By Bradley Clark a psychotherapist working in existential, psychodynamic, and relational traditions
There is a phenomenon in physics that has fascinated me for years. Not because I am a scientist, but because it describes something I witness in the therapy room almost every week.
It is called laminar flow.
When water moves slowly and without disturbance, it travels in smooth, parallel layers. Each layer glides past the next without crossing, without interference. The movement is elegant, almost invisible. If you were to drop dye into such a stream, it would travel in a clean, unbroken thread: no swirling, no diffusion, no chaos. Just clear, purposeful movement towards wherever the water is going.
Physicists describe this as the most efficient state a fluid can achieve. It requires no extra energy. It wastes nothing. It simply is.
Now contrast that with turbulence.
When the same water is forced too fast, or meets resistance, or tries to be something other than what it is, the layers collapse into one another. Eddies form. Energy is wasted in the churning. The dye disperses into confusion. The water spends enormous effort going nowhere in particular.
I have come to believe that anxiety, together with the rigid psychic structures we build around it, is the turbulence of the human soul.
The Defended Self
In psychodynamic thinking, we speak of defences: the unconscious strategies the psyche develops to protect itself from intolerable feelings. The fear of annihilation, of abandonment, of being seen and found wanting. These defences are not pathological. They were, at some point, survival. A child who learned that vulnerability led to humiliation learns to armour themselves. A person who was never reliably held learns to hold themselves instead, tightly, compulsively, always.
The defended self is ingenious.
But it is turbulent.
There is a cost to the constant vigilance, to scanning every room for threat, to managing how one is perceived, to the enormous energy spent keeping certain feelings from surfacing. In relational terms, this costs us presence. We cannot be fully with another person when part of us is permanently stationed at the watchtower.
The philosopher Heidegger described Angst (existential anxiety) as a fundamental attunement. It is the felt sense of being thrown into a world we did not choose, a self we did not design, a freedom that is also a burden. Most of us do not sit with that anxiety. We flee it. We flee into busyness, certainty, roles, routines: anything that gives the illusion that the ground beneath us is firm.
This fleeing is turbulence. It takes effort. It makes noise. It keeps us from the laminar.
What Letting Go Is Not
There is a cultural misunderstanding about the phrase “letting go” that is worth addressing, because if we get it wrong, we may spend years trying to force ourselves into a kind of false serenity that is itself another defence.
Letting go is not an act of will.
You cannot think your way into it. You cannot decide, on a Tuesday morning, to no longer be afraid of abandonment. The psyche does not work this way. The unconscious, as Freud understood, is not a well-behaved student waiting to be instructed. It is a vast, dark river with its own logic, its own currents.
What letting go actually looks like, in my experience and in the experience of those I sit with, is far less dramatic than the phrase suggests. It is more like being witnessed. It is the gradual discovery, in the context of a safe relationship, that the thing you have been defending against is survivable. That you can feel the fear and not be destroyed by it. That you can allow the sadness to come and discover it has a limit, a seabed.
This is what the relational tradition understands that cognitive approaches sometimes miss: the healing is in the being with. Not the insight. Not the reframing. The slow, embodied experience of being held in the anxiety and finding that the world does not end.
And as that happens, over time and often non-linearly, something loosens. The layers of the self begin to stop fighting one another. The flow, which was always trying to happen, resumes.
Flow as Our Natural State
This is the part that moves me most in contemplating the laminar metaphor.
The physics of fluid dynamics tells us that turbulence requires input. Left alone, a fluid tends towards the laminar. You have to introduce energy, friction, speed, obstruction, to create chaos. The default is order. The default is ease.
I think the same is true of the psyche.
We are not born anxious. We become anxious in response to an environment that communicates, in one way or another, that the world is unsafe, that we are too much or not enough, that love is conditional. We learn to constrict. We learn to brace for later impact.
But underneath the bracing, and this is what I have come to believe through years of sitting with people in their suffering, there is something that wants to move. A person who has lived their whole life in their head will, in the right relational context, begin to drop into their body. A person who has intellectualised every emotion will, given enough safety, begin to cry. A person who has never allowed themselves to want anything will, gently, tentatively, begin to name a desire.
This is the water finding its course again.
Carl Rogers called it the actualising tendency: the innate movement of every organism towards its own growth and wholeness. Winnicott wrote of the true self that waits, not dead but dormant, for conditions safe enough to emerge. These are different languages for the same intuition. That ease, connection, and aliveness are not achievements we have to strain towards. They are what remains when the obstruction is reduced.
Laminar flow is not created. It is restored.
The Existential Dimension
But I want to resist any reading of this that makes it sound too easy, or worse, that makes suffering sound like a problem to be solved.
The existential tradition reminds us that anxiety is not neurotic. It is the price of freedom, of consciousness, of the knowledge that we are finite beings in an indifferent universe. Sartre’s nausea, Kierkegaard’s dread, Camus’s absurd: these are honest reckonings with what it means to be human.
And so the goal is not the elimination of all disturbance. A life without turbulence would be a life without depth, without encounter, without the creative friction that makes meaning.
The goal, perhaps, is a more chosen relationship to disturbance.
The person who has done the self work does not stop being afraid. They stop being ruled by the fear. They can be anxious and still act. They can be sad and still be present. The turbulence, when it comes, passes through. It does not become the whole river.
In physics, this is sometimes called transitional flow: the moment between laminar and turbulent, where both forces are present and the outcome hangs in the balance. In therapy, we live there often. In the hesitation before a difficult truth. In the silence before the tears. In the moment the client looks at me and asks, quietly, is it alright to feel this?
Yes, I want to say. It is more than alright. It is where you become you.
What This Means in Practice
I can share what I notice in the people who begin to find their laminar.
They become less legible to themselves in advance. What I mean is that they stop anticipating so compulsively. The anxious mind is always writing the future: predicting the rejection, rehearsing the argument, preparing the exit. People in flow spend less time there. They are, more often, here.
They become more tolerant of their own contradictions. They can hold the fact that they love someone and sometimes resent them. That they want to be seen and are also terrified of it. The psyche stops requiring resolution and begins to allow complexity.
They often describe a physical quality to the change. Things feel lighter. There is more space in the chest. The shoulders drop. The jaw unclenches. The body knows before the mind does that the river has smoothed.
And relationships change too. When we are turbulent, we create turbulence in the people around us. Our unresolved anxiety becomes the weather of our closest connections. As we settle, so often do those around us. The relational field, which is always co-created, becomes somewhere others can also breathe.
A Closing Thought
I keep returning to that image: the dye moving in a clean, unbroken line through still water.
It does not know where it is going. It has no map. It follows only the current, only the gentle pull of gravity, only the shape of whatever vessel it is moving through.
And yet it arrives. Cleanly. Completely. Without having fought its way there.
I think that is available to us. Not all the time. Not without effort, paradoxically, because it takes real courage to lay down the armour, to soften the defences that once kept us safe, to trust that the ground can hold us.
But it is available.
And when someone discovers it, when the sessions of slow, careful, relational work begin to show in the way they hold themselves, in the quality of their quiet, I am always struck by the same thought.
They were never broken. The water was always there.
It just needed room to flow.
If this piece resonates with you and you are wondering whether therapy might help you find your own ease, I would welcome a conversation.
