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What is Psychodynamic Psychotherapy?

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a talking therapy that focuses on exploring the unconscious processes that influence your thoughts, feelings, relationships and behaviours. By gaining insight into these hidden dynamics, you can...
 

  • better understand your past - find meaning to aspects that are confusing or painful, especially from childhood

  • heal from emotional pain - increasing your awareness and stop repeating ways of managing that no longer work

  • improve your relationships and overall wellbeing - gaining inner strength to start taking the next step to a more fulfilling life

 
The focus of the therapy is the relationship that is created between me as the therapist and you the client, which provides information about what happens outside the therapy room in your day to day life.  It helps you to become more self aware about the way you relate to others and how your thought processes have been formed.  This isn't a quick fix and I don't provide advice.  It requires commitment to attend sessions regularly (once a week) and a preparedness for things to feel some uncomfortable, which is all part of the change process.  

 

This type of psychotherapy is organic and different to what the NHS provides in Cambridgeshire because it is longer term and open ended.  It examines deep rooted and repressed feelings that perhaps are difficult to understand, and which appear as repeated patterns of behaviour that have become destructive, resulting in feeling anxious, low and listless.  
 
There is an increasing body of evidence that psychodynamic psychotherapy provides a better outcome (Hirschfield R, Steen S, Dunn EL, Hanif A & Clarke L, 2024) because it not only looks at what is happening now, but it generates awareness about the past that has been unprocessed, freeing up headspace and reducing physical pain resulting from past conflicts and trauma.
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Reference:  Hirschfeld, R., Steen, S., Dunn, E. L., Hanif, A., & Clarke, L. (2024). The effectiveness of psychodynamic therapy in an NHS psychotherapy service: outcomes for service-users with complex presentations. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 38(2), 132–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/02668734.2023.2295437

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