Psychodynamic therapy explores the unconscious forces shaping your thoughts, emotions, and relationships. At Angeles Psychology Group, we integrate psychoanalytic principles with somatic awareness, IFS, and culturally competent care — helping you understand not just what you feel, but why you feel it, and how to finally change the patterns that keep you stuck.
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You've probably been told your anxiety is a "thinking problem" or your depression is a "chemical imbalance." Maybe you've spent months learning coping skills that work for a week before the same patterns return. If that experience sounds familiar, you're not broken — you just haven't gone deep enough yet.
Psychodynamic therapy operates on a fundamentally different premise: most of what drives your suffering exists outside conscious awareness. Your defenses, your relational patterns, your emotional reactions — these were shaped by experiences you may not remember or fully understand. Research published by the American Psychological Association consistently demonstrates that psychodynamic approaches produce lasting structural change that actually increases after treatment ends.
At Angeles Psychology Group, psychodynamic therapy is the foundation of our clinical approach. We don't just help you manage symptoms — we help you understand and transform the unconscious architecture that creates them in the first place.
Psychodynamic therapy grew from the psychoanalytic tradition pioneered by Freud and evolved through object relations theory, self psychology, attachment theory, and contemporary relational psychoanalysis. The core insight remains: consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of your psychological life operates beneath the surface.
In practice, psychoanalytic therapy sessions are less structured than approaches like CBT. You're encouraged to speak freely — about whatever comes to mind, including thoughts that feel irrelevant, embarrassing, or confusing. Your therapist listens for themes, contradictions, emotional shifts, and patterns that reveal unconscious material.
The therapeutic relationship itself becomes the most powerful instrument of change. How you relate to your therapist — whether you try to please them, fear their judgment, expect rejection, or withhold vulnerability — mirrors the relational templates you carry from early life. The National Institute of Mental Health recognizes psychodynamic approaches as evidence-based treatments for depression, anxiety, and personality disorders.
You choose the same unavailable partners. You sabotage success when it's within reach. You react with intensity to situations that shouldn't warrant it. Coping skills haven't touched these patterns because they originate in your unconscious — in defenses built long before you had words for what was happening.
Psychodynamic therapy works with dreams, free association, transference, and the therapeutic relationship to access the hidden forces driving your behavior. Instead of managing what you do, we explore why you do it — revealing the protective structures your psyche built to survive early experiences.
Unlike symptom-focused approaches where gains plateau, psychodynamic therapy produces the "sleeper effect" — improvements that continue accelerating after treatment ends. You don't just feel better. You are different. Your personality becomes more flexible, your relationships more authentic, your emotional life richer.
Several foundational concepts guide psychodynamic practice. Understanding them helps you know what to expect — and why this approach produces such durable change.
You speak whatever comes to mind without editing or censoring. This unstructured process allows unconscious material to surface — themes, memories, fantasies, and emotional reactions that reveal what your conscious mind can't access directly. Your therapist tracks these threads to identify patterns you've never recognized.
How you relate to your therapist mirrors how you relate to everyone. Do you seek approval? Expect criticism? Withhold your real feelings? These transference patterns, when examined within the therapeutic relationship, reveal the relational templates you carry from childhood. Working through transference creates change at the deepest structural level.
Your psyche developed defenses — repression, projection, intellectualization, denial — to protect you from overwhelming pain. These strategies were adaptive when they formed. Now they may limit your emotional range, distort your relationships, and keep you from authentic self-expression. Psychodynamic therapy helps you recognize and gradually release defenses that no longer serve you.
Dreams aren't random neural firing — they're meaningful communications from your unconscious. In psychodynamic therapy, working with dreams reveals conflicts, desires, fears, and creative solutions your waking mind can't access. Dream analysis opens doors to material that pure conversation rarely reaches, accelerating the depth of therapeutic work.
Psychodynamic therapy isn't for everyone — and that's by design. It's most powerful for people ready to go beneath the surface and do genuinely challenging work. You may be an ideal fit if you:
At APG, our clinicians bring specialized training in depth-oriented individual therapy combined with genuine cultural competency. We understand that unconscious patterns don't develop in a vacuum — they're shaped by family, culture, oppression, and social forces that require nuanced, informed clinical work.
Traditional psychoanalytic therapy worked almost exclusively with words — thoughts, associations, interpretations. At Angeles Psychology Group, we've evolved this foundation by integrating psychodynamic principles with contemporary modalities that address the whole person.
Our clinicians weave psychodynamic exploration with Orgonomic (Reichian) therapy that addresses how unconscious conflicts live in your body as muscular tension and character armor. We integrate Internal Family Systems (IFS) to work with the distinct psychological parts that carry burdens from your past. And we draw on Emotion-Focused Therapy to ensure that insight translates into genuine emotional processing — not just intellectual understanding.
This integration means a session might begin with psychodynamic exploration of a recurring dream, move into somatic awareness of where that dream's emotional content lives in your body, and use IFS to dialogue with the part of you that generated the dream's imagery. This multi-layered approach — rare in conventional practices — is what makes our depth therapy genuinely transformative.
All services are available in-person at our tranquil Mid-Wilshire office and via secure HIPAA-compliant telehealth throughout California and internationally. Sessions are offered 7 AM–10 PM, seven days a week.
Despite persistent myths that psychodynamic therapy lacks empirical support, the research tells a different story. A landmark meta-analysis by Jonathan Shedler, published in American Psychologist, found effect sizes for psychodynamic therapy as large as those reported for other evidence-based treatments — with the critical difference that patients continued improving after treatment ended.
Additional research from NIMH-funded studies demonstrates psychodynamic therapy's effectiveness for treatment-resistant depression, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and complex trauma. SAMHSA includes psychodynamic approaches in its registry of evidence-based practices for mental health treatment.
The "sleeper effect" — where psychodynamic therapy patients show continued improvement at follow-up assessments months and years after termination — has been replicated across multiple independent research teams. This phenomenon makes clinical sense: when you restructure the unconscious patterns driving symptoms rather than managing symptoms directly, the benefits compound as you apply new psychological capacities across more life domains over time.
I am the founder of Angeles Psychology Group and a Clinical Psychologist with a focus on helping people heal from chaos, overwhelm, harshness, and social inhibitions. Much of my work focuses on relationships: The relationship you have with yourself, others, the environment, and the cosmos.
I help people come home to who they really are, either by remembering it or discovering it for the first time. This happens through dismantling and gaining lasting freedom from unconscious defenses that are holding you back from having the life you really want and can have. I primarily use holistic character analysis and orgonomic (somatic) therapy in my work, coupled with a strong sociocultural, feminist orientation.
I work with adult individuals, couples, families, and all sorts of personal and professional relationships.
Research shows that the relationship you have with your therapist is the most important factor for successful outcomes. Let’s get started with a free consultation to explore if I’m the best fit for you.
To schedule all other appointments with me, please use my online booking system.
