What I focus on when using a psychodynamic approach

The ‘inner conflicts’ you experience in everyday life

Life often leaves us with difficult choices. Sometimes we have two opposing thoughts at the same time. Other times we have multiple feelings about the same situation. This can lead to an internal conflict that is difficult to resolve. In Psychodynamic Therapy we work through the conflicts you experience internally, and help you resolve them. For example, you might feel anger towards someone, but at the same time think it is wrong to be angry at this person. This unresolved inner conflict around anger, if unresolved, will trigger anxiety, and when you are anxious it is harder to find out how you truly feel and think.

How your emotions affect your thinking and your actions

Your emotions have a very real and strong effect on what you do and how you think. If your emotions are too strong, you cannot think and see the world clearly. If we are stuck in our thoughts and cannot feel our emotions, we lose motivation and awareness of what is important to us. In therapy, the goal is to help you connect with your emotions and thoughts equally.

The defences you use to avoid painful emotions

Defences are what we use to avoid the emotionally painful aspects of life. We learn to use defences in childhood when we are exposed to problems in relationships that we are trying to resolve. For example, Sadness is a normal and healthy emotion to feel when you experience disappointment or loss. However, a child may hide their sadness from a parent because that parent gets unstable and upset when the child is sad. If this defence of hiding sadness from adults is repeated frequently through childhood to keep the parent stable and calm, eventually it will become a habit that the child is unaware of, and it is likely to be repeated unconsciously in relationships as an adult. If you find it hard to be sad when you experience loss as an adult, this could be why. In Psychodynamic therapy, we help you identify your defences, see how they may have helped you in the past, and how they cause suffering and harm in your life today.

Your Development as a Person

Your childhood shaped you into the person you are today. You are the product of nature (your temperament and genetic characteristics you are born with) interacting with nurture (the world you grow up in - parents and family, your community, your teachers, and your culture). To better understand who you are, and why you do what you do, we can look at what has happened in this interaction. In therapy, you start to see that you changed as a child to adapt to your environment. As children, we would do things to preserve relationships and to try and feel connected and secure, not because there was something wrong with us. Our low self-esteem is often a result of this misunderstanding.

Past and Present Focus

Psychodynamic Therapy may explore your past, but its main focus is what is happening in your life right now. We can never change what happened in our past but we can change how we think and feel about our past today. An example of this is when trauma from our past is re-experienced in the present moment and emotions overwhelm us. When we have PTSD we ‘time-travel’ back to when the trauma was happening, and start to act out a protective response. If this is happening, our aim in therapy is to build some separation between past and present, to help you simply recall and remember the past and regulate your emotions, so you can live and thrive in the present moment.

What is Happening in the Session is the Therapy

Whatever problems we have in relationships and our lives outside of therapy, we will eventually bring them into therapy. Literally. For example, if you overthink in your daily life, you will also overthink in therapy. If you are constantly seeking praise from the people around you, it won’t be long before you are also seeking praise from your therapist. In Psychodynamic Therapy, we often use the therapist-client relationship to address and work on these problems in the session.