What we’ve said about Psychodynamic therapy

“Your goal is to help elaborate someone's emotional experiences and to help them better understand their emotional experiences with the hopes of giving them more degrees of freedom and their life”

“Psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychodynamic therapy use those ideas in treatment. So some use psychoanalytic psychotherapy to mean higher frequency technique driven work, like meeting two to three times per week. And psychodynamic often means using those principles about the past shaping the present in a more flexible format”

“psychoanalysis and psychodynamic mean the same thing. Efforts to say that they mean something different from a theory standpoint is pretty much marketing”

“A better way to explain it is that we're trying to gain mastery over something that originally we felt helpless and we felt like it was happening to us. And by recreating it ourselves, we're actually the one who has the power”

“You want to make links between causes and effects and put things together. into some kind of abstract name so that you can refer to it with the patient, regardless of the source”

“A confrontation is any intervention that points out a pattern, a discrepancy, An inconsistency or some kind of a change in the narrative or between different parts of the patient or between the values of the patient and the behaviors”

“anytime you see somebody avoiding a line of thinking, a way of saying something, or in many cases in the film, literally running away from an interviewer by making some kind of excuse, those are all good examples of psychological or interpersonal defenses”

“readying and guiding patients during interview is pretty much the key to you getting patients. any kind of diagnostic data. And it's kind of like, how good is your MRI, right? If your interviewing and therapy technique isn't good, then your MRI is going to be very low resolution”

“a lot of people think that dream analysis is the clinician interpreting the dream, but really it's up to the patient, right? So I just try to lead the patient and reflect on what do you think this could relate to in your life that's been stressing you out”

“the goal was to take out the emotion wheel and instead of saying like i'm experiencing anxiety we identified that they were experiencing rejection that they were experiencing loneliness um which are emotions that are productive and that can be acted on”

“I would say psychodynamic being more important for early onset traumas. I feel like that's an area where going pure CBT struggles. You know, there's actually a type of psychotherapy that seems to be more intended for people with multi-trauma, generational traumas or complex traumas called narrative exposure therapy”

“it superficially sounds like you're staying close to the material when you say does that remind you of someone from the past? Because it's like someone could argue, it's like, oh, I'm just making a connection. But you're not paying attention to the person's internal experience”

“venting itself is not actually helpful. It really bothers me when I see venting being documented as a psychotherapy intervention. The venting is not the operating procedure that actually helps people. It's the reflections you do”

“I do see people use psychodynamic and psychoanalytic concepts and abuse them in short bursts during psychiatric appointments”

“when I was anxious, I would feel pulled to explain what I was thinking or what I was doing rather than let the process unfold naturally because of the discomfort of sitting in silence”

“one thing that's important to notice is you hear this described as very narcissistically depleting in that this is not hot and sexy stuff where you're thinking of all these complex things”

“to the extent that someone may say they're doing a psychodynamic psychotherapy and all they've done is maybe read some Freud or done a class or two and they've never really been formally trained in the technique”

“it's not the first time you point it out. It's not the fifth time you point it out. It's the 10th time, a year and a half into treatment”

“the level system. Again, I do not recommend you do it in session. Don't think about the levels when you're in the session. It's for retrospective analysis only”