About the Centre for Psychodynamic Insights
The Centre for Psychodynamic Insights is a private practice located in Ontario specializing in Psychodynamic, Psychoanalytic, and Adlerian psychotherapy. These approaches focus on revealing, understanding, and resolving underlying emotions and root causes of symptoms through evidence-based interventions and a comprehensive treatment plan. With an in-depth collaborative discussion and analysis of unconscious thoughts and emotions from childhood until the present day, we can explore how they inform us today to help relieve symptoms and to develop targeted strategies to foster change.
Psychodynamic
As one of the earliest schools of psychotherapy in our modern world, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy aims to explore and understand the root causes of symptoms to work on resolving and regulating their effects. With a client-centred approach, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy begins with the therapist engaging the client and building rapport before starting the assessment process. This process involves the therapist inquiring about the client’s early relationship with their family, early childhood memories, feelings of love, resentment, attachment, and rejection, personality characteristics during childhood, and more. Through learning about family dynamics and early character formation, the therapist can learn more about the client’s unhelpful thinking patterns and their context in life. The therapist then dives deeper with the client to release unresolved thoughts, emotions, and memories, usually through various interventions such Active Imagination, Word Association Test, Recognizing Resistance, Free Association, and Dream Analysis.
Through guiding the client into releasing their unconscious complexes (thoughts, emotions, and memories tied together) into the conscious mind, the therapist and client can then work on observing, analyzing, and eventually regulating unhelpful patterns. This release from the personal unconscious to the conscious mind may be a cathartic one for many clients, as much of information being released may have been long unknown to the client through their use of psychological defenses. While psychological defences can be helpful, such as humour, altruism, and anticipation (realistic future planning), many other defences may increase anxiety and internal tension, such as projection, splitting (black or white thinking), and repression (conscious internalization of thoughts while emotions are still present).
Insights
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy is also referred to as insight-oriented therapy, as the treatment process relies on insights. Insights are self-realizations and self-knowledge of deep-rooted thoughts, emotions, memories, or reasonings of what, why, and how events happened in the past. Elicited through the therapist’s questions, prompts, and the process of the client’s increasing self-awareness, experiencing deep-rooted realizations helps clients in finding reason, meaning, and context for the past. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy understands that these insights may have been avoided, repressed, or suppressed through the system of psychological defences due to their complex or painful nature. However, the connections of past experiences and conflicts and present perceptions and behaviour can be highly therapeutic for the clients’ healing journey.
Insight seeking is a fascinating process of looking inward. This approach enables the client to examine unresolved conflicts and symptoms that arise from past dysfunctional relationships and traumatic events which manifest themselves in the present through many ways. This includes substance abuse, maladaptive coping mechanisms, abuse relationships, and unstable mood. The value of understanding origins is far more than being curious. Identifying the root of an issue clarifies the nature of the issue, how it may best be resolved or even reveal the original issue that now has been camouflaged by a secondary, perhaps even surrogate issue. Often times, especially with anxiety, identifying the root cause of the anxiety can point to another underlying issue that is hidden under it, or has been mistaken to be anxiety. In other words, original events unidentified and unresolved can become replaced with anxiety that becomes the identified issue and focus of attention.
An evidence-based approach
Empirical evidence supports the efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. It has been found across many studies that this approach is evidence-based, with considerable research supporting the efficacy and effectiveness of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. Clients who receive Psychodynamic Psychotherapy maintain therapeutic gains and appear to continue to improve after treatment ends. More interestingly, research has found that non-Psychodynamic therapies may be effective in part because the more skilled practitioners utilize techniques that have long been central to psychodynamic theory and practice. The perception that Psychodynamic approaches lack empirical support does not coincide with available scientific evidence and may reflect selective dissemination and bias of research findings. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy has also been found to have one of the lowest relapse rates compared to other non-Psychodynamic therapies, meaning that clients could maintain therapeutic improvements for extended periods of time.
While short-term and present-focused therapies could be effective for some clients, it has become difficult for many to find a psychotherapist who would thoroughly explore and analyze their past with them to help create meaning and context for the present, such as in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. While Psychodynamic Psychotherapy is not as widely applied in North America as it is in the rest of the world, this approach may be helpful for clients who would like to target the root causes of their present symptoms through a deep dive into the self and the past. In addition, this approach could be helpful for clients looking for long-term therapeutic work targeting long-standing harmful habits or characteristics that they are seeking to change or regulate.