What is Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Counselling?

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a non-judgemental and collaborative process. No two encounters are the same and there is no simple definition or right answer. I would hope to help you, in a non-judgemental way, to think and talk about yourself and your current and past relationships and to realise the possibility of increased perspective and change. Talking about whatever is on your mind whether it is work, relationships, family, hopes and fears or anything you wish and by becoming more aware of links between past and present can enable you to make more informed choices about your life.

Psychotherapy is a way of helping someone to explore the often unconscious assumptions, motivations and repetitions that influence their life and relationships. When a person can identify, understand and build a relationship with these hidden aspects of themselves they often find they can influence their previously automatic emotional and physical responses to certain situations or people. This can reduce their need for symptoms (of whatever kind, anxiety, psychosomatic, fight or flight). However it can be difficult, on our own, to identify those parts of ourselves that keep us stuck. They just feel a familiar part of who we are (they hide in plain sight you could say). Psychotherapy and psychotherapists challenge us to take a small distance from our lived experience to look at ourselves as dynamic people with many moving parts. These parts may be active and passive in turns often causing us to experience ourselves in quite different ways or even as having seemingly different identities in different environments and relationships.

As a therapist one aim I have is to understand and accept the wide range of someone’s lived experiences and feelings. That is, to help them understand and come to terms with why some life experiences, often never shared before, may be so difficult or painful. Another aim is to be curious about whether the underlying assumptions or protective behaviour patterns developed by someone over a lifetime are still as relevant in their current life. It may be that they are actually inhibiting change, creativity and new relationships.

For example, someone who has trouble sleeping may certainly have tried to attend to this through better sleep hygiene, medication, exercise etc. They may have valid external causes such as SAD or their stressful job. All these may indeed be factors in an overdetermined unhappiness with sleep. However a psychotherapy approach may wonder why they need to stay awake? For instance, perhaps they worry about what happens if they fall asleep. Do they have bad dreams or a deep terror of an encounter with their own non-existence? Are they compelled to hang on to the day to do more work (to continue a conversation with a colleague say or worry about an issue; to assuage some guilt perhaps) or do they hope to use the ‘wasted’ time of sleep to seek out the freedom they can no longer find in their busy lives. They may use their not sleeping as a communication to ask for help as someone in their own past did. There are obviously many other versions of not sleeping available. The common feature may be that none of these are consciously available to a person who cannot sleep as we are compelled to feel we are in charge of ourselves. In therapy the frustration and anxiety about the very upsetting effects of not sleeping are accepted for what they are. However the demand to resolve the problem using agency or will power with the often resulting failure and associated guilt may be added to over time with better insight into underlying anxieties and fantasies around sleeping, dreaming, resting and importantly what we would rather avoid in our unconscious world. We can start to reacquaint ourselves with some of the feelings and experiences we have locked away in our psychical cupboards over a lifetime and will likely find they are fairly small insults in the context of our current adult life. Nevertheless the defensive walls we built to protect ourselves and the world from them long ago are still sufficiently powerful to set off terrifying anxiety alarm bells in us when we approach, similar to the figure of the All Powerful Oz; just something all too human and probably vulnerable hiding behind the curtain. People often find that access to these previously repressed emotions and memories can bring a greater sense of personal integration, stability, capacity and better, more robust relationships while the significant energy previously used to keep them locked tightly, if unreliably, away is now available for more creative use.