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Structure of the Triangle
The Triangle of Conflict consists of three interconnected components:
- Feelings (Impulse or Feeling):
These are the core emotional truths of the patient — love, rage, guilt, grief — typically stemming from attachment trauma. These feelings are often unconscious, forbidden, or deemed dangerous. - Anxiety:
When these feelings begin to emerge, they trigger anxiety, particularly in those with insecure or traumatic attachments. Anxiety acts as a signal to the psyche that an inner threat (e.g., repressed affect) is nearing consciousness. - Defenses:
In response to the anxiety, the patient deploys psychological defenses to avoid feeling the emotion or confronting the associated memories. These defenses range from repression and projection to rationalization and somatization.
Therapist’s Role: Navigating the Triangle
A skilled ISTDP therapist must:
- Identify defenses as they operate moment-to-moment.
- Clarify the link between the defense and the underlying avoided feeling.
- Highlight the cost (price) of the defense — what is lost or distorted by using it — to render it dystonic (no longer ego-syntonic).
- Monitor anxiety levels and help regulate them, ensuring they remain within a “threshold” window that facilitates affective experiencing without overwhelming the patient.
This approach aligns with Davanloo's technique of pressure, clarification, challenge, and head-on collision to gradually increase affective closeness and access to the unconscious.
Clinical Example
Patient begins intellectualizing after being asked about childhood.
Therapist: “Notice how your mind is jumping to analysis right now — can we just stay with what you're feeling as you recall that moment with your father?”
(Clarification of defense; monitoring for anxiety)
Therapist: “It seems this intellectualizing protects you from painful emotions underneath. But can we look together at what it costs you — how it may be keeping you distant not just from those feelings, but also from the people you love?”
In this vignette, the therapist maps the defense (intellectualization) onto the Triangle of Conflict, drawing attention to its function and cost, thus fostering motivation to abandon it.
Therapeutic Benefit
Using the Triangle of Conflict allows the therapist to:
- Decode moment-to-moment shifts in resistance
- Pinpoint unconscious affect as the true source of symptomatology
- Build an internal alliance with the patient against their maladaptive defenses
By persistently guiding the patient through this triangle, therapists facilitate access to repressed emotional material, promote integration, and enable character change.
The Triangle of Conflict is not a theoretical abstraction — it is a real-time compass. For therapists trained in its use, it offers an elegant and empirically supported method for helping patients break through resistance, experience deep emotion, and heal longstanding wounds.
