Most psychology is based on the idea that we, as human beings, function on a mixture of conscious and unconscious processes. Psychodynamic therapy deals with both types of processes and focuses on the dynamic between them. It aims to help the client understand their unconscious processes and how they affect their conscious thoughts and action.

I find it helpful not to think of the unconscious as something threatening and potentially overpowering. But instead to conceptualize it as that which is not accessable to us in a given moment. In this sense, we can think of therapy as an exercise in accessing the unconscious.

The view is that our relationships (including the life long relationship we have with ourselves) constitute our emotional life and that you can’t work on one without the other.

We are formed through our past and present relationships. As children we internalize the social world around us. And it is this internalization that characterizes how we interact with others. Through accessing and understanding those internalized and often unconscious patterns (the psychodynamic approach), therapy can help us foster and develop healthy and well functioning relationship and thereby help us create a more meaningful life.

To conduct an experiential therapy means to work with the experiences that manifest themselves in the therapy session. It means to focus on the here and now and ground the client in the emotions they experience as they experience them.

With roots in humanistic approaches to therapy, experiential psychotherapy places an emphasis on the relationship between the client and therapist and sees this relationship as a tool with which to explore the clients reactions, thoughts and emotions in the therapy session.

The focus on the relationship between client and therapist builds on the humanistic stance in psychotherapy. It developed around the middle of the 20th century as a response to the more impersonal psychoanalysis of the likes of Freud.

The humanistic stance sees the therapist’s authenticity and empathy as crucial ingredients in therapy and a safe and respectful relationship between client and therapist as the main therapeutic tool.