Approach · Psychodynamic Therapy
Psychodynamic Therapy
The families we grow up in teach us what love looks like, what conflict means and what we are allowed to need. Those lessons do not stay in childhood. Psychodynamic work looks at how they echo in the relationships you are in now.
In Person in Salt Lake City · Telehealth Anywhere in Utah
The Basics
The Past in the Present
Psychodynamic therapy is built on the idea that much of what drives our reactions sits just outside our awareness. We carry expectations formed long ago, about whether people can be relied on, whether anger is dangerous, whether our needs are a burden, and we tend to act on them without noticing that we are.
You might recognize this in a reaction that feels bigger than the moment calls for. A partner is ten minutes late and the hurt is out of all proportion. A manager gives mild feedback and you spend the weekend feeling like a failure. A family gathering turns you, within an hour, into the version of yourself you were at fifteen. These moments are often clues. Something older is being touched, and the present situation is carrying some of its weight.
The work is not about finding someone to blame. Parents and caregivers were usually doing what they could with what they had been given. The purpose of looking back is to understand the patterns well enough that you can make choices about them, rather than repeating them automatically.
Some of what gets explored is ordinary rather than dramatic: how affection was shown, how disagreements were handled, who was allowed to be upset and who was expected to keep the peace. Those everyday rules often shape adult relationships more than any single event.
The Systemic Part
Two Lenses Together
Athena is a licensed marriage and family therapist and works systemically. The systemic lens asks what is happening between people now: the cycles, roles and unspoken rules in a couple or household. The psychodynamic lens asks where each person learned the part they are playing. Used together, they give a fuller picture than either one alone.
Imagine a couple locked in a pattern where one partner pursues and the other withdraws. The systemic view describes the dance and how each move invites the next. The psychodynamic view adds that one partner may have grown up in a home where closeness had to be chased, and the other in a home where conflict was overwhelming and retreat was the safest option. Neither of them invented the pattern in this relationship. They each brought half of it with them.
Seeing that can change the tone of the work. The argument stops being only about who is right, and becomes a shared problem with a history that both people can understand.
It also tends to reduce shame. When a reaction is understood as something learned, for good reasons, in an earlier setting, it becomes easier to look at honestly and easier to change.
The Work
In Individual and Couples Sessions
In individual therapy, psychodynamic work often means following a present difficulty back to where it started. Sessions might explore the roles you held in your family growing up, the relationships that shaped your sense of what to expect from others, and the ways those expectations show up at work, with friends, or with a partner. Attention is also paid to what happens in the session itself, because the way someone relates to their therapist can reveal patterns that are hard to see from the inside.
In couples counseling, the family-of-origin questions are asked with both partners present. Each person gets to hear, sometimes for the first time, why certain moments land so hard for the other. That understanding tends to make room for more patience and more careful repair. This sits alongside the Gottman Method, which offers practical tools for the conflict itself.
In family therapy, the same ideas can help a household see patterns that have been passed down across generations, and decide which ones they want to keep.
Pace
How the Work Unfolds
Psychodynamic exploration can touch tender material, so pace matters. Nothing is pushed. You decide what to talk about and when, and the work stays connected to what you want to be different in your life now. Insight on its own is rarely the whole goal; it is most useful when it helps you respond differently the next time an old pattern starts.
Psychodynamic work sits alongside the other ways of working described on the approach page, and what to expect explains how the first sessions are structured.
Common Questions
Psychodynamic Therapy Questions
- Does psychodynamic therapy mean talking about my childhood for years?
- No. The past is explored because it helps explain the present, not as an end in itself. Sessions stay connected to what is happening in your life and relationships now, and the pace and length of the work are decided together.
- How is this different from the systemic approach?
- The systemic lens looks at the patterns between people in your life today. The psychodynamic lens looks at how earlier relationships, especially in your family of origin, shaped the expectations you bring into them. Athena draws on both, because each explains something the other misses.
- Can psychodynamic ideas be used in couples sessions?
- Yes. Partners often find that their most painful conflicts echo something older. Seeing that together can soften the argument. Couples sessions are 60 minutes at $250; individual sessions are 60 minutes at $200.
Start With the Contact Form
Start with a sentence about what brings you in. Send the contact form before anything is scheduled.