Psychotherapy is an invitation into a collaborative relationship that can facilitate a life-long process of personal growth and self-discovery. For many people, painful symptoms or difficult relationship patterns create the initial impulse to seek therapy, and at the beginning the desire for relief is a powerful motivator to keep returning. The primary insight of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, though, is that symptoms are meaningful communications from unconscious parts of ourselves calling out for a different kind of attention. In time, the focus begins to shift toward developing a new relationship with these parts, fostering curiosity and compassion for your inner experiences and for the necessary adaptations you have made throughout life to ensure your needs were met and you remained safe. As we look together at the roots of your difficulties, insights will develop into the ways that old solutions have been perpetuated in the present and new possibilities for more satisfying ways of being will begin to emerge.

The quality of our therapeutic relationship is particularly important because trust and safety allow deeper, unvoiced parts of ourselves to begin to find expression. Examining these hidden parts and feelings together takes great courage. When we are helped to bear the shame of private feelings, we begin to gain freedom from old, compulsive ways of being, and new, more authentic expressions of self become possible.