Psychodynamic Attachment based Psychotherapy in East Vancouver, Mount Pleasant & online across BC
This work is depth-oriented both psychodynamic and attachment-focused, for people looking for more than symptom relief: real, lasting change in how you relate to yourself and others.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a depth-oriented approach that explores the unconscious patterns, beliefs, and relational and attachment experiences shaping how we feel and live today. Long before we had words for it, we were already building an inner world and a map of who we are, what to expect from others, and how safe it is to need. That map was drawn in our earliest experiences, shaped by whether our needs were welcome, whether we were understood and emotionally held, as well as our identifications with main characters in our life and our culture. These internal maps travel with us into every situation, showing up in our emotions and the patterns we keep finding ourselves in.
By making what was formed below conscious thought visible, psychodynamic therapy allows it to be understood and gradually changed. Research consistently shows the gains last, and we often continue to grow long after therapy ends.
Avoidant patterns can show up as workaholism, or absorption in any other kind of busy-ness, as a way to avoid the overwhelm of relational conflict, including conflict itself, which often looks like withdrawal or denial of emotional need or vulnerability. Emotional avoidance is a learnt strategy that helped the avoidant individual in their family of origin.
Therapy brings clarity to how this strategy is playing out in the moment-to-moment of thoughts and emotions, and builds the resilience to stay with emotions and accept and communicate their needs.
Anxious patterns can show as worrisome awareness of others’ reactions and moods, and finding signs of rejection or abandonment in them. Attachment anxiety can show as overthinking social interactions and needing constant reassurance and validation amid the other person’s pattern of support and availability.
Therapy brings clarity to how this strategy is playing out in the moment-to-moment of thoughts and emotions, and helps heal wounds and internal presentations of self that are contributing to the relational anxiety.
Some people move between both patterns, pulling close, then pulling away, sometimes in the same day. This push-pull pattern often comes from relationships where the people we depended on were also, at times, frightening or unpredictable. This work helps make sense of the push-pull, rather than treating it as a contradiction to fix.
This therapy is relational and conversational, and the process itself is part of how change happens.
In psychodynamic therapy, the therapist does not follow a fixed protocol. Instead, she provides a relational space that can receive and help process difficult emotional experience. Within that space, hidden beliefs come to the surface and aspects of the self that were suppressed or never fully developed find room to grow.
Emotional atunement and relational depth are cornerstones of this approach. .The therapeutic relationship itself becomes part of the work. It gives the client the grounding to reach their own emotional depth, and to begin testing the beliefs that have been holding them back.
In each therapy session we tend to content that you bring to the session. This may be your story of what is bringing you pain, or a piece of your thoughts in between sessions, or the report of the week. We follow your feelings and mind through what you bring to each session, watching, meditating and feeling together. Through these meanderings, we become aware of how you think and feel, and what is holding you back.
Psychodynamic therapy aims to understand the underlying inner world and beliefs that shape your experience. Based on your experience the focus of the work may be therapy for anxiety, mood, self esteem, or relationships. Most frequently therapy addresses all these aspects in varing degrees.
The underlying principles of the work are the following mechanisms:
We pay close attention to the full range of what you feel, including what is contradictory, troubling, or hard to name, allowing the mind to integrate and work it through.
We all do things, knowingly and unknowingly to avoid what is painful. We make those visible, with curiosity rather than judgment, and let them slowly unravel.
Early attachment wounds are coded in in the nervous system and the mind. As you feel genuinely understood and held with consistency, something shifts at a felt level.
Discover how psychodynamic attachment based therapy in Vancouver can help you feel more connected to yourself and others.
Offices in East Vancouver and East Kitsilano
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is the only type of therapy that does not frame you in a box, but attempts to understand you with all your uniqueness. Over time you can find:
Therapy is not only a method. It is also a relationship. What you will find in our work together is a space that is:
• thoughtful
• emotionally grounded
• attentive to complexity
I am specialized in depth-oriented and attachment-informed psychotherapy.
I have a Masters in Counseling Psychology and I am a Registered Clinical Counsellor (# 21215). I work in person in Vancouver, BC and Virtual across all BC.
The patterns you live inside were learned which means they can be unlearned.
If you’re ready to understand what’s been running beneath the surface, I’d be glad to begin that conversation with you.
Offices in East Vancouver and East Kitsilano
CBT focuses on changing unhelpful thought patterns in the present. Psychodynamic therapy goes a layer deeper, exploring how past experiences and unconscious patterns and beliefs shape how you feel today, using the relationship with your therapist as part of the healing process.
You will find some clarity and stability after 3-4 sessions, 10-15 sessions can afford you a deeper understanding and change. For long standing issues and trauma, longer term therapy will be needed for lasting change.
Yes, quite often ADHD is a side-effect of childhood trauma. If that is your case, Psychodynamic therapy helps relieve the anxiety and overwhelm that you experience over time.
Unlike traditional psychoanalysis, modern psychodynamic therapy is less focused on helping people recover repressed memories. The focus is on present experience, and the past comes into view only as much as it helps to understand the emotions, conflicts, and patterns currently at work.