ISTDP Therapy
What happens when you seek Psychodynamic Therapy with me?
Therapy sessions with me tend to be intense. I work best with people who suffer from long-standing pain in their life and want to create radical change.
Using Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), I help otherwise high-functioning people overcome anxiety, depression, and relationship difficulties.
Conceptually, the process is simple. First, I become highly attuned to your anxiety second to second during the session. When anxiety gets too high, we will work to regulate it at the moment. We then analyze and clarify what caused your anxiety to spike at that moment.
Second, I acquaint you with the (largely unconscious) defenses you use in our time together. These defenses prevent you from experiencing your feelings fully and engaging in authentic relationships, both with me and important people in your life.
Once I familiarize you with your defenses, we elucidate how those behaviors are hurtful to you. I then invite you to do something better for yourself.
Finally, I encourage you to feel your feelings fully so that you can have better information about what it is that you truly want in life, as well as the motivation to pursue those desires.
During sessions, you can expect to experience intense feelings. Those feelings will allow you to trust that whatever life throws your way, you’ll have the necessary tools to handle it.
You will be happy again, know what you want in relationships, and get better at picking friends and partners who are more suitable with who you are and what you want.
Our first session starts with a conversation.
When you enter treatment, I will ask you about the problem you want to address. Articulating what you need may be easy for you. If that’s the case, great, we can move on to figuring out a specific example of where that’s a problem for you.
But you may find that it’s quite difficult for you to articulate an internal, emotional problem. You may have a general sense of what you don’t want but not be sure what you DO want. Or you may have a sense of what you want, but it will feel terrifying to articulate your feelings.
You might become vague so that I can’t get a clear sense of your problem. Or perhaps as we begin, I will notice that you start to hold your breath, that you stop yourself mid-sentence repeatedly, and that you undo your utterances by saying, “I don’t know.”
Next, we work in the moment to fill the distance between us.
We will begin to see the specific ways that you hold me – a person whose help you want, but also whose help you are terrified of receiving – at a distance.
When you hold me at a distance, you make it impossible to get to know you and impossible for me to advise you. We will begin to explore if this is a pattern.
Working moment by moment, I acquaint you with how you are enacting old relationship patterns in your relationship with me. Once you can see how you do this, you can begin to make a conscious choice to do something different.
But often, choosing to do something different is quite scary.
Why is it so scary to make changes?
ISTDP focuses on attachment and the emotional effects of broken attachments. Most of my patients experienced profound ruptures in early relationships with important caretakers. Because you were young when this happened, you needed help processing the immense feelings these early disruptions caused. But you didn’t get this help.
Instead, you learned messed up ways of coping.
You learned that your feelings could make your parents too anxious, upset, or even angry. You became adept at hiding your feelings from others, and sometimes you became proficient at hiding your feelings from yourself.
Unfortunately, these feelings about early caretakers didn’t go away. They became blocked and avoided. Later life events stir up these feelings, activating anxiety and defensiveness.
ISTDP therapists take an active role in your therapy.
ISTDP shares roots with psychoanalysis. Like analysts, ISTDP therapists are interested in how perceptions, past events, feelings about events, and distorted beliefs affect a person’s present.
A significant difference is that ISTDP therapists take an active role in the therapeutic process.
If you are ready to take charge of your life and want to be more chill, happier, and have infinitely more pleasurable relationships, please reach out to me. Pick up your phone and call me at (917) 687-8445.