Frequently Asked Questions

Depth psychotherapy explores the unconscious—the layer of inner life where memories, emotions, symbols, and patterns reside beneath conscious awareness. It's a broad term that includes psychodynamic therapy and also draws from Jungian psychology, somatic practices, and other traditions that honor the symbolic and creative dimensions of the psyche.

Psychodynamic therapy focuses primarily on how unconscious conflicts, early relationships, and defense mechanisms continue to influence thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Depth therapy encompasses these ideas and goes further: it works with dreams, archetypes, the wisdom held in the body, and the imaginal language of symbols.

Both methods share the belief that insight—understanding where your struggles originate and why they persist—creates the foundation for lasting change. An underlying principle of Jungian and depth psychology is that there exists an innate orientation towards wholeness within the psyche. Symptoms are not simply problems to fix; they are messages pointing toward what needs attention, integration, or release.

To learn more about how I integrate these approaches, visit my Approach page.

Psychodynamic therapy rests on the understanding that significant aspects of our inner life operate outside conscious awareness. The unconscious holds difficult emotions, painful memories, and unresolved conflicts—and these hidden elements continue to shape thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the present.

Early relationships and experiences are foundational. This modality explores how formative moments from childhood and past relationships influence current struggles. The past is examined to understand how it persists in the present and to open pathways for change. The therapeutic relationship is central. It creates a safe space for exploring difficult material, and can be a mirror for understanding relational dynamics.

Psychodynamic therapy also helps identify defense mechanisms: unconscious protective strategies like denial, repression, or projection. While these defenses may have been necessary at one time, bringing them into awareness allows you to develop healthier, more intentional ways of coping. A principal goal throughout is insight—both emotional and intellectual understanding of where patterns come from and why they persist. This awareness creates the foundation for genuine, lasting change.

Jungian therapy, also called analytical psychology, is built on several foundational concepts:

Individuation: The lifelong journey toward psychological wholeness and becoming who you truly are. This process involves integrating both conscious and unconscious aspects of self—shedding borrowed masks and inherited identities to reveal your authentic, unique essence.

The Unconscious: Jung viewed the unconscious mind as consisting of two dimensions: the personal unconscious, which contains individual memories and repressed experiences, and the collective unconscious, a deeper, inherited layer of shared psychic material common to all humans. This collective unconscious is also a creative source of wisdom, guidance, and potential. This is where we meet the archetypes, which are universal, innate patterns of images and ideas that manifest in myths, dreams, and cultural symbols. 

Shadow: The Shadow is the repressed, unconscious part of the self that contains socially unacceptable traits, desires, and instincts. It includes qualities people disown due to guilt, shame, or fear, but it can also hold positive, untapped potential like creativity and personal power. Jungian therapy works to bring shadow material into consciousness for integration.

Archetypes & Symbols: Jungian archetypes are universal, innate patterns of thought and behavior that are part of the collective unconscious—a shared psychic reservoir of all humanity. While the archetypes themselves are unconscious and formless, they can guide the individuation process, emerging into our conscious awareness as symbolic images in dreams, myths, art and stories. 

The Therapeutic Relationship: The relationship between therapist and client is central—a container where projection, transference, and genuine encounter can illuminate unconscious patterns. It is not a one-sided relationship where the therapist simply offers interpretations. Instead, it is a mutual journey where the therapist enables the client's self-discovery process, trusting that the psyche knows the path toward healing and wholeness.

If you're curious about working with dreams, symbols, and the unconscious, explore how we might work together.

"Somatic" comes from the Greek word soma, meaning body, and thus somatic work attends directly to physical sensations, the nervous system, breath, and movement as pathways to healing. Somatic therapy is a body-centered approach grounded in the understanding that trauma, emotion, and memory live not only in the mind but throughout the entire body.

Trauma, in particular, is stored in the body. When you face overwhelming experiences, your nervous system activates survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, or collapse. In the aftermath of trauma, these responses can remain stuck, leaving you feeling perpetually on edge, numb, or disconnected. Somatic therapy helps you recognize your body's protective strategies, and gradually restore nervous system regulation and a felt sense of safety.

Somatic therapy is a process of learning to listen to the body. Through body-centered techniques we can bring unconscious content such as emotions or beliefs into conscious awareness where they can be addressed, metabolized or released.