What is Psychodynamic Therapy?

Sometimes called psychoanalytic therapy, depth therapy, insight therapy, it refers to an approach to talk therapy that emphasizes the relationship between therapist and patient in a specific way. This kind of talk therapy focuses on discovering, exploring and changing patterns in a person’s life – patterns of behavior, patterns of feeling and of thinking, and patterns of relationships.

In psychodynamic talk therapy there are some basic assumptions:

• Childhood experiences with the others in our lives teach us what to expect from others – how we will or won’t be loved;
• People repeat these relationship patterns and expectations throughout their adulthood, mostly without realizing it, unless they make a real effort to change;
• These patterns and expectations are repeated in the therapy session, too, but there they can be looked at more closely within that safe environment, giving the patient an opportunity to form more helpful ways of relating.

Therapy with me is focused on identifying patterns that keep creating problems for you; patterns of thinking, feeling, responding to and forming relationships with others. We work on how to separate then-and-there from here-and-now. The therapy relationship itself becomes a “slice of life” in which these patterns play out within the safe environment of the therapy space. This provides you with opportunities to recognize the patterns, explore the underlying issues, and create new, more helpful ways of being. I’m not interested in providing you with hollow platitudes. Rather, I strive to partner with you to manage the present problems and to dig deeply within yourself to resolve issues at their source.