A Culture of Coasting: Mistaking Transition for Transformation
Reclaiming the Courage to Tolerate Anxiety—In and Out of the Therapy Room
We are living in a time when many people feel unsettled in themselves—uncertain of who they are, where they belong, and how to live and connect with others. This is often treated as an individual problem, but it reflects a broader issue. When a culture loses its ability to orient people toward a meaningful, shared reality, the process of forming a genuine sense of self becomes unstable. People don’t just feel anxious; they feel unmoored.
Therapists encounter this directly. The therapy room has become a place where not only personal suffering, but also cultural confusion, arrives to be worked through—often without the wider support structures that once helped make that work possible.
What follows is an attempt to name what is happening, both in the culture and in the therapy room itself.
The Cultural Backdrop: A Civilization of Unprocessed Anxiety
Western society often appears to be steeped in chronic, diffuse anxiety—existential, relational, and ontological. Many people sense this in their day-to-day lives, whether or not they ever enter a therapy room. It hums beneath the noise of modern life, unacknowledged yet ubiquitous.
This anxiety stems from multiple ruptures: disconnection from the natural world, from community and belonging, collapse of shared meaning systems, a diminishing of secure attachment as we become further untethered from multigenerational familial bonds, and a pull toward quick, superficial fixes, including pills and surgeries that promise transformation. This goes hand in hand with a relentless acceleration of stimuli from media, technology, and consumerism that create the illusion of cohesion and agency while deepening dysregulation.
Consumer culture offers distraction as anesthesia. But unaddressed anxiety doesn’t resolve; it disperses. It infiltrates systems, relationships, identities, and therapy itself. Our collective nervous system reverberates with unprocessed energy, driving us toward the very mechanisms that perpetuate it. The cultural psyche becomes a kind of ambient panic—constant, shapeless, and contagious.
The Relational Fallout: Isolation and the Hunger for Bonding
In this deficient climate, authentic human contact is both craved and feared. The nervous system longs for attunement yet cannot tolerate genuine intimacy. The result is a widespread search for pseudo-bonding—connections that avoid discomfort and protect the self—in identity groups, online echo chambers, and ideological “families” that simulate belonging without requiring vulnerability. In essence, these relationships offer the appearance of connection while protecting from the exposure of a genuine encounter.
It’s the Hollywood marriage of modern culture: all glitz, paparazzi, and curated imagery, but little emotional substance. Beneath the surface, isolation deepens. Because the anxiety is collective and relational, it seeks relief in affiliation, rather than reflection—in performance, rather than presence.
Gender ideology, and the broader phenomenon of identity absolutism, fit seamlessly into this psychological economy. They offer instant belonging and moral clarity. They offer certainty in exchange for complexity and emotional labor. They are the new scripts for a civilization terrified of ambiguity.
When the Culture Enters the Therapy Space
When this fragmented self enters therapy, the unprocessed social anxiety is projected into the therapeutic relationship. In this unmoored societal climate, the client’s demand for certainty and affirmation carries the full weight of the culture’s expectation: I must be instantly seen, accepted, fully understood, and never challenged.
The therapist, also a participant in the same cultural milieu, unconsciously absorbs the projected restlessness. The client’s anxiety resonates with the therapist’s own: Don’t offend, don’t harm, don’t question, don’t lose your moral standing.
What unfolds is not simply transference—the way past relational patterns, feelings, and expectations shape how the client experiences the therapist—but something broader. The emotional atmosphere itself becomes shared. The therapist finds themselves carrying not only the client’s distress, but the pressure of the culture that produced it.
Unrecognized, this cannot be thought about or worked through. It is simply lived out—reenacted within the relationship itself.
Collusion: How Therapists Slip into Coasting
Here lies the crucial moment—the fork in the road between depth and collusion.
The therapist, untrained in careful psychodynamic containment and steeped in the same ideological pressures as the client, often cannot sustain the discomfort that authentic exploration demands.
The therapist’s personal countertransference—their emotional response to the client, shaped by both the client’s material and the therapist’s own history—may show up as fear of rejection, moral failure, or exposure, and then fuse with societal anxiety. Unable to “think” the tension, the therapist must “act” it. An enactment follows: rather than thinking about the conflict, therapist and client begin acting it out unconsciously in the therapeutic relationship. The result is premature affirmation, pseudo-soothing, or retreat into jargon. It feels like empathy, but functions as avoidance.
This is collusion, but it may also be understood more innocently as coasting: the therapist may slip into a state of apparent calm and alignment that masks what is really relational and clinical paralysis. The mind slides into compliance. The heart numbs. Therapy becomes an exchange of reassurance rather than exploration. It feels nice. It is momentarily pleasing. And the role of “good therapist” is secured.
In this state, the therapist has unconsciously chosen comfort over truth, belonging over authenticity. The therapist is mirroring the cultural neurosis rather than helping to heal it. Tragically, I believe this happens far more often than any of us care to admit. Now and again, I feel it in my own practice. A disturbing unease seeps through the body. The signal is unmistakable. It calls for a thorough, honest assessment of the therapeutic relationship, its purpose, and the therapist’s return to their own, inner work.
Bridging to Hirsch: The Dynamics Behind Coasting
This phenomenon was powerfully articulated years ago by psychoanalyst Irwin Hirsch in his book Coasting in the Countertransference: Conflicts of Self-Interest between Analyst and Patient (Routledge, 2008).
Hirsch describes coasting as a subtle but pervasive form of therapeutic collusion—a “comfortable equilibrium” in which both therapist and client unconsciously agree to avoid the anxiety that genuine change would require. It is likely far more widespread in the psychotherapy field than we tend to acknowledge.
He argues that such coasting arises from a conflict between the therapist’s self-interest—the wish to maintain comfort, approval, or emotional safety—and the analytic or psychotherapeutic aim: to facilitate transformation, which inevitably involves discomfort and rupture. The therapist senses the stagnation, even feels the faint pulse of unease or awareness, but rationalizes it: the client isn’t ready, we’re building trust, the client’s primary need is to feel understood and receive empathy.
Let that land. The rationalizing itself, which can continue for months or years with minimal movement forward, becomes the only tolerated discomfort.
Hirsch’s insight is that the therapist’s unacknowledged self-interest, when merged with the client’s anxious defenses, creates a relational homeostasis that feels partly harmonious but is fundamentally inert—stagnant, and ultimately without meaning. It is a false quasi-peace that replaces emotional risk with collusive comfort.
This contemporary application extends Hirsch’s observation from the therapeutic relationship to the cultural field itself. Many of today’s therapists are not merely coasting within individual countertransference, but within a societal one—a collective countertransference to anxiety, uncertainty, and moral fear.
What Hirsch observed as a personal, therapist–client dynamic has, in some ways, become civilizational: the profession itself risks coasting in order to maintain social approval and ideological safety.
The Deeper Work: Transformation, Not Transition
What we need to recognize in every therapeutic encounter is the client’s longing to transform—the desire to move from an anxious, unsettled existence toward one that is more regulated, coherent, and internally secure.
This is a profound transformation, but one the client is neither fully equipped nor culturally supported to undertake, especially in a time when even adults struggle to hold tension without collapsing into distraction or rigid belief.
As performance replaces reflection and immediacy replaces depth, the psychic capacities required for transformation begin to atrophy. It is no surprise, then, that the client’s deeper, often unconscious longing for integration becomes redirected into the idea of transition: a visible, external, and physical change that promises relief without the internal labor of growth.
The yearning for transformation—the timeless impulse toward maturity, wisdom, and internal coherence—is channeled into “transition” as a kind of counterfeit metamorphosis. But true transformation requires the capacity to remain within the storm: to tolerate the turbulence of becoming, to metabolize fear and ambivalence, and to resist the pull toward premature resolution through action or ideology.
When this longing is not recognized—when transference and countertransference remain unacknowledged and unprocessed—the therapeutic relationship itself can become distorted: a mirror of the client’s internal split. Therapist and client begin to enact what cannot yet be symbolized—the tension between the wish for wholeness and the fear of fragmentation.
Transformation is what is truly sought. But “transition” becomes the culturally sanctioned substitute.
The Clinical and Cultural Consequences
The result is a profession that mirrors the pathology it’s meant to heal: Intolerance for ambiguity, avoidance of anxiety, and replacement of relational depth with ideological ritual.
Gender-affirming therapy, and similar models that prioritize affirmation or diagnostic scripts over inquiry, become not acts of care but symptoms of a broader cultural regression. They represent a flight from psychic complexity into moral simplicity, and from therapeutic courage into collusive sedation.
This is how the culture’s unprocessed anxiety finds its way into the therapy space, and how the therapist’s unexamined countertransference completes the circuit. The profession itself becomes a container for collective avoidance.
Toward Relational Courage
To reverse this trend, therapists must reclaim the courage to tolerate anxiety—both their own and their clients’. But this is not only the task of therapists. It is a broader cultural task. We must all recover the capacity to think rather than react, to stay with—and lean into—discomfort rather than anesthetize it with quick certainty or affirmation.
Only then can individuals begin to develop a more stable, grounded sense of self. And only then can therapy fulfill its deepest function: not to soothe society’s panic, but to metabolize it. At its best, therapy models something larger: the possibility of transforming avoidance into awareness, compliance into contact, and coasting into courageous and authentic movement.
In the end, every act of genuine therapy is an act of resistance against the culture of coasting. And every therapist—and every person—who learns to hold tension, to remain present without collapsing into certainty or escape, becomes, in their own way, a quiet midwife of transformation.
Evelyn Ball is a writer, therapist, and commentator focusing on gender identity, detransition experiences, and safeguarding concerns related to medical transition practices
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There is so much value in this article. Thank you for writing it. Let's hope we can all move beyond coasting.
This is such an insightful post, Evelyn, and beautiful written. I started out skimming it, but quickly realized it was one for slower digestion. So many thoughtful reflections and great lines. Like this one:
"It feels like empathy, but functions as avoidance."
That's pervasive on different levels and in different contexts, isn't it?
Thank you for sharing your observations.