What is Psychodynamic Relational Therapy?
Healing happens in relationship. Together, we notice patterns, sensations, thoughts, and emotions, and we connect these to your earliest relationships and your attachment experiences.
We all develop unconscious templates regarding love, safety, belonging, conflict, and closeness. These patterns show-up in our relationships and can include over-giving, people-pleasing, avoidance behaviors and tendencies, feeling like you are too much, shutting down or freezing, and choosing unavailable partners.
To adapt to our environments – our earliest relationships and family systems – we develop coping mechanisms and techniques that are often outside of our awareness. Your experiences, including depression, anxiety, somatic distress, perfectionism, dissociation, etc., can be learned as adaptations — the way your mind and body learned to cope. When these ways of coping are developed when we are young, but still used relationally as adults, they are often maladaptive behaviors which can harm us.
You are the most important person in the room. How you feel matters. Through psychodynamic therapy we explore early attachment experiences, defenses (defenses are ways you protect yourself such as intellectualizing, joking, controlling, withdrawing, pleasing, or numbing), shame and self-worth, grief and anger, meaning-making, as well as identity.
We talk about what has happened to you, and we also want to explore how the past is present –how it lives in you now — and manifests in your relationships. The therapy space can become a safe space to practice new ways of being, including setting boundaries, receiving care, tolerating closeness, and expressing anger.