Approach

At DPPC, our mission is to help you get beyond merely coping with your symptoms. We specialize in depth psychotherapy approaches that address the underlying emotional root of your difficulties and shown by studies to be effective in reducing distressing psychological disorders and symptoms, and improving mental health. We are skilled in evidence-based approaches such as:

• Psychodynamic

• Emotion-focused and Experiential

• Attachment-based

• Relational

• Somatic

Our approach helps you uncover your unconscious and unhelpful ways of responding to your emotions and anxiety that keep you stuck in distress, overwhelm, isolation, and despair. Together, we can examine and understand these patterns that might have helped you in the past but no longer help you in your life now. By seeing and changing the unhelpful automatic patterns, you can address the underlying unresolved emotions and break away from past limitations to live with more fulfilling life.

Some of our clinicians also provide Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), an advanced form of psychodynamic psychotherapy. ISTDP and other short-term psychodynamic psychotherapies have been shown to be effective in significantly reducing symptoms for people who experience medically unexplained symptoms and treatment resistant disorders. 

We uphold our ethical duties to stay up-to-date about research outcomes of treatment effectiveness to inform our approach to provide you with the most effective care. Decades of research studies including recent studies have shown dynamic, emotion-focused, and experiential psychotherapies to have positive lasting effects for people with longstanding mental health symptoms that might not have responded to skills-based therapy approaches. ISTDP and other short-term psychodynamic psychotherapies have been shown to be effective in significantly reducing symptoms for people who experience medically unexplained symptoms and treatment resistant disorders. 

Please refer to the About Us page to see the types of services that each clinician provides.

What to expect

• The initial psychotherapy appointment could be 1 hour 45 minutes long (with 15 minutes reserved for documentation and case management) to 1 hour long depending on your clinician. We will talk about your problems and goals for therapy, and begin to explore your internal processes and patterns related to your problems to collaboratively develop a treatment plan. We will spend some time in the latter portion of the meeting to review your relevant history.

• Follow-up psychotherapy sessions are 50 minutes long (with 10 minutes reserved for documentation and case management).

• Although the frequency of sessions is typically once a week, this may vary depending on your needs and our agreed upon treatment plan.

• If you are coming from out of town, we can provide block treatment. Please contact us for more information. 

Treatment concerns

We work with a wide range of conditions and concerns including:

• Depression

• Anxiety

• Trauma

  • Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Complex Trauma, Attachment Trauma, Adjustment Disorder

• Medically Unexplained Symptoms, Functional Neurological Disorders / Conversion Disorder

  • e.g. chronic pain, chronic tension headaches, gastrointestinal syndromes/ IBS, migraines, pseudoseizures, functional paralysis

• Treatment Resistant Disorders

  • e.g. Treatment Resistant Depression

• Maladaptive behavioural coping patterns

  • e.g. Eating Disorders, Substance Use Problems, Obsessive-Compulsive tendencies

• Dissociation, depersonalization, derealization

• Personality disorders

• Relationship and Interpersonal difficulties

• Stress and burnout

We are also interested in working with people who have attempted skill-based therapies and have either failed to experience improvement and/or are now interested in getting to the core internal emotional underlying problem.

We welcome you to connect with us.