Psychodynamic Therapy
Understanding unconscious patterns, early experiences, and relational dynamics to create lasting change
Explore Psychodynamic TherapyWhat Is Psychodynamic Therapy?
Psychodynamic therapy is a depth-oriented approach that explores how unconscious patterns, past experiences, and internal conflicts shape your present-day thoughts, feelings, and relationships. Rooted in psychoanalytic theory but adapted for modern therapeutic practice, psychodynamic therapy helps you understand the deeper "why" behind your struggles.
Unlike approaches that focus solely on symptoms or behaviors, psychodynamic therapy examines the underlying psychological processes—the patterns you developed early in life, the defenses you use to protect yourself, the ways you relate to others, and the emotions you might not even realize you're avoiding. This deeper understanding creates lasting change rather than temporary symptom relief.
At Sagebrush Counseling, we integrate psychodynamic principles with other evidence-based approaches including attachment-based therapy, emotionally focused therapy, parts work, and Jungian therapy. This integrative approach provides both depth and practical tools for change.
Core Principles of Psychodynamic Therapy
The fundamental concepts that guide psychodynamic understanding
The Unconscious Matters
Much of what drives your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors operates outside conscious awareness. Patterns formed in childhood, unresolved conflicts, and defended-against emotions influence you without your realizing it. Psychodynamic therapy brings these unconscious processes into awareness.
Early Experiences Shape You
Your relationships with early caregivers create internal templates for how you expect relationships to work, who you believe you are, and what you deserve. Understanding these formative experiences helps you recognize how past patterns show up in present relationships.
Defenses Protect and Limit
Everyone develops psychological defenses—strategies to protect against emotional pain. While these defenses once served you, they often create problems in adult life. Understanding your defensive patterns allows you to make conscious choices rather than automatic reactions.
Patterns Repeat
Without awareness, you tend to recreate familiar relationship patterns, even when they're painful. You might choose similar partners, trigger the same conflicts, or experience familiar feelings across different relationships. Recognizing these repetitions creates opportunities for change.
Emotions Carry Information
Feelings aren't random—they provide crucial information about your needs, boundaries, and unresolved experiences. Psychodynamic therapy helps you understand what emotions are communicating rather than just trying to change or eliminate them.
The Therapeutic Relationship Is Key
How you relate to your therapist often mirrors how you relate to others. This relationship becomes a safe space to notice patterns, try new ways of connecting, and experience being understood without judgment.
Key Psychodynamic Concepts
Understanding the mechanisms that shape your psychological experience
Defense Mechanisms
Unconscious strategies to protect against anxiety
Repression, denial, projection, intellectualization, displacement—these unconscious strategies keep threatening emotions or thoughts out of awareness. While protective, they often create problems by distorting reality or limiting emotional availability.
Transference
Transferring feelings from the past onto present relationships
You unconsciously relate to people in your current life as if they were important figures from your past. This explains why you might have strong emotional reactions that seem disproportionate to the situation—you're responding to old patterns, not just present reality.
Internal Working Models
Mental templates for how relationships function
Based on early attachment experiences, you develop expectations about whether people are trustworthy, available, or safe. These models operate automatically, influencing who you choose, how you behave in relationships, and what you expect from others.
Conflict and Ambivalence
Holding contradictory feelings simultaneously
Internal conflicts—wanting both closeness and distance, feeling love and resentment, desiring change while fearing it—are normal. Psychodynamic therapy helps you tolerate ambivalence rather than splitting experiences into all-good or all-bad.
Resistance
Unconscious opposition to change
Even when you consciously want change, parts of you resist it because change feels threatening. Understanding resistance as protective rather than oppositional allows you to work with it rather than fight against yourself.
Repetition Compulsion
Recreating familiar patterns, even painful ones
There's an unconscious tendency to repeat familiar experiences, seeking to master old traumas or make sense of confusing early relationships. This explains why you might find yourself in similar situations repeatedly despite conscious intentions to change.
How Psychodynamic Therapy Works
The therapeutic process of uncovering unconscious patterns and creating change
Exploration and Inquiry
Rather than providing quick answers or techniques, psychodynamic therapy involves collaborative exploration. You'll examine patterns across your life, explore difficult emotions, and investigate what might be operating outside your awareness.
- Talk freely about whatever comes to mind
- Explore dreams, fantasies, and seemingly random thoughts
- Examine patterns across different relationships and life situations
- Notice what you avoid talking about or feeling
Making the Unconscious Conscious
The therapist helps you notice patterns you haven't seen, feelings you've avoided, and ways your past influences your present. This increased awareness creates choice—you can't change what you don't know exists.
- Recognize automatic thoughts and emotional reactions
- Understand the origins of current patterns
- Identify defenses and how they limit you
- Connect present struggles to past experiences
Working Through
Understanding isn't enough—patterns need to be worked through repeatedly in different contexts. As you encounter the same patterns in new situations, you develop deeper insight and the ability to respond differently.
- Notice patterns as they arise in real-time
- Experience and express previously defended-against emotions
- Try new ways of relating within the therapeutic relationship
- Challenge old beliefs about yourself and others
Integration and Change
Over time, increased awareness, emotional processing, and new relational experiences create lasting personality change. You develop more flexibility, emotional depth, and authenticity in relationships.
- Make conscious choices rather than automatic reactions
- Relate to others based on who they are, not who they represent
- Access a fuller range of emotions without being overwhelmed
- Create more satisfying, authentic relationships
Integrating Psychodynamic Therapy with Other Approaches
How psychodynamic principles enhance and deepen other therapeutic modalities
With Attachment-Based Therapy
Psychodynamic therapy naturally integrates with attachment theory—both examine how early relationships create internal working models. This combination provides both theoretical framework and practical attachment repair work.
Learn more about Attachment-Based Therapy →With Emotionally Focused Therapy
While EFT focuses on present emotion and attachment needs in couples, psychodynamic understanding helps explain why certain patterns developed and what they represent from the past, creating deeper relational change.
Learn more about Emotionally Focused Therapy →With Parts Work
Parts work and psychodynamic therapy share the understanding that the psyche is multi-faceted. Psychodynamic concepts like defense mechanisms, internal conflicts, and developmental experiences enrich parts work practice.
Learn more about Parts Work →With Jungian Therapy
Both psychodynamic and Jungian approaches value the unconscious, symbolic meaning, and depth exploration. Jungian concepts like the shadow, archetypes, and individuation add spiritual and collective dimensions to psychodynamic work.
Learn more about Jungian Therapy →What Psychodynamic Therapy Helps With
Issues that benefit from depth exploration and unconscious work
Relationship Patterns
Repeatedly choosing similar partners, recreating familiar dynamics, or experiencing the same conflicts across different relationships.
Depression
Understanding the roots of persistent sadness, exploring defended-against anger or grief, and addressing underlying losses or disappointments.
Anxiety
Uncovering what anxiety protects against, understanding unconscious conflicts that create worry, and exploring attachment-related fears.
Identity Issues
Questions about who you are, feeling inauthentic, or living according to others' expectations rather than your own values and desires.
Trauma and Early Wounds
Processing childhood experiences, understanding how early trauma affects current functioning, and healing developmental injuries.
Self-Sabotage
Unconscious patterns of undermining yourself, fear of success, or guilt about having more than family members had.
Intimacy Difficulties
Fear of closeness, difficulty trusting, or patterns of pushing people away when relationships deepen.
Chronic Emptiness
Persistent feelings of hollowness, difficulty knowing what you want, or sense of going through the motions without meaning.
Defensive Patterns
Over-intellectualizing emotions, denying problems, projecting feelings onto others, or other rigid defensive strategies.
Unresolved Grief
Losses that weren't processed, complicated bereavement, or difficulty moving forward after significant endings.
Career and Achievement Issues
Underachievement despite ability, fear of outshining parents, or conflicts about success and ambition.
Feeling Stuck
Chronic patterns that won't change despite efforts, resistance to growth, or sense of being trapped in old ways of being.
Who Benefits from Psychodynamic Therapy
This approach is particularly valuable for those seeking deeper self-understanding
Those Seeking Depth Understanding
You want to understand the "why" behind your patterns, not just change surface behaviors. You're curious about unconscious processes and willing to explore difficult material.
People with Recurring Patterns
You find yourself in similar situations repeatedly—same relationship problems, same emotional struggles—and want to understand and change these patterns at a deeper level.
Those Healing from Childhood
You recognize that early experiences still affect you and want to work through developmental wounds, attachment injuries, or family-of-origin issues.
Individuals Wanting Personality Change
You seek lasting personality development, not just symptom reduction. You want to become more authentic, flexible, and emotionally available.
Those Comfortable with Complexity
You're willing to tolerate ambiguity, sit with difficult emotions, and accept that change takes time. You value depth over quick fixes.
People in Long-Term Therapy
You're committed to ongoing therapeutic work and recognize that deeper change requires time, patience, and willingness to explore unconscious material.
Ready to Explore Deeper Patterns?
Psychodynamic therapy can help you understand unconscious processes, heal early wounds, and create lasting personality change.
Contact Sagebrush Counseling