Psychodynamic therapy is a style of talk therapy that aims to increase your understanding of yourself and your unconscious, with a focus on connecting how past experiences inform the present. This approach involves processing and exploring your experiences, identifying patterns in behaviors, relationships, and beliefs, and pulling this all together to create change where needed.

EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) is an evidence-based psychotherapy that treats and reduces the symptoms associated with trauma and other distressing experiences.

When a person experiences a traumatic event(s) or other intensely distressing experiences, a common result is that their brain gets “stuck” when trying to process and store these memories. Unlike our regular day-to-day memories, traumatic memories are stored in a more fragmented manner in the emotional center of our brain, almost as though the event is still happening. This results in upsetting and overwhelming emotions, physical sensations, beliefs, and thoughts whenever these memories are consciously or unconsciously triggered.

EMDR allows us to reprocess the memories that are getting blocked, in order to reduce the distressing symptoms. For a more detailed explanation, read more here.

I pull from several cognitive behavioral therapies, ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy), and CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy). Each of these approaches focuses on how your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors interact with one another and create cycles that may help or hurt you, and introduces various strategies and skills to change and better cope. These strategies may involve mindfulness techniques, emotional regulation skills, reframing, behavioral strategies, and problem solving to break free of the patterns that keep you stuck.

Anti-oppressive therapy recognizes how oppression influences individuals, and thus their mental health. People exist within the context of their world, and therefore experiences such as racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, classism, ableism, etc. can’t be separated from a person’s wellbeing and mental health.

Sometimes this may be an explicit focus of therapy - for example processing experiences of trauma that are related to aspects of your marginalization and identity. Other times, this is more about understanding the background and context of how systems of oppression may influence your experiences, perspectives, relationships, and what therapeutic approaches are most effective. Anti-oppressive therapy also involves being critical and conscious of how the therapeutic process itself may reinforce oppression, with efforts to reduce this as much as possible.

Trauma-informed care is an approach that recognizes that people are a result of their experiences, including their trauma, and this must be considered when addressing present challenges. Rather than viewing just the present symptoms/problems/diagnosis, we look at the whole picture. A common trauma-informed refrain is the importance of asking “What happened to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?”

This approach is also about taking steps to reduce re-traumatization in the therapy process. This is accomplished through collaboration, establishing trust and safety, moving at a pace that feels supportive and tolerable, and building on the strengths you already have.

Relational therapy is a style of therapy that considers how relationships influence and impact an individual, and play an important role in their life. Relational therapy will explore patterns of behavior that occur in relationships, including family, romantic, platonic, and professional relationships, and also how past relationships inform those in the present. This approach also involves a focus on the client-therapist relationship, and treats this as a fundamental aspect of the healing process. This means that relational therapists don’t sit back and just listen – we are active participants in the conversation.

This style of therapy can help you gain insight into how you navigate your relationships, as well as develop more constructive patterns to improve them.