Welcome to Purgatory: How Defense Mechanisms Trap Us (And How Therapy Helps Us Get Free
If you've ever been stuck in the same emotional pattern for what feels like... forever, this one’s for you.
You keep dating the same type of person, having the same fight in every relationship, or spiraling in anxiety and shame even though your rational brain knows better. You’ve read the books. You’ve journaled. You’re trying. But something’s not shifting.
Welcome to purgatory.
The Dante Metaphor: Therapy as a Descent
Psychoanalyst Donald Kalsched talks about this in a beautiful, haunting essay where he maps the therapeutic process onto The Divine Comedy by Dante. You might remember this one from high school lit: Dante travels through hell, then purgatory, and finally paradise. But before he can climb toward the light, he has to go down deep into the underworld.
Hell, in this metaphor, is the traumatized psyche. It’s where our most exiled feelings live: rage, terror, despair, shame. We rarely go there on purpose. It’s overwhelming. So our mind builds defense mechanisms to protect us: numbing out, people-pleasing, perfectionism, dissociation, controlling everything, blaming others, overworking, zoning out with screens. It can also look like toxic relationships, substance over-use, self-hatred. These defenses help us survive the unbearable.
"There was no lamentation save of sighs, / Whence throbbed the air eternal through and through" —Dante
You know that friend who does the dumb thing over and over again? They live in the land of perpetual sighs, a purgatory of their own making.
But over time, they trap us in purgatory.
Purgatory, according to Kalsched, is that in-between place. You’re not in crisis anymore, but you’re also not free. You’re managing, but you're not really living. The old coping strategies keep your system stable… but also keep you stuck.
Inanna’s Descent: Another Ancient Map
The Sumerian myth of Inanna gives us a similar map. Inanna, goddess of love and fertility, descends into the underworld to visit her sister Ereshkigal, queen of death. To get there, she has to pass through seven gates, shedding a piece of clothing or jewelry at each one, symbolizing the stripping away of ego, power, and defenses.
Eventually, she stands naked in front of death.
Why would anyone do this?!
“My name is Innana, Queen of Heaven and Earth. Please let me in. I have come to see what I have not yet seen, to experience what I’ve not yet experienced, and to learn what I do not yet know.”
What I hope my clients say to me, tbh.
Because the only way to true transformation is through the underworld. Inanna is killed, temporarily, but eventually resurrected, changed. This descent and return is the path to healing, power, and integration. Not bypassing the pain, not “managing it,” but surrendering to it and moving through.
So What Does This Look Like in Therapy?
A well-trained therapist will never drag you into the deep end before you're ready. The descent into old wounds and buried emotions happens at your pace, with care and collaboration. Yes, therapy can be uncomfortable (you're unlearning survival patterns and feeling things you once had to avoid), but it should never feel unsafe or abusive. You should feel empowered, respected, and supported throughout your journey.
You might come to therapy saying:
“I want to stop procrastinating.”
“I keep getting overwhelmed and ghosting people.”
“I don’t feel connected to anything.”
“I want to stop fighting with my partner.”
Totally valid goals. But as we dig deeper, we might discover that:
Procrastination is protecting you from fear of failure—and from the deep belief that if you fail, you’ll be unloved.
Ghosting is a trauma response to past emotional engulfment, and setting boundaries feels dangerous.
Disconnection is a defense against grief or rage that once felt too big to survive.
The fights with your partner are a reenactment of unmet childhood needs and abandonment fears.
Therapy becomes the descent.
“Ninshubur, my faithful friend, I must do this. I know it will not be easy, but I must go. Will you wait for my return and if after 3 days I have not returned, bang the drums, gather my community and tell them what was happened to me? Then go to the elders and ask them to bring me back. Will you do this for me?”
Even Inanna, queen of Heaven and Earth, knows—you shouldn’t do it alone! You need community and support.
It’s not about fixing yourself quickly—it’s about slowly and safely uncovering the parts of you that had to go underground to survive. The goal isn’t to rip away defenses (that’s re-traumatizing), but to understand them with compassion, and gently meet the exiled emotions underneath. Defense mechanisms form in response to environments where certain emotions, needs, or behaviors weren’t safe. They helped you survive, stay connected, or stay protected. The problem is, what once kept you safe can keep you stuck when the danger is no longer there.
In practical terms, that might look like:
Learning how to notice and name a dissociative freeze before it takes over.
Practicing self-compassion when your inner critic shows up.
Doing EMDR to reprocess a memory that’s still living in your body.
Realizing in session, “Oh… this isn’t actually about my boss, it’s about how helpless I felt as a kid.”
Allowing yourself to feel grief you’ve been avoiding for years, with someone there to witness it.
This is the hard, slow work of descending. Therapy can be very uncomfortable! But here’s the good news: we don’t live in hell forever. Once we’ve met the parts of ourselves we were most afraid of, something begins to shift.
We start to feel more whole. Less reactive. More connected. More real.
Like Inanna, like Dante, we come back from the underworld changed.
TL;DR
As a therapist in Oakland, CA I often find my clients in a weird in-between place, functional but stuck, surviving but not thriving, they are in purgatory. Therapy can help you gently descend into the deeper layers, uncover the defenses that once protected you but now limit you, and make contact with your real feelings, needs, and power.
And yes, it's a little dramatic. Mythic, even. But you are a whole-ass human being, not a machine to be optimized. You deserve depth. You deserve liberation. You don’t have to stay stuck forever.
