Every therapist has a particular theory or understanding of the factors that cause psychological symptoms, how to work within the therapy process, and how to facilitate change. The common goal of each practitioner is to help relieve suffering and to help you live a more productive life. However, as a consumer of therapy services, it is important to know that theoretical orientations between providers can differ greatly and part of finding a good fit with a particular therapist includes having some knowledge of his or her approach.

My approach to understanding symptoms, the therapy process, and change has largely been informed by psychoanalytic or psychodynamic theory. These theories are considered depth theories and view psychological symptoms as often indicating deeper underlying needs, conflicts, and issues that need our attention. In this view, psychological pain invites us to explore the often unconscious emotional and relational patterns in our lives that caused the symptom and to discover way to change these automatic patterns.

Psychodynamic theory views the relationship that is developed between therapist and patient as central to working within the therapy process. The active and collaborative relationship becomes a vehicle through which we can notice and reflect upon your ways of relating and interacting.

Another important aspect of the therapy process is the invitation to talk about whatever comes into your mind. We are typically not used to speaking this way and we tend to monitor our thoughts and feelings because we often consider them unimportant. However, learning to put into words whatever comes into your mind, enables you to move past conscious awareness and to begin to work with the unconscious factors that are affecting your current functioning.

Lastly, psychodynamic thought appreciates the significance of our cumulative life experiences, beginning in our original families and early development. These emotionally patterned interactions and experiences typically take root in childhood and are repeated, often without our awareness, in our subsequent interactions throughout our development.

If you would like to read more about psychodynamic therapy and the benefits of this approach, you may visit these links:

• Getting to Know Me

• The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

• Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Brings Lasting Benefits through Self-Knowledge

• CBT or Psychodynamic Therapy?

• That was Then, This is Now: An Introduction to Contemporary Psychodynamic Therapy

• Therapy Wars: The Revenge of Freud

• Not Your Great-Grandfather’s Psychoanalysis