Psychodynamic psychotherapy 

Psychodynamic psychotherapy can help you gain insights into your feelings and thoughts that contribute to your behaviors. It also facilitates to understand one’s unconscious motivations, which have an impact on how one feels, thinks, and acts. It can lead to self-reflection, self-awareness, insight, and emotional growth. Through this process, you will become better at managing your emotions and will develop coping skills that will help you now and into the future. 

Through their search of the PsycLit database, Blagys and Hilsenroth (2000) have identified the following seven features that distinguish psychodynamic psychotherapy from other therapies. (Blagys and Hilsenroth 2000. Distinctive activities of short-term psychodynamic-interpersonal psychotherapy: A review of the comparative psychotherapy process literature. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 7, 167–188.)

1) It encourages expression of full range of emotions.

2) The therapist focuses on attempts to avoid distressing feelings and thoughts and explores them.

3) The therapist works to explore recurring themes and patterns in feelings, thoughts, relationships, and life experiences.

4) Past experiences are discussed because they affect our experience of the present. 

5) It places emphasis on interpersonal relations. 

6) The therapist focuses on the therapy relationship because repetitive themes in one’s relationships emerge in the therapy relation. 

7) It encourages people to freely speak about whatever comes to their minds.