Understanding our problems and achieving change in our lives is found in considering our whole life journey. Our past provides a foundation for learning, our present provides us with the opportunity for agency, and our future possibilities gives us courage to live.
From this we can grow, strive, become more resilient and better adapt to what ever life throws at us.
Psychotherapy works best when we recognise we have strengths not just weaknesses, our painful experiences are part of us not all of us, that change is about both loss and gain and that self-knowledge is the basis for growth.
Why Psychodynamic Psychotherapy?
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy starts from the idea that much of what shapes us happens outside our immediate conscious awareness. Early relationships and experiences can leave lasting impressions: ways of feeling about ourselves, ways of relating to others and the world around us, ways of coping with life’s adversities and ways we face the uncertainties of the future. These legacies quietly repeat and shape us throughout our lives, even when they no longer serve us.
Change can come as these patterns are brought into awareness and understood giving our current selves the opportunities to make new and more adaptive choices that can better prepare us for what we a facing now and into the future.
Understanding alone isn't the whole story. Often these legacies show up in the therapy relationship itself, where they can be noticed and explored in a safe, caring, and empathetic environment. The therapeutic relationship allows for old feelings to be experienced and worked through in a new way, becoming a new template for responding rather than reacting to them.
As old patterns loosen their hold, the current and future can begin to feel less like a repetition of the past and more open to new possibilities.
As this happens, people may find they have more freedom to feel and think, to choose how they respond, and to relate to themselves and others differently. To feel greater agency in their lives and learn to accept what they can change and comes to terms with what they can’t.
Rather than seeking certainty about the future, psychotherapy can help us meet its uncertainty with greater courage, and discover what gives our lives meaning.