Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

We offer psychoanalytic psychotherapy to adults and adolescents who struggle with things like depression and anxiety; relationship issues; problems related to motivation, creativity, resiliency; those affected by trauma; peoples who want to understand themselves more deeply; problems related to identity; and issues related to sexual identity and gender. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy focuses on feeling, identifying, and tolerating emotion; identifying recurring patterns in our lives; discussing our past and how it may have brought us to be who we are today; understanding some of our current and longstanding patterns in relationships; exploring our fantasy/imagination; and using the interactions in therapy to understand ourselves better. The essence of psychoanalytic therapy is understanding and experiencing those parts of ourselves that are unknown: things that get in our way, or may cause us to be or feel some way that confuses us or causes us pain. This process also allows solutions to our concerns to arise naturally.

When should I start?

People choose to start psychotherapy at various times, usually based on the feeling that something needs to change. Many people simply want help working through something painful and need someone who can help. For others, it may be when something causes them to become more aware of themselves, and they want to dig in deeper, and understand themselves better. Sometimes it may be with great resistance, when one is sick and tired of suffering and simply demand something better for oneself. Whatever the circumstance, the best time to enter therapy is when it feels like the right step, at which point you might speak to a few therapists and see with whom you might feel comfortable.

How Does Therapy Help?

Therapy helps by allowing us space and time to slow down, look deeper inside ourselves, and face whatever we find. Substantial research in neurobiology and psychotherapy indicates that (for a large portion of people) therapy helps us rewire our brain so that we can feel, identify, and tolerate our emotional life, have less symptoms, a greater sense of meaning, make better use of our strengths, accomplish our goals more easily, and improve our relationships. Much of this occurs over time through active participation in therapy, and the integration of new learning and new patterns into our day to day life.

What are the risks to therapy?

Therapy is not without risk and downside. The process of psychoanalytic psychotherapy takes time and commitment, and requires one be willing to feel things that are painful. Much care is taken to progress at the appropriate speed, and assess risks as time goes, to ensure that patients get the appropriate level of care they need.