What Do We Want from Therapy?
What solution(s) are we looking for? My experience aligns with recent research:
- To feel (and actually be) heard and understood by a therapist who listens deeply and nonjudgmentally
- To be freed from frustrating, limiting patterns
- The power to change by understanding how the patterns came to be and how they work
- The genuine experience of free will and self determination informed by compassion for others and self
- To feel equal in relationships and social situations
- Inner freedom and authority to choose…
- to say and mean “Yes”, or to say and mean “No”
- how to act and respond, in accordance with our values
- Capacity to feel and savor the full spectrum of our infinitely rich and colorful emotional experience, with presence, without feeling overwhelmed
The Psychodynamic Approach
The above list is not only what most people want from psychotherapy, it also faithfully represents the Psychodynamic approach.
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy’s mission is to free the authentic self through skilled listening, deep understanding, and self empowerment.
Psyche originally means soul, and soul is an old, wise word for the entirety of the person. Psychodynamic therapy deals with the dynamics—the forces and movements—of the soul: conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings, emotions, impulses, intuitions… all of what makes you uniquely you.
The Somatic Approach
Psychodynamic therapy traditionally relies on patient and therapist talking together. The creative act of speech can express any experience that can be put into words. But what about nonverbal experience?
Somatic psychotherapy works directly, respectfully, gently, with the body’s nervous system and implicit (nonverbal) memories. This is important for two reasons:
- First, working sensitively with the nervous system ensures feeling safe
- Second, those frustrating, mystifying, repeating patterns of suffering that bring us to therapy in the first place are stored in the body’s implicit memory
This is what we learn from Bessel van der Kolk’s groundbreaking book The Body Keeps the Score, as well as many other books and an abundance of research on how the body remembers and is affected by trauma. (Read more about Somatic Experiencing and trauma.)
Integrative Somatic-Psychodynamic Therapy
I work with the whole complexity of each unique person’s nervous system, thoughts, feelings, dreams, relationships, narrative experiences, and the implicit memories and nonverbal language of the body. Working integratively this way, together we can discover what lies at the roots of recurring patterns in your life, how those patterns activate and play out, and how they affect you.
Typically, over time, you will start to notice that one or another pattern has loosened, has less of a grip than it used to, and you begin to feel less victimized, more confident, freer, more empowered to choose and act, and more like your authentic self.
