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 …
Primary Emotion Series: Sadness
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. …
Primary Emotions Series: Anger
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 …
Where Shame Lives
Shame is one of those words that elicits a strong visceral reaction from our body and mind. Probably just reading that one word you may have noticed yourself wanting to stop reading this blog (avoidance) or your stomach cringing (psychosomatic symptom expression). Shame is often associated with feelings and emotions we try to block from …
Both Sides of the Couch
What makes therapy difficult for so many people is this idea that you have to share some of your deepest and darkest secrets to a complete stranger. As someone who has sat both in the chair as the therapist and on the couch as the patient, I can tell you that I sincerely empathize with …
Empathy that Cures
One of the key factors in any successful therapeutic relationship is the ability for the therapist to understand the patient; it is only then authentic safety and healing can occur. Regardless of one’s theoretical orientation or how one comes to understand psychopathology, this key ingredient makes the treatment effective. To gain a better understand of …
The First Session
Psychotherapy has come a long way in relation to restoring one’s humanity and the overall goal of improving one’s person life. From Freud who emphasized unconscious drives related to sex and death to the mindfulness movement that focuses on the here and now of the patient’s experience. Regardless of a clinician’s theoretical background or way …