Approach
Integrative Relational Psychodynamic Therapy
Psychodynamic and psychoanalytic thinking provide the organizing foundation of my work. I integrate somatic and parts-based methods as scaffolding that can make deeper emotional and relational work more tangible, tolerable, and accessible.
Each approach serves a distinct clinical purpose and works in relationship with the others. This is an integrative rather than eclectic model of treatment: a coherent way of understanding the person, organizing the work, and supporting meaningful change.
Two Ways of Understanding the Work
I think about my approach in two related ways: the clinical foundations that shape how I listen, understand, and organize the treatment, and the processes through which change develops over time.
The clinical foundations include psychodynamic and psychoanalytic theory, attachment, somatic methods, parts work, family systems, and personality structure. Together, they help us understand what may be happening beneath symptoms, conflicts, defenses, and repeated relational patterns.
The processes of change include regulation, integration, differentiation, individuation, and new relational experiences. These are part of how therapy moves beyond intellectual insight and becomes lived emotional and relational change.
Clinical Foundations
These foundations shape how I listen, understand each person, and organize the treatment. They guide my attention toward unconscious processes, early relational experiences, attachment, defenses, family systems, personality structure, and the dynamics that emerge within the therapeutic relationship.
Psychoanalytic Theory
Psychoanalytic theory provides the central organizing framework for my work. It begins with the understanding that much of emotional life develops and operates outside conscious awareness. We repeat earlier relational patterns, carry old expectations into present relationships, and protect ourselves in ways that once made sense but may now contribute to distance, conflict, anxiety, shame, or disconnection.
This way of working listens beneath symptoms and conflict. We pay attention to what is being defended against, what is being longed for, what continues to be repeated, and what has not yet been fully known, felt, or integrated.
Attachment, Object Relations, and Self Psychology
Attachment theory helps us understand how early relationships influence our sense of safety, closeness, dependence, fear, protest, withdrawal, and repair.
Object relations explores how these relationships become part of our inner world, shaping our sense of self and our expectations of others. Self psychology helps us understand the relational conditions needed to develop and maintain a cohesive sense of self, including the need to feel seen, understood, valued, and emotionally held.
We are not only looking at what happened in the past. We are listening for how early relational experiences continue to shape present relationships, identity, self-worth, longing, protection, and conflict.
Somatic Methods
Somatic methods bring attention to the body and nervous system. Relational patterns do not live only in thoughts or memories. They may also appear as tightening, bracing, collapse, numbness, urgency, agitation, dissociation, or shutdown.
The body often registers what is happening before the mind has words for it. Attending to these responses can help make emotional and relational processes more visible and support the capacity to remain present with difficult material.
Parts-Based Work
Parts-based work offers an accessible way to understand inner experience. It helps us recognize different self-states, inner narratives, and protective positions that shape how a person relates to themselves and others.
One part may long for closeness while another protects through withdrawal. Other parts may please, perform, attack, collapse, or insist on needing no one.
Parts-based work helps make these inner conflicts more visible and emotionally present, so they can be experienced and understood rather than only discussed intellectually.
Family Systems
Family systems and Bowen theory help us understand how anxiety, roles, loyalties, emotional cutoffs, triangles, and intergenerational patterns organize family life and continue across generations.
This lens is especially important in couples therapy. Each partner brings an individual history, attachment patterns, family roles, and learned expectations about closeness, conflict, power, and responsibility into the relationship they create together.
Personality Structure and the Enneagram
I also draw from personality frameworks, including the Enneagram, when they are clinically useful. I do not use personality typing to place people in fixed categories. I use it as one way of understanding recurring patterns of attention, protection, motivation, shame, fear, anger, longing, and relational strategy.
Used carefully, personality work can help people recognize familiar patterns with greater clarity and compassion, while becoming less governed by the protective strategies that have organized their lives.
Processes of Change
Insight matters, but insight alone is often not enough. Change develops through becoming aware of what has remained outside our attention, learning to stay present with difficult feelings, understanding the protective patterns that once helped us cope, and having new experiences within relationship. As old forms of protection become less necessary, they can loosen and transform. This creates greater freedom in relationships, a more integrated sense of self, and a stronger capacity to remain connected without losing yourself.
Regulation: Staying Present With Difficult Feelings
Drawing from somatic and attachment-informed work, regulation is the growing capacity to remain present with emotion and nervous system activation without becoming overwhelmed, reactive, shut down, or disconnected.
In our work together, we may slow down and attend to what is happening in your body and nervous system. This helps you remain connected to yourself while approaching difficult feelings, memories, and relational experiences. Regulation creates enough steadiness for the deeper work between us to become possible.
Integration: Working With Parts of You That Feel Divided
Integration means bringing experiences that have been disconnected, defended against, or held apart into a fuller relationship with the rest of you. These may include emotions, memories, body states, beliefs, protective responses, and different parts of yourself.
In our work together, we make room to understand and reconnect with these experiences rather than trying to eliminate them. Integration allows difficult feelings and parts of yourself to be included without needing to suppress them or becoming overwhelmed by them.
Differentiation: Staying Yourself in Relationship
Differentiation is the growing capacity to stay connected without losing yourself. It allows for closeness without merging, honesty without attack, boundaries without cutoff, and care without self-abandonment.
In our work together, we may explore inherited roles and relational patterns such as pleasing, controlling, withdrawing, or collapsing. Drawing from family systems, Bowen theory, and psychoanalytic understandings of individuation, the work supports a more grounded sense of self while remaining open to closeness, conflict, and connection.
The Therapy Relationship: Old Patterns and New Experiences
Earlier relational patterns often become active within the therapy relationship itself. In psychoanalytic therapy, transference and countertransference help us understand how expectations, fears, longings, and protective responses shaped in earlier relationships may be felt and enacted between us.
I pay careful attention to what you may come to expect or fear from me, what develops in our interactions, and what I experience in response. These dynamics are not problems to eliminate. When approached with curiosity, honesty, restraint, and ethical care, they can become valuable sources of understanding.
Therapy is not only a place to recognize old patterns. It is also a relationship in which something new can begin to happen. You may experience being understood more accurately, responded to with greater care, or met differently during conflict, vulnerability, rupture, and repair.
Over time, these new experiences can soften old expectations of being misunderstood, rejected, controlled, abandoned, or left emotionally alone. They can help heal earlier relational wounds and make room for more secure, honest, and flexible ways of relating.