Healing Lessons from the LA River

If you’ve seen Terminator 2 or Grease, you’ve seen the Los Angeles River. For much of its 51 miles, it doesn’t look like a river at all—it looks like a concrete gulley, a drainage ditch with a trickle of water at the center. What you’re looking at is the product of fear and ingenuity: after a devastating 1938 flood, the Army Corps of Engineers encased the river in concrete to contain its dangerous surges. The floods stopped. The city grew. Safety was secured, but the river itself was stripped of its vitality.

This is more than civic history—it’s a picture of how we adapt to overwhelming danger in our own lives.

When we’re young and vulnerable, we learn ways to protect ourselves from floods of feeling. If anger once brought punishment, we may channel it into silence. If closeness once felt unsafe, we may build a strong identity around independence. If chaos felt unbearable, we may craft a self that is always competent, always agreeable, never messy. These adaptations work. Like the concrete channel, they keep us intact.

But they come at a cost. Just as the river lost its curves, plants, and habitats, our rigid defenses can leave us stripped of vitality. The strategies that once saved us can, over time, keep us from living fully. We feel safe but barren, contained but cut off from spontaneity and intimacy.

Therapy often begins here—with the recognition that the “concrete river” we built inside ourselves is both brilliant and limiting. It protected us once, but it may now keep us from what we long for: connection, freedom, aliveness.

The work is not demolition. Floods and dangers still exist, both in rivers and in psyches. Therapy offers something subtler: a gradual softening. In the same way that parts of the Los Angeles River are slowly re-wilding—groundwater seeping up, willows and cattails returning, egrets and herons nesting again—therapy makes room for vitality to re-enter. Defenses don’t vanish, but they can loosen enough for color and growth to return.

What does this look like in practice?

• A client who always “keeps it together” allows herself to cry in session, and discovers that the world doesn’t collapse.

  
  

• A man who built his life around never needing anyone experiments with asking for comfort, and finds the risk of closeness worth taking.

  
  

• Someone who’s lived in silence about old wounds begins to tell the truth of what happened, and with another person present, begins to feel less alone.

  
  

Each of these moments is a crack in the concrete—a small place where life seeps back in. The structure of old protections remains, but now there’s movement, softness, and new possibilities.

This process takes time. The Los Angeles River wasn’t re-wilded overnight; it required citizens speaking up, gradual projects, and patient care. The psyche asks for the same patience. Therapy provides a space where this work can happen—where rigid protections are honored for what they once did, and slowly re-examined for what they cost now.

Healing is never simple. Parts of the river teem with life again, while other parts remain barren. In the same way, our defenses don’t dissolve into some perfect freedom. They shift, they soften, they allow new growth, while still carrying the marks of what we endured. Therapy is a process of learning to live with complexity—safety and risk, defense and vitality, memory and possibility.

The Los Angeles River may still look like a concrete ditch from the freeway, but if you step closer you’ll see reeds, birds, and life pushing back against the walls. The same is possible within us. What was once calcified can soften. What felt barren can host new life. Therapy is the place where that work begins.

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Like the river, our inner life can grow again when old protections begin to soften. If you’re curious about how therapy can support that process, schedule a free 15-minute consultation.