Wessex Counselling Service

What is Psychodynamic Counselling?

Psychodynamic Counselling may seem an unfamiliar description and it can feel confusing to pick your way through a maze of types of counselling available.
What you will most likely want to know is Can it help?, and In what way?

So it may help to think about it in these terms:

Psychodynamic counselling gives a great deal of significance to the role of early experience in shaping our psychological development and our relationships as adults.

Central to the approach is that we are influenced by thoughts, desires, fears, anxieties and fantasies (or imaginings)of which we are barely aware.

Being able to bring these unconscious mental processes more into conscious awareness is seen as a key way of helping a person live a more fulfilling life.

Life becomes more fulfilling because we are more aware of our unhelpful patterns of behaviour and defences and more aware of being able to make choices.

We can therefore begin to see things differently and build small but significant changes into our lives.