Myths
Myth #1
“The goal of dynamic therapy is to focus on my past childhood and gain insight into how my childhood impacts the way I am as an adult.”
Contrary to pop psychology, effective dynamic therapy is very much focused on addressing present day problems. Neither the goal nor the mechanism of change of dynamic therapy is to merely gain insight into how your childhood impacts the way you are as an adult. The goal is to help you address your current internal emotional difficulties. A dynamic therapist spends many years of ongoing training and supervision to learn how to collaboratively work with you to attend to your intrapersonal (intrapsychic conflicts), emotional states, and interpersonal dynamics in which these occur in a manner that helps you address your current day problems. When relevant, you might become aware of how your past experiences contributed to the problematic patterns.
Myth #2
“Isn’t dynamic therapy just blaming your parents for your problems?”
While our attachment experiences with our primary care givers do play a significant role in the development of our personality and ability to adjust to later life stressors, dynamic therapy does not encourage blaming or venting, as these mechanisms do not help you resolve your problems. Dynamic therapy helps you better understand how you have learned to cope with difficult attachment relationships and how these patterns might have persisted beyond their utility. Dynamic therapists help you address the complex emotions related to the relevant attachment ruptures that may have contributed to your patterns so you can move through life less burdened by old patterns that no longer serve you.
Myth #3
“If a therapist labels themselves as a psychodynamic/dynamic therapist, that means they are effectively practicing from a psychodynamic framework.”
Unfortunately, “psychodynamic” is not a regulated term so any therapist can call themselves psychodynamic whether or not they have had sufficient or any training in the practice of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Psychodynamic training involves both didactic learning but more importantly years of supervision of the therapist’s work. It can take years of ongoing supervision or consultation to obtain proficiency in being a psychodynamic therapist. At DPPC, all of our therapists undergo ongoing supervision or consultation of their psychodynamic work through reviewing video recordings of actual sessions to obtain the most effective training and maintain their proficiency.
Myth #4
“Will I be lying down on a couch and free associating during my sessions?”
Not at all. While some traditional psychoanalysts practice in this way, contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapy is very much about the active engagement between the client and the therapist. Effective dynamic therapy focuses on actively focusing on addressing your difficulties and does not encourage rumination into unrelated topics.
Learn more about how dynamic therapy can help you today:
ISTDP: https://www.dynamictherapy.ca/istdp
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: https://www.dynamictherapy.ca/psychodynamic-psychotherapy