Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is an evidence-based approach to therapy; all therapists featured on Toronto Psychotherapy Group have foundational training in this modality of therapy. This approach focuses on the roots of current conflicts and difficulties, and is a depth-focused, insight-oriented type of therapy.

What Is Psychodynamic Psychotherapy?

Psychodynamic psychotherapy does more than treat symptoms: it works with our emotions, experiences, relationships, and social patterns. It looks at how our inner and outer worlds interact, and how our personality and patterns of relating were formed.

This type of therapy recognizes that our experiences have many layers, and not all of them are in view at any one time. In other words, some of our mental experience is active but unconscious to us—like a “blind spot” we need to keep in mind.

Overall, this therapy helps us to understand and alter how we think, feel, and relate. These gains in self-awareness set in motion deeper processes of personal change, even after therapy has ended.

What Does Psychodynamic Therapy Focus On?

The focus of psychodynamic therapy involves working with the patterns in our thoughts, feelings, and actions. An example of this would be to explore the unconscious reasons for doing things that harm us (like self-sabotage at work, or engaging in unhealthy relationships, or addiction), even when we try to stop.

In this approach, we take time to describe our childhood and past significant events. The aim is to understand how our history, our adaptations, our assumed roles affect us now. Maximizing self-awareness is a path to empowerment and creating change.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy relies on empathy and relating, as these are the key activators of personal change. This approach to therapy identifies and resolves deeper causes of symptoms and issues that affect our lives.

Our childhood experiences and family background are important, but so are the relationships, communities, and societies we’re raised in. We are shaped in ways we aren’t aware of and didn’t choose. Psychodynamic therapy is a space to explore the effects of social oppression, trauma, and violence related to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, ability, and other forms of identity.

What Makes Psychodynamic Therapy Effective?

In order to bring about change, it is not enough to manage symptoms. Creating true well-being involves deeper work. Powerful outcomes of psychodynamic therapy include:

• Building understanding of difficulties, at the level of motivation, and therefore more lasting change
• Accessing deeper levels of self-knowledge by seeing into our “blind spots”
• Developing usable insights
• Creating new emotional capacities and resources
• Expanding skills and resources to address long standing problems
• Overcoming unwanted repetitive thought patterns and relating
• Changing our relationship to difficult past experiences, to live more fully in the present

This kind of therapy is especially effective as it works well with many psychological and emotional problems. This includes depression, anxiety, trauma, life transitions, relationship issues and more. We are helped to use the insight we can to create more profound change.

A helpful summary of psychodynamic therapy can be found on Wikipedia.