Your current struggles often have roots in unconscious patterns, early experiences, and unrecognized emotional conflicts. At Better Lives Building Tribes, we offer psychodynamic therapy that explores these deeper dimensions of your psyche, fostering insight and lasting change that emerges from genuine self-understanding rather than symptom management alone.

Understanding Psychodynamic Therapy

Psychodynamic therapy, rooted in psychoanalytic theory but adapted for modern practice, explores how unconscious processes, past experiences, and relational patterns influence your current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Unlike approaches focusing primarily on present symptoms and conscious thoughts, psychodynamic therapy investigates what lies beneath the surface, seeking to understand the “why” behind your experiences.

This approach recognizes that many of your difficulties stem from conflicts outside conscious awareness, defenses protecting you from painful feelings, or patterns learned early in life that no longer serve you but persist automatically. By bringing these unconscious processes into awareness, you gain freedom to choose different responses rather than remaining trapped in automatic patterns.

Core Principles of Psychodynamic Therapy

Several foundational concepts guide psychodynamic work:

The Unconscious Mind: Much of mental life operates outside conscious awareness. Thoughts, feelings, memories, and motivations you’re unaware of significantly influence your behavior, relationships, and wellbeing.

Childhood Experiences Shape Adult Patterns: Early relationships, especially with primary caregivers, profoundly influence how you see yourself, relate to others, and navigate the world. Patterns formed in childhood often repeat in adult life.

Defense Mechanisms: Your psyche develops automatic strategies for managing anxiety, painful feelings, or threatening thoughts. While defenses protect you, they can also limit your emotional experience and create problems when overused or misapplied.

Transference and Countertransference: You unconsciously transfer feelings and patterns from past relationships onto current relationships, including your relationship with your therapist. Examining these transfers provides valuable insight into your relational patterns.

Resistance: Even though you consciously want to change, unconscious forces may resist change that threatens your psychological defenses or sense of identity. Exploring resistance itself becomes therapeutic.

Internal Conflict: Much suffering stems from conflicts between different aspects of yourself, contradictory desires, or incompatible beliefs operating outside awareness.

How Psychodynamic Therapy Works

Unlike brief, structured therapies targeting specific symptoms, psychodynamic therapy unfolds more organically over time. The process includes:

Free Association: You’re encouraged to say whatever comes to mind without censoring thoughts or worrying about making sense. This free-flowing expression allows unconscious material to surface.

Exploration of Emotions: Rather than just identifying emotions, psychodynamic therapy explores their nuances, contradictions, and underlying layers. What feels like anger might cover hurt; apparent indifference might mask intense caring.

Pattern Recognition: Together, we identify recurring themes in your relationships, reactions, and life circumstances. Repetitive patterns that seem like bad luck often reflect unconscious reenactments of early experiences.

Making the Unconscious Conscious: Through interpretation and exploration, unconscious processes gradually become conscious. This awareness itself is therapeutic, providing choice where automatic reactions previously dominated.

Working Through: Insight alone isn’t enough. Psychodynamic therapy includes working through, repeatedly examining patterns from different angles, in different contexts, until change becomes integrated at a deep level.

Analysis of Defenses: We explore how you protect yourself from difficult feelings and examine whether these defenses still serve you or have become obstacles to wellbeing.

Common Defense Mechanisms

Everyone uses psychological defenses, often unconsciously. Common defenses include:

Repression: Pushing threatening thoughts or memories out of conscious awareness entirely.

Denial: Refusing to acknowledge painful realities or feelings.

Projection: Attributing your own unacceptable thoughts or feelings to others.

Rationalization: Creating seemingly logical explanations for behavior actually motivated by unconscious factors.

Intellectualization: Focusing on abstract thinking to avoid experiencing emotions.

Displacement: Redirecting feelings from their true object to a safer target.

Reaction Formation: Expressing the opposite of what you unconsciously feel.

Sublimation: Channeling unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable activities.

Defenses aren’t inherently bad; they developed to protect you. Psychodynamic therapy helps you recognize when defenses cause problems and develop more adaptive ways of managing difficult feelings.

The Role of the Therapeutic Relationship

In psychodynamic therapy, the relationship between you and your therapist is itself a primary vehicle for change. This differs from approaches where the therapist simply delivers techniques.

Transference: You’ll inevitably bring patterns from past relationships into therapy, perhaps seeing me as critical like a parent, or expecting me to abandon you like previous losses. Rather than correcting these perceptions, we explore them as windows into your inner world and relational patterns.

Real Relationship: Beyond transference, we also develop a genuine relationship. This authentic connection provides a corrective emotional experience, demonstrating relationships can be different than what you’ve known.

Safe Space for Exploration: The therapeutic relationship provides safety to express feelings, thoughts, and aspects of yourself you might hide from others or even from yourself.

Model for Other Relationships: As you experience being genuinely seen, accepted, and understood in therapy, this shifts your expectations and capacity for intimacy in other relationships.

What Makes Psychodynamic Therapy Unique

Several features distinguish psychodynamic therapy from other approaches:

Depth Over Symptom Relief: While symptoms often improve, the primary goal is fundamental personality change and self-understanding rather than just symptom reduction. This deeper work often leads to more lasting transformation.

Open-Ended Exploration: Rather than following a structured protocol, sessions evolve based on what emerges. This allows for discovery of issues you didn’t know needed addressing.

Emphasis on Emotional Experience: Psychodynamic therapy values actually feeling emotions in session, not just talking about them intellectually. Emotional experience drives change.

Attention to Complexity and Ambivalence: Rather than pushing toward resolution, psychodynamic therapy tolerates ambiguity, recognizing you can simultaneously hold contradictory feelings and desires.

Focus on Meaning-Making: This approach helps you create coherent narratives about your experiences, integrating fragmented or confusing aspects of your life into meaningful understanding.

Duration and Format of Psychodynamic Therapy

Psychodynamic therapy typically unfolds over a longer timeframe than brief therapies:

Short-Term Psychodynamic Therapy: Focused psychodynamic treatments can address specific issues in 12-24 sessions by targeting circumscribed conflicts or patterns.

Long-Term Psychodynamic Therapy: More comprehensive character change and resolution of complex issues typically requires a year or more of weekly sessions. This longer format allows deeper work and more thorough integration of changes.

Session Frequency: Traditional psychoanalysis occurred multiple times weekly, but contemporary psychodynamic therapy usually meets once or twice weekly.

Open-Ended Versus Time-Limited: While some psychodynamic therapy is time-limited, it often proceeds without predetermined end dates, concluding when you and I agree therapeutic goals have been achieved.

Issues Psychodynamic Therapy Addresses

While psychodynamic therapy can help with most mental health concerns, it particularly suits certain situations:

Chronic or Recurring Patterns: When you find yourself repeatedly in similar difficult situations (relationships, work problems, etc.) despite consciously wanting different outcomes.

Identity and Self-Understanding: Questions about who you are, what you want, or feeling disconnected from authentic self.

Relationship Difficulties: Patterns of choosing problematic partners, difficulty with intimacy, or repeating dysfunctional dynamics.

Personality Issues: Long-standing patterns in how you relate to others, view yourself, and experience emotions.

Emptiness or Meaninglessness: Feeling life lacks purpose or meaning despite outward success.

Complex Trauma: When trauma’s impacts are deeply woven into personality and relationships, requiring more than symptom-focused treatment.

Resistance to Change: When you know what you should do but can’t seem to do it, or when previous therapies haven’t created lasting change.

The Process of Psychodynamic Therapy

While less structured than some approaches, psychodynamic therapy follows a general progression:

Early Phase: Building the therapeutic relationship, establishing safety, beginning to explore presenting concerns and life history. You learn how psychodynamic therapy works.

Middle Phase: Deeper exploration of unconscious patterns, defenses, and conflicts. Transference emerges and becomes material for analysis. Resistance may intensify as threatened defenses fight against change. Insights develop about how past shapes present.

Working Through: Repeatedly examining patterns from new angles, applying insights to various life situations, and gradually integrating changes at deeper levels.

Termination: Ending therapy itself becomes therapeutic work, providing opportunity to process separation, loss, and autonomy differently than in past. Properly concluded psychodynamic therapy includes explicit work on ending.

Research Supporting Psychodynamic Therapy

While psychodynamic approaches were historically criticized for lacking research support, extensive studies now demonstrate effectiveness:

• Long-term benefits that continue growing after therapy ends, unlike some approaches where gains plateau
• Effectiveness for depression comparable to CBT and medication
• Particular efficacy for personality disorders and complex presentations
• Improvements in overall functioning and quality of life beyond symptom reduction
• Changes in personality structure and relationship patterns

Meta-analyses show effect sizes for psychodynamic therapy rival or exceed those of other empirically supported treatments.

Combining Psychodynamic Therapy with Other Approaches

At Better Lives Building Tribes, we integrate psychodynamic understanding with other modalities when beneficial. You might receive:

• Psychodynamic exploration of unconscious patterns
• CBT skills for managing specific symptoms
• EMDR for processing trauma
• Mindfulness practices for present-moment awareness

This integration honors psychodynamic therapy’s depth while providing practical tools when needed.

Is Psychodynamic Therapy Right for You?

Psychodynamic therapy might be particularly suitable if you:

• Want to understand yourself more deeply, not just reduce symptoms
• Notice recurring patterns you can’t seem to change
• Feel curious about unconscious processes and early experiences
• Value emotional exploration and can tolerate ambiguity
• Are willing to commit to longer-term work
• Find brief, structured therapies haven’t created lasting change
• Want to explore not just what you do but why you do it

However, psychodynamic therapy may not be ideal if you:

• Need immediate symptom relief for crisis situations
• Prefer structured, directive approaches
• Want brief, time-limited treatment
• Feel uncomfortable with emotional exploration or examining past

Why Choose Psychodynamic Therapy at Better Lives Building Tribes

Dr. Meaghan Rice provides psychodynamic therapy rooted in genuine curiosity about your inner world. We create space for deep exploration while maintaining awareness of your present needs and circumstances.

Our psychodynamic approach offers:

• A safe, non-judgmental space for exploring all aspects of yourself
• Integration of psychodynamic understanding with practical interventions when helpful
• Attention to both insight and emotional experience
• Flexibility in length and format based on your needs and goals
• A genuine therapeutic relationship as vehicle for change

Begin Your Journey of Self-Discovery

If you’re tired of surface-level changes that don’t last, if you sense there’s more beneath your struggles than meets the eye, if you want to understand yourself more fully rather than just manage symptoms, psychodynamic therapy offers a path to profound transformation.

This work requires courage, the courage to look honestly at yourself, to feel difficult emotions, to question long-held beliefs, and to risk change. But the rewards include deeper self-understanding, more authentic relationships, and freedom from patterns that have limited you.

Contact Better Lives Building Tribes today to begin psychodynamic therapy with Dr. Meaghan Rice. Together, we’ll explore the depths of your inner world, making sense of patterns that have confused you and discovering the self-understanding that facilitates lasting change.

The answers you seek are already within you. Let’s uncover them together.

Serving clients in Colorado and Arizona through secure telehealth sessions.