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Therapy that goes looking for the pattern, not just the week.
Depth work takes seriously the material most of life asks you to move past: what repeats, what is out of proportion, and what you find yourself doing again.
Psychodynamic therapy
We follow what repeats.
Psychodynamic therapy works from the idea that a good deal of what shapes your life began taking shape before you had language for it, and can keep operating without asking your permission. Not as a mystery, but as a habit of relating that may once have been necessary.
So rather than treating the argument, or the anxiety, or the yes you regret, as the whole problem, we treat it as information. Where was this learned? What did it protect you from? What does it still cost?
Relational therapy
What happens between us is part of the material.
Relational work means the therapy relationship is not a neutral container. The way you manage closeness, disagreement, needing something, or being seen, tends to show up in the room, and that is useful rather than awkward.
It is also where change tends to happen. Understanding a pattern intellectually rarely shifts it. Having a different experience of it, with another person, more often does.
Attachment
Closeness has a history.
If early relationships made closeness feel unreliable, or costly, or conditional on being useful, the body can hold on to that long after the circumstances change. Insecure attachment is less a diagnosis than a description of how someone learned to stay safe.
Much of the work is about loosening that, so that depending on someone can stop feeling like a risk you have to manage alone.
What sessions may feel like
Mostly ordinary, occasionally surprising.
We talk. I ask about what happened and also about what it was like. Some sessions are practical, some circle something you cannot name yet, and some are quiet.
You will not be given homework or a technique to run. You may notice, over time, that something you always did automatically has become a decision.
Sessions are held online. You will need somewhere you can speak freely and about fifty minutes without interruption.
Questions
Things people ask about this.
- How is psychodynamic therapy different from CBT?
- CBT works on the thought and the behavior in front of you, and it is genuinely effective for a lot of things. Psychodynamic therapy assumes the thought is downstream of something older, so rather than correcting it we get curious about where it was learned and what it was protecting. In practice that means fewer worksheets and more attention to what repeats. Some people want the first kind of work, and if that is you I would rather say so early.
- How long does psychodynamic therapy take?
- Longer than short-term therapy and shorter than the caricature. What people tend to notice first is not the problem disappearing but the gap widening between a reaction and a decision. The work is open-ended by design rather than by accident, which means we review whether it is still useful instead of assuming it is. You can stop at any point.
- Do I have to talk about my childhood?
- Not on demand and not on a schedule. It tends to arrive on its own, because the present keeps referring back to it. If something from then is not connected to what you came in with, we do not go looking for it in order to be thorough.
- What if I do not know what to say?
- That is a normal way to arrive, and it is usually information rather than a problem. Silence in a session is not wasted time; it is often where something surfaces before it has been organized into a story. I ask questions, so you are not sitting there generating material.
The thing you came in with is rarely the thing underneath.
If that is the kind of work you have been looking for.
Booking runs through Maverick Psychotherapy Group, the practice I see clients through. Emailing me directly is the shorter route to a first conversation.