And if you wince at that line, my hope is that you will stay and carry on reading as your body may be telling you something very important.

In couples' psychotherapy, there’s a dynamic I encounter regularly. One partner appears to carry all the difficulty — the anxiety, the anger, the obvious pain. The other sits back, composed, apparently the stable one, the reasonable one, the one who has it together.

It's the same with teams of people. People carry things for each other and it is only by staying entirely present that you start to hear the real subtext beneath the surface storyline. I did this as a journalist and now I do it as a psychotherapist.

Almost invariably, it is the watcher in whom I sense the deeper wound.

The person in obvious distress is at least in contact with their pain. Something is moving in them, however uncomfortably. But the person who has sealed themselves off, who has built such effective defences that neither feeling nor other people can fully penetrate, that person concerns me more. Because what looks like strength is often a fortress with no door. And to me that equals at best a life not fully lived and at worse an extremely lonely, distressing place to live - and on occasion the path to serious mental health issues.

The man at my friend’s dinner party sounded like someone who had built that fortress, brick by brick, over decades of high performance. I see this in my consulting room on a daily basis and often the most courageous and liberating thing they have ever done is to finally ask for help. I know from personal experience just how hard this is to do but I also know about the transformational potential of finally reaching out and saying "enough".

What high achievement can conceal

Psychodynamic thinking invites us to look beneath the surface narrative. When we see someone who has driven relentlessly toward success, established themselves in positions of power, and somewhere along the way become, as my friend put it, "untouchable", we might ask: what is the achievement protecting?

For many high-achieving individuals, the drive toward success is not simply ambition in the ordinary sense. It is, at least in part, a solution — an unconscious strategy for managing something that feels unbearable. The work becomes a container for self-worth that cannot be located anywhere else. Status becomes the answer to a question about whether one is fundamentally acceptable. Invincibility becomes a defence against the terror of being ordinary, overlooked, or found wanting.

This works — until it doesn’t.

When something doesn’t land

What happens to the psyche when the strategy fails? When the role disappears, the promotion doesn’t come, the project collapses, the influence quietly erodes?

For most people, professional setback is painful but survivable. They have other sources of meaning — relationships, inner resources, a self that exists independently of what they do. They grieve, they recalibrate, they move forward.

But for someone whose identity has been entirely organised around external achievement, the collapse of that structure is not merely disappointing. It is annihilating. Because what is lost is not just the job, or the status, or the platform. What is lost is the self — or rather, the version of the self that has been constructed so carefully to ward off something far more frightening.

The clinical term "narcissistic injury" is often misunderstood. It is not about vanity. It describes the profound wound that occurs when the structures a person has built to protect a fragile sense of self are suddenly stripped away. The reaction can be bewildering in its intensity — rage, collapse, paranoia, withdrawal — because the stakes, unconsciously, are existential.

Resilience is not the same as armour

There is a great deal of talk about resilience in professional and leadership circles, and much of it conflates resilience with robustness. The capacity to take a hit and keep going, to bounce back faster, to be less affected.

But genuine resilience is something quieter and more radical than that. It is the capacity to be affected — to feel the loss, the failure, the humiliation — and not be destroyed by it. It requires a self that is sturdy enough to be shaken.

That kind of self is built not through achievement, but through the slow and often uncomfortable work of knowing oneself. It requires developing what psychotherapists call "mentalization"— the ability to hold one’s own mental states with curiosity rather than terror, to understand that feelings are not facts, that failure is not the same as worthlessness, that being ordinary in one moment does not negate everything that came before.

It requires, in other words, a relationship with one’s inner life.

Why the unreachable ones rarely seek help

The bitter irony for people like the man in my friend’s story is that the very defences that have made them so successful also make it extraordinarily difficult to seek support. To acknowledge struggle is to risk confirming the very inadequacy they have spent their lives outrunning. Therapy — which requires vulnerability, uncertainty, and genuine contact with another person can feel not just uncomfortable but structurally threatening.

And yet it is precisely this work — the slow dismantling of the fortress, the rediscovery of the person inside it — that makes genuine resilience possible. Not the performance of strength. The real thing.

The Robbie Williams story was funny. But the man who had become unreachable was the one I kept thinking about on the drive home.

I have specialist experience working therapeutically with high-performing individuals and leaders and a particular interest in what success can sometimes conceal