Dr. Alex Rowell- Licensed Clinical Psychologist
Online Therapy in Oregon
Finding the right therapist can feel overwhelming, especially when you are already dealing with anxiety, depression, relationship stress, grief, burnout, or a major life transition. You may be searching through therapist directories, insurance listings, websites, and online profiles while trying to decide who is qualified, who is available, and who might actually be a good …
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In a world built for speed, psychodynamic psychotherapy may be more important than ever.We live in an age of instant answers, rapid swipes, constant notifications, and endless self-optimization. Feeling anxious? Search for a tool. Feeling lonely? Open an app and start scrolling. Feeling stuck? Look for the next hack.Psychodynamic psychotherapy offers something increasingly rare: a …
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Symptom checklists are helpful but Psychodynamic treatment aims for deeper change: how a person organizes self, how defense mechanisms are used to ward off unconscious content, object relations, and ontological meaning. So how do researchers measure that kind of growth?There are a lot Psychodynamically orientated assessments and tests out there, but here are three common “beyond …
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With students being inundated with only short-term outcomes, protocols, and manualized treatments, many undergraduate and graudate programs students are taught therapy as if it began with cognitive-behavioral worksheets and deep breathing.Psychodynamic psychotherapy is not just another approach, it is the theory from which nearly every modern therapy emerged. From the early work of Sigmund Freud, …
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Many psychologists and therapists intentionally choose psychodynamic therapy for their own personal development and self-growth even when they are trained in (and regularly practice) other modalities. It is not because brief, skills-based approaches lack value, it is because clinicians often want a different kind of experience: depth, meaning, pattern recognition and lasting internal change.Psychodynamic therapy …
Beyond Symptom Relief: The Depth Work of Psychodynamic TherapyPsychodynamic therapy continues to evolve with a focus on research and being an evidence-based treatment. A 2023 meta-analysis by Leichsenring and colleagues examined 27 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing psychodynamic therapy (PDT) to other treatments (e.g., CBT) for depression. The study found PDT to be equally effective …
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Twenty years ago, saying “psychodynamic psychotherapy is evidence-based” was a good way to get dismissed as “old school” or "outdated." Today, if someone still says that, they are not describing the data and evidence, they are describing their own bias and perhaps knowledge gap.Over the last 20–30 years, the empirical picture has flipped. Meta-analyses of …
When people think about Psychodynamic treatment they often think it focuses only on one’s childhood, sexual impulses, and unconscious content. This is partly true, as portions of psychodynamic treatment focus on the quest to make the unconscious, conscious. However, psychodynamic treatment also focuses on gaining awareness of thoughts, feelings, and patterns based on past relationships …
Sadness is an emotion we often associate with depression, grief, loss, change, and many other transitions occurring in our lives. When people experience sadness, they may describe a heaviness in their chest or a weighted vest slowing them down; cognitively sadness may be labeled as a mental fog or an absence from the present moment. …
In this next series of blogs, I am going to write about our six primary emotions and how they present themselves in therapy. This research comes from Paul Ekman who identified six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) all humans have. These may sound familiar because there is a wonderful movie, Inside Out, in which the …
Dr. Alex Rowell- Licensed Clinical Psychologist 