Working Through Your Personal Problems

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Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a form of interactive verbal therapy that enables an individual to find relief from the emotional pain that arises from subconscious motives and conflicts. It recognizes that your problems have their origins in childhood when you were dependent on your primary caregivers to make choices for you. The decisions that were made, primarily by your parents, and the way that you were taught to interact may no longer be effective for adapting to the world as an adult.

 

Once you develop an awareness of the patterns of behaviour you developed in childhood in order to cope you may find they are no longer effective. Only then, can you begin the process of changing old patterns and creating new options for solving problems, and living a lifestyle that is healthy and independent.

A good example of this would be: if you experienced a situation at age three that made you cry and your parents told you to “stop crying or you’ll get something to cry about”. How do you think you’d respond? Most of us would do everything in our power to stop crying and avoid further pain from the punishment they meted out. You would have learned that crying is unacceptable and you would likely take that emotion and put it on a shelf in your mind out of reach. From then on, you would develop elaborate strategies to avoid crying, which was so unacceptable to your parents. You may become a bully, develop an angry defense, withdraw, isolate yourself or become an intellectual.

 

Therapeutic Solutions

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While the rest of your psyche develops into adulthood the part of you that was damaged at age three would result in arrested development at that age. Then, somewhere in adulthood you encounter an experience such as a funeral for a dear friend and your emotions shut down. You start finding that every time you begin to feel upset and tearful you automatically shut down emotionally. You identify that something is not right and you should be feeling something very painful and be able to cry. When you seek help from a psychotherapist you to locate the origins of your inability to cry, in this case, from the incident with your parents at age three.

With my assistance you “re-parent” that part of your psyche in the same way you needed your parents to “parent” you when you were in pain. You may have wanted their support, comfort, soothing and acceptance of your tears.

Now, as an adult it is time for you to give yourself all of the things you missed out on in childhood. You need to give yourself permission to cry and learn to accept this emotion as part of your emotional self. Once you accomplish this you have integrated this damaged part into your adult psyche, and you will no longer experience difficulty feeling and expressing your tears.

People seek psychodynamic psychotherapy for a variety of reasons that include but are not limited to: PTSD, eating disorders, ADHD sexual dysfunction, mood disorders, relationship problems, psychosomatic behaviours and stress.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is an intensive self-excavation process that gleans its success from the positive connection between the therapist and the client.

 

Improving Your Health

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Typically your therapeutic process will continue until the issues that brought you to seek assistance have been reduced or alleviated. It is not uncommon for treatment to exceed the original reason for therapy since it is often only a symptom of a variety of deeper issues that are being repressed until you have developed the ego strengths to uncover and deal with them.

 

Even once you have resolved your problem areas, you may choose to continue working with me to expand on areas of personal growth, to bring about even more positive adaptive changes.

 

For some individuals meeting the initial goals will be sufficient. There is typically an agreed upon number of sessions dedicated to the termination process of the therapeutic relationship. It takes time for you to absorb your feelings about leaving the therapeutic relationship – which may include dealing with feelings of loss and change.

Once psychotherapy has concluded you should be able to maintain the adaptive patterns of dealing with life’s issues that you developed in treatment. In general you should be experiencing improved interpersonal relationships and productivity at work. You will have developed the skills necessary to facilitate ongoing increasing of awareness and new insights into your thoughts, feelings and behaviour.