Psychodynamic therapy is an evolved and modernized approach to therapy that originated from Freud and his contemporaries. It contains a thorough and comprehensive understanding of personality and emotions. Common cultural words like projection, denial, displacement, and repression all originate from this theoretical model. Personality patterns like narcissism, borderline, and obsessive compulsive are products of over 100 years of psychodynamic research and an extension of Freud’s genius. We wouldn’t have these words or understandings if it wasn’t for psychodynamic therapy.
As a foundation, psychodynamic therapy operates under the premise that what we refuse to know (and our psyche may decide this for us sometimes), confront, or understand within ourselves has its tightest grip on us. It believes we are prone to repeat patterns from the past until directly addressed. It puts an emphasis on our earliest, and most important relationships. It targets our foundational patterns stemming back to when they began. Until we own, understand and digest what we have experienced in the past we are left blind in many ways as we attempt to navigate the present and future. Until therapy, we do not know the code underlying our programming and there is real value in designing a life around the insights discovered in psychodynamic therapy. Much suffering gets avoided when you can provide a meaningful answer to the question “who are you?”
Psychodynamic therapy believes that the way we adapted to our early home lives created a template that is later filled with familiar characters and situations that we continue to reenact until resolved. A personality is literally and simply a set of interpersonal habits around how one regulates emotion in their connection with others. People fall into familiar habit clusters that we define as “personality types.” This model has a comprehensive way of understanding familiar wounds and the ways in which people reflexively protect themselves and regulate emotions in the form of “personality.”
As psychodynamic therapists, our goal is to help you become more honest with yourself – emotionally, psychologically, and relationally. We will encourage and support you in opening to emotions fully and safely while exploring the Truths about your life experience. Simultaneously, we will help you to connect the dots of your past so that you may better your chances at living a satisfying and useful life.
This approach relies upon over a hundred years of collaborative wisdom that will help you move threatening unconscious material (thoughts, emotions, experiences) into a more conscious, workable place. Patients of psychodynamic therapists use words like “deep, meaningful, healing, insightful, and powerful” to describe their experiences.
If you are looking to explore who you are, make sense of your personality, better your relationships or become more insightful then this is the therapy for you. It is a roots-up healing modality with an incredible track record for success. To read more about psychodynamic therapy visit our Posts page: https://www.drmitchkeil.com/post/why-we-become-symptomatic-in-relationships/ and https://www.drmitchkeil.com/post/attachment-and-psychotherapy/