How it works
Patients attend therapy sessions, lasting 50 minutes, once or twice a week, over a period of time. Therapy may be short term which ranges from 16 to 20 weeks, or longer term, which may be over several years. During treatment, we work towards building an effective therapeutic relationship, drawing upon a mutual understanding of the therapy process. We may use the therapy relationship to examine and explore repetitive interpersonal patterns, as well as unconscious feelings, emotions and symbolic material such as dreams, to gain a better understanding of your symptoms, or the problems which may be contributing to the difficulties which led you to seek help.
Psychodynamic theory considers that there may be a range of factors contributing to a person’s experiencing difficulties. These may include genetic and constitutional factors, but we also recognise the significance of early experience, relationships with parents, family members, sexuality, powerful emotions, trauma, deprivations, and the experience of loss. These experiences may well contribute to patterns laid down early in the person’s developing mind, and provide unconscious templates, or models of relationship. These unconscious patterns may contribute to the reasons for seeking help.
Your relationship with the therapist will hopefully provide a very different experience to previous relationships. Through this relationship, you are expected to gain a greater understanding of yourself and develop a greater capacity to express such experiences during the process of the therapy, and outside the therapy.
Having regular meetings over an extended period, in a therapeutic relationship where you feel able to express a range of experiences (including the feelings associated with such experiences), allows unconscious elements to emerge and supports you to gain new understandings of yourself and your experiences. Through this process, you will become aware of the role of unconscious influences over time, as we start to examine your experience occurring within the therapy process itself.
With such awareness, you should be in a better position to make conscious changes in your relationships with important others in your life.
The work may be painstaking for us both, and requires some degree of perseverance. When successful, however, the rewards are significant: you will become more able to engage in, or change previous patterns which were impacting your capacity to live more fully. You may experience a change in your sense of yourself, and in relation to significant others, your relationships within work contexts, and also your capacity for creativity. Success depends upon both the therapist and patient, and their ability to work together over time, for the process to lead to desired outcomes.
