Walking the Tightrope in Adolescence: Depression as Relational Experience

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Depression as Relational Experience: Walking the Tightrope in Adolescence

Introduction: Starting at the Beginning

This essay restarts deliberately from first principles. Rather than treating depression as a diagnostic category or an intrapsychic deficit, it is approached as a relational experience that emerges at the contact boundary between person and world. The source material, chapter notes titled Walking a Tightrope: Depressive Experiences in Adolescence Forrest (n.d.) are understood here not as a standalone text, but as partial reflections within a larger theoretical and clinical framework drawn primarily from Gestalt psychotherapy and contemporary phenomenological-relational thinking.

Deeper source reading sharpens this reframing. First, Francesetti and Jacobs’ Absence Is the Bridge Between Us (2013) provides a comprehensive phenomenology of depressive experience as rooted in unreachableness and loss of hope within the relational field. The second, Michela Gecele’s (2011) work on personality disturbances (Forrest b, n.d.) cautions against diagnostic fixation and foregrounds the social and cultural production of suffering. Together, these texts allow us to situate adolescent depression not as pathology located in the young person, but as an expression of disturbance in the between — in the relational, developmental, and social field.

From Diagnosis to Experience

Contemporary diagnostic systems tend to divide mental disturbance into symptom clusters on the one hand and personality structures on the other. As Gecele (2011) notes,

this division risks reifying ways of being into fixed entities, thereby contributing to the very pathology it seeks to describe (Gecele, 2011, Kindle loc. 14081–14089).

From a Gestalt perspective, such fixation obscures the fluid, contextual, and developmental nature of experience. Depression, in this view, is not a stable object but a process — an emergent configuration shaped by relational history, present field conditions, and future possibilities.

Francesetti similarly argues for a paradigm shift: from explaining depression causally to understanding it phenomenologically.

Depression is grasped as a lived experience characterised by the surrender of the desire to be desired, the collapse of hope, and the impossibility of reaching the other (Francesetti & Jacobs, 2013, Kindle loc. 908–913).

This shift matters clinically. It moves the therapist away from symptom eradication and toward sustained presence at the contact boundary, where experience can once again be co-created.

Depression as Unreachableness and Loss of Hope

The young man who came enthusiastically to see me disappeared as I closed off the outside world. The pretense of normality had required huge amounts of will and energy and this quickly collapsed and rapidly drained away as I watched his body sinking into the chair. Was it bravery, was it courage, or was it fear that enabled the momentary light to flare? I was aware of thinking there was hope if this light could be kept from being extinguished; he was not totally lost, yet.

A central contribution of Absence Is the Bridge Between Us is its articulation of depression as an experience of unreachableness. Depression emerges when repeated attempts to reach a significant other fail, leading eventually to surrender, withdrawal, and forced self-regulation. What is lost is not simply an object, as in mourning, but the very conditions that make relational reaching possible (Francesetti & Roubal, 2013: p.442).

Phenomenologically, this loss is expressed through changes in time, space, and intentionality. The future collapses; the present becomes static; movement toward the other loses momentum. Francesetti describes melancholic depression as a disturbance in the id function of the self — the function that anchors experience in the immediacy of bodily, affective contact (Francesetti, 2015, Kindle loc. 2679–2789). Without this anchoring, no figure can emerge from the ground, and experience becomes one of non-experience.

Developmental Vulnerability in Adolescence

At this developmental juncture, Richard Erskine’s Integrative Psychotherapy provides a precise relational language that complements the Gestalt phenomenology without displacing it. Erskine conceptualises psychopathology as emerging from repeated failures of relational attunement and the chronic frustration of core relational needs within developmentally significant relationships (Erskine, 2015).

From this perspective, adolescent depressive experience can be understood as the cumulative impact of unmet relational needs for security, validation, acceptance, and self-definition. These needs, as Erskine describes them, are not psychological preferences but developmental necessities: the need to feel safe with another (security), to have one’s internal experience acknowledged (validation), to be welcomed without condition (acceptance), and to experience oneself as a distinct person in relationship (self-definition) (Erskine, 2015). These needs are not abstract; they are lived and registered bodily and relationally. When these relational needs remain unmet, the adolescent adapts creatively—often through withdrawal, inhibition, emotional numbing, or collapse of initiative - in order to preserve some sense of relational continuity. Depression, in this sense, can be understood as a developmental accommodation: a way of staying connected to the relational field by minimising the risk of further misattunement.

This view does not contradict Gestalt field theory. Rather, it sharpens it. The loss of hope and intentionality described by Francesetti can be read simultaneously as a field phenomenon and as the internalisation of repeated relational non-attunement. Depression, then, is neither intrapsychic deficit nor pure social product, but a relational memory carried forward into the present contact boundary.

The young man in front of me sat silent. Eye contact was absent, like the bridge between us. My desire was to span the void that existed in front of him. I felt the helplessness in my body; I felt the frustration of not reaching him; I thought this is not what I signed up for, I don’t need this degree of difficulty. My body fidgeted as a contrast to his stillness.  As I mirrored his frozen posture, I was aware of the energy and fight needed to quell the frustration and sense of helplessness into stillness. I recognised the depth of his struggle through the embodied sense of my being.

Adolescence intensifies these dynamics. It is a developmental period organised around separation, experimentation, and the reworking of identity. Gestalt theory understands this phase as requiring renewed support for three interrelated capacities: a sense of self, intentionality for contact, and the ability to draw nourishment from relationships. When the relational ground is sufficiently supportive, adolescents can tolerate uncertainty, frustration, and difference. When it is not, depressive experiences may emerge.

Importantly, adolescent depression rarely presents as classic low mood.

Instead, it often appears through boredom, irritability, somatic complaints, withdrawal from school, risky behaviour, or diffuse exhaustion (Francesetti & Jacobs, 2013, Kindle loc. 7937–7984).

What does not happen developmentally is as significant as what does. The adolescent may not complain of sadness but shows a diminishing of initiative, curiosity, and hope.

The metaphor of “walking a tightrope” is clinically apt. Adolescents are balancing between dependence and autonomy, belonging and differentiation. When earlier experiences of unreachableness — particularly within primary relationships — are reactivated, the adolescent’s intentionality for contact may falter. Healthy aggression, understood etymologically as ad-gredere (to move toward), gives way to inhibition or retreat. Caution becomes figure; desire fades into ground.

Mapping Relational Needs to Adolescent Depressive Behaviours

A relational-needs lens allows adolescent behaviours often labelled as problematic to be understood with greater developmental precision. Rather than treating boredom, risk-taking, or shutdown as symptoms to be eliminated, these behaviours can be read as relational communications—creative adjustments shaped by the frustration of specific relational needs.

Boredom and chronic disengagement are frequently linked to thwarted needs for validation and self-definition. When an adolescent’s interests, emerging values, or emotional experiences are repeatedly overlooked, minimised, or instrumentalised, the world loses its vitality. Boredom, in this sense, is not a lack of stimulation but the felt experience of not being met. It reflects a collapse of intentionality: why reach, if one’s reaching makes no difference?

Risk-taking behaviours—reckless driving, substance use, sexual acting out, impulsive aggression—can often be understood as urgent attempts to reclaim self-definition in a field experienced as controlling, indifferent, or unreachable. Such behaviours may also express a distorted search for validation: to be seen, to feel real, to register impact. From this perspective, risk-taking is less about sensation-seeking and more about forcing contact where ordinary relational routes have failed.

Shutdown, withdrawal, and immobilisation are commonly associated with deeply compromised experiences of security and acceptance. When relational environments feel unpredictable, critical, or emotionally unsafe, withdrawal becomes a way of preserving some internal coherence. Depression here functions as protection: minimising exposure to further misattunement by reducing contact altogether.

These behavioural patterns should not be interpreted rigidly or diagnostically. They are context-dependent and often overlap. What matters clinically is not the behaviour itself, but the relational need being expressed—and the history of how that need has been met, ignored, or violated.

The young man’s collapse spoke to me; he was communicating, loudly, his fear; the isolation that existed in his world; in his home. The absence of a voice responding to him. ‘Is there anyone there, he said … Tell them I came, and no one answer’d’(de la Mare (1912). This young man had knocked on too many doors that answered with silence

Social and Cultural Field Conditions

Neither Francesetti nor Gecele locates depression solely within individual psychology. Both insist on the role of the wider social field. Contemporary Western societies increasingly frame happiness and success as individual achievements, placing enormous pressure on young people to perform, choose, and succeed. Failure is experienced not as situational but as personal inadequacy. Within such a field, depressive experience becomes more likely — not because adolescents are fragile, but because relational supports are thin, distracted, or absent.

Gecele highlights how social and cultural narratives shape what is deemed pathological (2011). Francesetti extends this by describing modern society as marked by a constitutive lack of the other: parents anxious and distracted, technology mediating contact, and shared narratives eroding. Adolescents, developmentally dependent on adult presence of a new quality, often encounter absence where recognition is needed.

Clinical Implications: Presence Over Technique

Here Erskine’s emphasis on contact-in-relationship is essential. Therapeutic contact becomes the medium through which unmet relational needs are cautiously re-encountered: the need for security through consistency and reliability; the need for validation through being taken seriously without correction; the need for acceptance through non-intrusive presence; and the need for self-definition through respect for difference and separateness (Erskine, 2015). Therapeutic change occurs not through interpretation or technique, but through sustained relational presence in which the adolescent’s experience is recognised, validated, and held without pressure to perform or improve (Erskine, 2015). This form of developmental attunement restores the possibility that the young person’s internal states can be known by another without being judged or corrected.

Importantly, such attunement must support differentiation rather than dependency. Erskine is explicit that relational needs must be met in ways that enhance autonomy rather than replace it.

Effective inquiry is crafted so as to enhance the client's self-discovery Erskine and Moursund 2022 p228

In adolescence, this means that security is offered without overprotection, validation without endorsement of withdrawal, acceptance without collusion, and self-definition without premature demand for responsibility. Adolescence requires the therapist to balance availability with respect for separateness - mirroring Erskine’s insistence that relational needs are met in ways appropriate to the developmental stage. When attunement supports autonomy, intentionality can gradually re-emerge.

The young man smiled fleetingly. All the same it was a smile.  Fleeting, quickly suppressed in case it suggested capacity to act, to have agency. I let him know I noticed and confirmed I was not demanding anything from him; it was I that was here to be demanded from. Inwardly I was excited at the bravery on his part to let that smile show and wondered if he also was keeping hidden his excitement.

The clinical stance that follows from this understanding is demanding and unsentimental. The therapist cannot rescue, persuade, or activate the depressed adolescent by force. Attempts to pull the young person out of depression often reproduce the experience of unreachableness. Instead, therapy begins with the therapist’s capacity to stay - to tolerate slowness, silence, and hopelessness without abandoning contact.

Francesetti describes the therapist as guardian of hope, space, and time - not by offering reassurance, but by sustaining presence at the boundary where experience can begin again (Francesetti & Jacobs, 2013, Kindle loc. 4654). Small movements matter: shared breathing, naming bodily sensations, acknowledging defeat without collapsing into it. For adolescents, this must be balanced carefully with respect for autonomy. Therapy that fosters dependence or colludes with introjective patterns undermines development.

Equally important is work with parents. Adolescents do not suffer in isolation. Supporting parents to rediscover their own intentionality for contact — often buried beneath anxiety, control, or helplessness — is frequently essential. The aim is not perfect attunement, but sufficient presence to allow the adolescent to risk moving again.

Conclusion: Holding the In-Between

Depressive experience in adolescence is best understood as a signal of relational suffering rather than individual failure. It speaks of interrupted reaching, collapsed hope, and fragile ground. Walking the tightrope is not pathology; it is the developmental task itself. When the rope feels too thin, too high, or too lonely, depression may be the only viable creative adjustment available.

Integrating Gestalt phenomenology with Erskine’s relational-developmental framework allows us to hold this suffering with greater precision. Depression can be recognised simultaneously as a disturbance of contact in the field and as the echo of unmet relational needs carried forward into the present. Therapeutic work, therefore, becomes the careful restoration of contact, attunement, and developmental support—without haste, without coercion, and without false reassurance.

The relationship needs time – Relational Time is required to allow the client to reawaken their sense of being. Relational Time allows for this restoration of the other. Allowing each to unfurl and set sail.

Depressive experience in adolescence is best understood as a signal of relational suffering rather than individual failure. It speaks of interrupted reaching, collapsed hope, and fragile ground. Walking the tightrope is not pathology; it is the developmental task itself. When the rope feels too thin, too high, or too lonely, depression may be the only viable creative adjustment available.

Gestalt psychotherapy offers neither quick fixes nor comforting abstractions. It offers something older and more demanding: attention to lived experience, respect for developmental timing, and faith in the restorative potential of contact. Depression, approached this way, becomes not an enemy to defeat but a call to restore the conditions under which life can once again move toward the other.

References

• Borgna, E. (2011) The Fragility of Goodness: Depression and Human Experience. Milan: Feltrinelli.

• de la Mare, W. (1912) The Listeners. In: de la Mare, W. The Poems of Walter de la Mare. London: Constable.

• Erskine, R.G. (2015) Relational Patterns, Therapeutic Presence: Concepts and Practice of Integrative Psychotherapy. London: Karnac. Kindle edition.

• Erskine, R.G. and Moursund, J. (2022) The Art and Science of Relationship: Integrative Psychotherapy in Action. Reissued edition. Phoenix Publishing.

• Francesetti, G. (2015) ‘Depressive experiences: A Gestalt therapy perspective’. In: Francesetti, G., Gecele, M. and Roubal, J. (eds.) Gestalt Therapy in Clinical Practice: From Psychopathology to the Aesthetics of Contact. Milan: FrancoAngeli.

• Francesetti, G. and Jacobs, L. (2013) Absence Is the Bridge Between Us: Gestalt Therapy Perspectives on Depressive Experiences. Gestalt Therapy Book Series 4. Milan: FrancoAngeli.

• Francesetti, G. and Roubal, J. (2013) ‘Depression and mourning from a Gestalt therapy perspective’. British Gestalt Journal, 22(2), pp. 436–447.

• Gecele, M. (2011) ‘Introduction to Personality Disturbances: Diagnostic and Social Remarks’. In: Francesetti, G., Gecele, M. and Roubal, J. (eds.) Gestalt Therapy in Clinical Practice: From Psychopathology to the Aesthetics of Contact. Milan: FrancoAngeli.

• Perls, F., Hefferline, R. and Goodman, P. (1951) Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York: Julian Press.