentic selves of others. The study contributes to both the evolution of scholarship on distress helping in the context of resilience, loss, and role distress and to theory about interpersonal holding.