Psychodynamic Therapy in Oakland, CA
How I Integrate Psychodynamic Therapy.
Do you offer Psychodynamic Depth Therapy?
Yes! Psychodynamic therapy is the foundation of my work as a therapist in Oakland, CA. I use a psychodynamic, relational approach to help you understand not just what you are struggling with, but why these particular patterns keep showing up in your life.
Sometimes you know exactly what you should do, but somehow keep doing something else. You understand your childhood, but still find yourself reacting to your partner in ways you don't like. You can explain your anxiety perfectly, but that doesn't make it go away. Or you keep finding yourself in the same kinds of relationships, conflicts, or emotional loops and can't quite figure out why.
Psychodynamic therapy looks beneath the surface. Together, we explore the patterns, beliefs, defenses, relationships, and experiences that have shaped the way you understand yourself and other people.
But going deep doesn't mean spending years talking about your childhood without anything changing in the present.
I believe therapy can be both deep and practical. We can explore the roots of a pattern while also developing concrete ways to regulate emotions, communicate more effectively, set boundaries, understand your needs, and respond differently when old patterns get activated.
Depending on what you need, I may integrate psychodynamic therapy with EMDR, IFS parts work, mindfulness, somatic techniques, attachment-based approaches, and DBT skills. The goal isn't to force you into one particular therapeutic method. It's to understand what is happening beneath the surface and then use the tools that actually help.
“The overarching theme among psychodynamic approaches to helping people is that the more honest we are with ourselves, the better our chances for living a satisfying and useful life.”
What Is Psychodynamic Therapy?
Psychodynamic therapy is based on the idea that there is more happening beneath our conscious awareness than we realize. Our current thoughts, emotions, relationships, and behaviors are shaped by earlier experiences, internal conflicts, attachment relationships, and ways we learned to protect ourselves. Psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy share a focus on the unconscious, relationships, and patterns shaped by our past, with psychodynamic therapy taking a more flexible, contemporary approach.
That doesn't mean everything is secretly about your childhood.
It means that sometimes the present makes more sense when we understand the history underneath it.
Psychodynamic therapy can help you explore questions like:
Why do I keep repeating the same patterns even when I know better?
Why do certain situations affect me so intensely?
Why is it so difficult for me to ask for what I need?
Why do I become anxious, controlling, avoidant, angry, or shut down in certain relationships?
Why do I understand myself intellectually but still feel stuck?
What am I protecting myself from?
What feelings are difficult for me to tolerate?
Where did I learn that I had to be this way?
What do I actually want, underneath what I think I should want?
Core Concepts
Unconscious Patterns: We don't always have conscious access to the forces shaping our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Therapy can help bring these patterns into awareness so you have more choice about how you respond.
Early Relationships: Our experiences with caregivers and other important relationships can influence how we understand ourselves, other people, intimacy, conflict, trust, and safety.
Defense Mechanisms: Defenses aren't bad habits that need to be eliminated. They are ways we learned to protect ourselves from feelings or experiences that once felt overwhelming, dangerous, or impossible to manage. Therapy helps us understand what a defense is doing for you and whether you still need it in the same way.
Repetition: We sometimes recreate familiar emotional patterns without realizing it. Understanding what keeps a pattern going can create an opportunity to do something different.
The Therapeutic Relationship: What happens between us in therapy can provide important information about how you experience other relationships. Together, we can notice these patterns with curiosity rather than judgment.
The Process
Understanding the Pattern: We start by looking at what brings you to therapy and identifying the patterns that seem most important. What keeps happening? What triggers it? What do you tend to do next?
Exploring What's Beneath It: We slow things down and become curious about the emotions, beliefs, fears, fantasies, and assumptions underneath the pattern.
Connecting Past and Present: We may explore earlier relationships and experiences when they help illuminate something happening in your life now. The point isn't simply to remember the past. It's to understand how the past may still be living in the present.
Noticing What Happens Between Us: Sometimes the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a useful place to understand your relational patterns. We might notice when you feel misunderstood, judged, disappointed, dependent, responsible for me, or reluctant to tell me something.
Building New Possibilities: Insight is useful when it creates more freedom. As you understand your patterns, we work toward having more choices in how you respond, relate, communicate, and care for yourself.
Deep Work + Practical Tools
Psychodynamic therapy doesn't have to mean choosing between insight and action.
I often integrate depth-oriented work with practical interventions depending on what you're struggling with.
For emotional overwhelm: We might use mindfulness, grounding, or DBT skills while exploring what makes certain emotions feel so difficult to experience.
For trauma: We might incorporate EMDR or IFS parts work to help process experiences that continue to affect you.
For relationship patterns: We can examine attachment dynamics, defenses, communication patterns, and the expectations you bring into relationships.
For people who overthink: We can explore the emotional function of analysis itself. Sometimes understanding everything intellectually can become a way of staying safely away from what you actually feel.
For people who struggle with boundaries or people-pleasing: We can explore where the need to accommodate others comes from while practicing more direct ways of expressing needs and limits.
For people who feel stuck despite knowing themselves well: We can look at the difference between knowing something intellectually and being able to experience and respond to it differently.
What Psychodynamic Therapy Can Help With
Psychodynamic therapy can be useful for many different concerns, including:
Anxiety and chronic worry
Relationship difficulties
Attachment and intimacy
Trauma and complex trauma
Shame and low self-worth
People-pleasing and over-functioning
Perfectionism
Emotional overwhelm
Repeating relationship patterns
Difficulty identifying or expressing needs
Identity exploration
Grief and loss
Sexuality and sexual concerns
Queer and LGBTQ+ experiences
Feeling stuck despite years of self-reflection
“Psychoanalytic therapy is a shared, collaborative endeavor between two human beings, neither of whom has privileged access to the truth of another’s experience.”
What Does Psychodynamic Therapy Feel Like?
Curious: We pay attention to what is happening beneath the obvious explanation.
Collaborative: I'm not sitting across from you with a clipboard trying to decode you. We figure things out together.
Relational: Your relationships matter, including the relationship we develop in therapy.
Emotionally honest: We make room for feelings that can be uncomfortable, contradictory, embarrassing, or difficult to put into words.
Practical: Understanding yourself is important. So is figuring out what to actually do differently.
Nonjudgmental: We can be curious about your defenses and patterns without treating them as character flaws. Most of the things that frustrate you about yourself developed for a reason.
“Many years of work go into learning to see what stands before our eyes.”