Psychodynamic Therapy

Psychodynamic therapy works from the premise that a great deal of what drives your behavior, patterns in relationships, recurring emotional reactions, the specific way you handle conflict or closeness, was shaped by early experience and operates largely outside conscious awareness. The work isn't about assigning blame to your past; it's about making visible the patterns that are currently running the show, so you have an actual choice about them instead of an automatic one.

Unlike CBT or DBT, psychodynamic work doesn't follow a fixed structure or manual. Sessions tend to be more open and exploratory, often following whatever is most alive for you that week, including, sometimes, what's happening in the relationship between you and your therapist itself, since that relationship can become a live example of patterns that show up elsewhere in your life.

This is slower work, and that's by design. Where CBT and DBT are built for relatively fast, measurable symptom change, psychodynamic therapy is built for something more structural: the kind of shift that doesn't just quiet a symptom but changes the pattern generating it in the first place. Research on psychodynamic therapy has consistently found that its benefits tend to continue growing even after treatment ends, which is less true of more skills-based approaches.