It's a question most people don't ask out loud. The dynamic has already been named — the intermittent partner, the job that keeps almost delivering, the friendship that gives just enough — and the naming hasn't changed anything. What remains is a pull that doesn't yield to understanding. Something about the difficult situation stays compelling in a way the stable one never quite manages.
The pull has a structure, even when it doesn't announce itself.
Ronald Fairbairn spent much of his career revising a foundational assumption in psychoanalytic thought: that what drives human beings is the pursuit of pleasure. His counter-proposal was quieter and more consequential. We are not, primarily, pleasure-seeking. We are relationship-seeking. And the relationships we seek are not simply the ones available in the present — they are organized around templates formed in the earliest relational experiences, internalized so completely that they become the lens through which all subsequent relationships are perceived.
Among the figures Fairbairn described is what he called the exciting object: the caregiver or early figure who was tantalizing and inconsistent, who offered enough to create hope and withheld enough to keep it alive. What the exciting object produces is not satisfaction but a particular kind of aliveness — the heightened state of wanting, of almost, of the promise that keeps renewing just before it delivers. That aliveness becomes familiar. It becomes, in a specific sense, what feeling alive feels like.
Which is why the stable, available, consistent option can feel, by comparison, somehow less real.
Kierkegaard wrote about despair not primarily as crisis but as a particular relationship to the self — the despair of not willing to be the self that one actually is. In his framing, despair is not always dramatic. It can be the quietly organized life that runs on someone else's rhythm, waiting for an external source to grant the feeling of aliveness. The person oriented around an exciting object — waiting for the call, the approval, the next good day in a difficult dynamic — is living precisely this: a life whose aliveness is contingent on something outside, and therefore never quite one's own.
Kierkegaard also understood the self not as a fixed thing but as a relation — specifically, a relation that relates to itself. Which means that how we speak to ourselves is not incidental.
The harsh internal voice, the one that finds the self perpetually insufficient and narrates failure with a fluency that suggests long practice — that voice is a relation too. And it is worth asking, as object relations therapy eventually does ask: whose voice is that? Is it actually yours? Or does it carry the rhythm and particular register of someone who was present early enough that the distinction was never visible? The message you have been delivering to yourself may have had a different author.
What object relations therapy offers is not the instruction to choose differently. It is the slower work of noticing what the pull is made of — where the exciting object template came from, what it was doing in its original context, and how it traveled forward. That recognition doesn't resolve the pull. But it creates a small distance from it that wasn't there before. In that distance, something that more closely resembles genuine choice becomes possible.
The people I work with in Connecticut — in Greenwich, Westport, Darien, New Canaan, and Ridgefield — often arrive with a version of this they have already named many times. In many cases the external life is genuinely stable: the career built, the house established, the long-term relationship intact. What hasn't resolved is the pull toward something that operates differently — more charged, more uncertain, more alive in a way the organized life no longer quite is. What they are looking for is something different from another naming.
Object relations therapy in this context is not analysis of the past for its own sake. It is about encountering the template in the room, in real time, and learning to recognize it before it has already organized the next chapter.
I work with adults throughout Connecticut via telehealth. Prospective clients are welcome to reach out at jonathanwalsh@hushmail.com or to request a complimentary 15-minute consultation through this site.
Frequently Asked Questions about Object Relations Therapy
What is object relations therapy?
Object relations therapy explores how early relationships with caregivers shape the internal templates we carry into adult life — patterns of relating, expecting, and experiencing others that often operate below conscious awareness. It treats present difficulties as partly organized by these internalized relational structures.
What does object relations therapy help with?
It is well-suited for recurring relationship patterns, the persistent sense of being drawn to what isn't good for you, and the gap between understanding a dynamic intellectually and actually experiencing it differently. It tends to work at a deeper level than approaches focused on current thoughts or behaviors alone.
How is object relations therapy different from cognitive behavioral therapy?
CBT works directly on thoughts and behaviors in the present. Object relations therapy is interested in the relational templates underneath — how early experience shaped what feels familiar, compelling, or safe, and how those templates continue to organize present experience.
Who is a good fit for object relations therapy?
It tends to work well for people who have found that insight alone hasn't moved the needle — who understand their patterns but find themselves inside them anyway, and who are drawn to understanding themselves at a deeper relational level.
Jonathan Walsh, LMHC, LCMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist offering object relations therapy via telehealth in Connecticut and several other states. He is a member of the New England Center for Existential Therapy and has completed core training at the Institute for Existential-Psychoanalytic Therapy. Learn more about Jonathan.