What is Psychodynamic Psychotherapy?
I was absolutely terrified of my psychotherapist during my early experience of therapy. Was she angry with me? Was I boring her? I liked her a lot and yet I felt so tense. I had the feeling that she may ‘tell me off’ at any point and I was deeply afraid. It transpired that my therapist wasn’t cross with me and that, what I was experiencing didn’t really belong to the here and now. How could I have felt such powerful emotions about something that wasn’t actually occurring between us? The way in which I was relating to my psychotherapist was clouded by old, outdated perceptions of the adults in my life growing up.
As part of my training I was expected to go to psychotherapy. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t really need it, I was just going through the motions in order to see what it all involved and to get my qualification. It didn’t take me long to realise that I did actually need therapy for all sorts of reasons. One key reason was that it drew my awareness to how scared I was, particularly of authority figures, much of the time.
Through psychodynamic psychotherapy I was given the opportunity to explore my childhood, how it played a part in how I experienced authority figures in the present (still trying to please and desperately trying not to displease) and some of my own thoughts and feelings that had been completely out of awareness.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy emphasises the importance of the unconscious at the core of its approach. It assumes that there are things out of awareness, perhaps because these things, at one time, felt shameful or unacceptable. Psychodynamic theorists understand that some things have been forgotten or temporarily buried in order to function, or even survive, in life. Often this is not an issue until we come up against some kind of symptom; feeling afraid all the time, feeling empty and numb, feeling rage for no explicable reason or even acting in ways that feel out of our control.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy offers up the space so that we can start to make sense of what may be unknown to us or pushed out of awareness. Together the psychodynamic therapist and person in therapy look for clues as to what may have been buried. Some of this will involve thinking about your childhood and some of it will entail exploring what happens between you and your psychotherapist.
When the person in therapy is scared of the therapist why might this be? Are they recreating a relationship from the past? Are they actually annoyed with their psychotherapist but cannot fully bring it into awareness and so it is projected onto the other? When psychotherapy works well, both your psychotherapist and you can work together to make sense of what might be happening.
What people imagine that I think of them when they are in therapy with me often has very little to do with what I actually think of them. Often they have fantasies about my life, my beliefs and my opinions of them. What they assume I am thinking or feeling often reveals so much more about their childhood relationships, their hidden fears about themselves or what they have come to believe they can expect from people in their lives. Deciphering what is clouded by the past and what belongs to the here and now is a valuable part of psychodynamic psychotherapy.
It is difficult to outline exactly what your experience of psychodynamic psychotherapy will be like as it is unique to you and your psychotherapist. At its most generative psychotherapy should be an expanding of your curiosity, an opening up of the hidden parts of the self and a way of placing the past back in the past.
The key things that set psychodynamic psychotherapy apart from other types of counselling or psychotherapy are:
The importance placed upon the unconscious and its influence on our lives
The emphasis on the impact that early babyhood and childhood has on us
The focus placed upon what happens between psychotherapist and person in therapy (the therapeutic relationship)
Among many other things, through psychodynamic therapy I became aware of many thoughts and feelings that had been unconscious, I began to understand how those ways of relating had been patterned through childhood and, over time, I was able to relate to my psychotherapist as she was, rather than a version of a parent.
If you are curious about your own unconscious, how your childhood may have influenced how you feel about yourself and others and you are keen to explore this with a psychodynamic psychotherapist, or if you have any other questions about psychodynamic psychotherapy, send me a message here: contact