Individual Differences and Emotional Problems

Ever wondered why one person 

develops an anxiety condition and another doesn’t?

You know what I mean… some people have phobias while other’s don’t. One person may suffer terribly with depression while the next person never has to fight against the same emotional numbness.

In years gone by, people were described as ‘having trouble with their nerves’, or being ‘highly strung,’ but that just describes how they are and not WHY they are so. A description is not an explanation and in terms of what might have caused the problem, we are left empty-handed.

If you were to ask the person suffering from depression or phobia, WHY they had that problem, they might shrug their shoulders and say: “that’s just the way I am.” Other times they might offer an explanation…

“I know where it all began, I was trapped in the cupboard under the stairs as a child, I was terrified. You see… that’s why I don’t like getting into lifts now…”

What if you were to ask why they think that caused their phobia, they might look puzzled as if you hadn’t heard their explanation. What I really mean is, lots of people get stuck in cupboards or enclosed spaces when they are playing as children, do they all develop claustrophobia? Of course not. What made this particular person different? There must be something else…

It’s a conundrum that psychologists have considered for a long time. One way to explain the individual differences in people developing nervous disorders (anxiety, depression phobias, e.t.c.) is that they have a predisposition to the condition and this makes them vulnerable to developing the condition in the right circumstances.

The Diathesis-Stress Model suggests that someone may develop a particular psychological problem as the result of an interaction between a predisposed vulnerability and stressful life events. The vulnerability may be biological such as genes, or abnormal levels of brain chemicals, which results in someone being predisposed to becoming poorly if triggered by stressful life events. If life-stress stays below a threshold then the vulnerability is not triggered and the person stays healthy.

How does that work for problems with our mental health?

Suffering from one anxiety problem may make you more vulnerable to developing another. For example, suffering from depression also affects your sleep leading to either insomnia (can’t sleep) or hypersomnia (wanting to sleep all of the time). 

The person who is battling with social phobia and finds it difficult to be calm in social situations, finds that their anxiety starts to spread and now they don’t like speaking on the phone or develop a mild stutter, the one anxiety problem means they are vulnerable to other problems.

What about if past unpleasant experiences also make us vulnerable?

As we grow up we have hundreds and thousands of experiences and each one we interpret in the best way we can given the circumstances at the time. Of course, a large proportion of those experiences occurred when our understanding of the world was not as advanced as it is now. We had to make sense of things in the best way we could and that was not always in a helpful way.

Consider… getting lost in the supermarket is a bigger deal at five than at thirty-five. That five-year-old who lost sight of their mum may experience that as potentially more traumatic than you as an adult. The child who feels embarrassed in class at school for getting the answer wrong is going to feel that embarrassment as a child would and not in the same way as an adult would.

None of us feels fear, anger, embarrassment or guilt 

with the same intensity that we did as a child.

Having worked with clients in therapy for years it is clear that we accumulate these traumas (and we say that with a small ’t’) and they create pressure within our mind. They make us vulnerable to life stresses. If life is kind to us and our stresses are minimal then we are most unlikely to be suffering terribly with nervous problems. Under those circumstances, our anxieties are likely to be no more than the next person, however, the greater the stress a person is subjected to the more likely they will be vulnerable to developing symptoms.

I am sure you can see that if we were to ignore that past experiences of someone suffering from an emotional problem, we are only treating symptoms and not what has made them vulnerable. When someone who is depressed, for example, is sat in front of us, wouldn’t it be silly to ignore that they had a disrupted relationship with their family? Wouldn’t it be odd if we didn’t at least consider that the unhelpful relationship with their parents might have some bearing on what made them vulnerable to this particular mental health problem?

Working from this starting point, Analytical Therapy (Hypnoanalysis) aims to reduce the accumulation of those childhood traumas by thinking through them as an adult. The emotions they felt at the time can be released and it can now be processed as an adult. With less accumulated psychological rubbish, we are less vulnerable to developing nervous disorders even when life stresses increase.


Being biologically or psychologically vulnerable does not make a person weak, far from it, it explains the differences between one person’s reaction to stresses in the world and another’s. Once we have an explanation (rather just a description of behaviour) we can be proactive in helping to ease the problem. Removing someone’s vulnerability is a way to help safeguard them against future stresses.


Find out more about Hypnoanalysis and the causes of anxiety here…