Anxiety: A feeling of worry over something which might happen, has happened or a general feeling of dread which permeates our lives.

Anxiety can strike us at any time. Perhaps you have been aware of and lived with your anxiety your entire life or perhaps it has recently snuck up on you. Psychodynamic therapy can help by finding the cause of your anxiety, which is often an unresolved internal conflict, such as complex repressed feelings and then untangling them so they can be expressed and released. Sometimes anxiety arises from past trauma which has gone unprocessed, similarly Psychodynamic therapy aims to confront the trauma and allow it to be understood and expressed, again releasing the internal conflict.

Depression: A low mood, lack of motivation, sometimes a feeling of worthlessness.

Depression can go unnoticed for many years, sometimes we just live with it in the background of our lives. Depression presents very similarly to grief, the key difference being with depression there is no focus for your sadness, no obvious loss. Similarly to anxiety, depression can be a result of unexpressed feelings, often anger, being pushed down and kept to ourselves often because we don’t feel we are allowed to feel these feelings. Psychodynamic therapy works to find the root cause of the depression and understand why we have kept these feelings to ourselves.

Trauma: Experiencing frightening, upsetting and distressing events which are difficult to process or move on from.

We all experience traumatic events through our lives but depending on the gravity of the event and the support we receive following the event will depend on how well we have processed the trauma. The best predictor of whether someone will develop PTSD is not the level of trauma they experience in the moment but how much support they receive after. Often trauma comes with complex feelings about other relationships and other events in our lives: why didn’t they help me, why didn’t I do something different, why did this happen to me, am I to blame. We can often struggle to unpick our trauma from our sense of self and worry that if we give up our trauma we give up a part of us. Through Psychodynamic therapy we aim to work the trauma through and understand the trauma itself and the events and relationships surrounding it.

Anger Management: Unwanted feelings of anger directed towards those around us. Often the source of the anger is unknown to us.

Anger is one of the most misunderstood emotions. We often struggle to express our anger so bottle it up until it expresses itself in unhelpful ways. Sometimes we hold on to anger for many years until we’re no longer sure why we’re angry. Anger can also be used to hide other emotions from others and ourselves, sometimes we feel more able to express anger than we are to express guilt or shame. Psychodynamic therapy aims to find the root cause of our anger or to work out if we are angry at all, rather feeling guilty or ashamed about events in our past, once we understand the cause of the anger we can address it for what it is.

Self Harm: Hurting ourselves, sometimes as an expression of difficult feelings, memories or feeling overwhelmed.

When we cannot express ourselves verbally we find other ways to do so. Sometimes self harm is an expression of feeling or emotions we cannot find the words for, because we cannot keep them bottled up; they have to be expressed through our bodies. Another cause of self harm is the desire to be brought back to reality, when we are feeling particularly disconnected from others and ourselves we use self harm to try to reconnect and recentre ourselves with the world. Psychodynamic therapy aims to help you express what cannot be verbalised and remain centred by understanding the cause of and expressing the internal pain.

Addiction: the repetitive doing, taking or using something which we are unable to stop such as gambling, drinking or drugs.

Addiction can be understood as a coping mechanism, a way of trying to self soothe when we cannot do this ourselves and cannot be soothed by others. Psychodynamic therapy aims to understand and resolve the underlying pain or conflict whilst understanding why someone is unable to soothe or emotionally regulate themselves, building these skills and reducing the reliance on external gratification.

Support for an existing diagnosis of a personality disorder (such as Borderline Personality Disorder, Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder), an eating disorder, bipolar disorder, PTSD or another diagnosis.