Individual IS-TDP
What is IS-TDP?
Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (IS-TDP) is designed as an accelerated therapy model, leading to significant cost savings compared to long-term options. What makes IS-TDP an intensive approach is simply the sustained focus on experiencing emotions that promote healing.
The therapy suggests that mental health symptoms come from the defensive ways in which we have learned over time to manage inner conflicts between: our emotions, our sense of ‘right and wrong’ and our environment.
We will focus on the problem(s) that bring you into counseling as well as how you experience your emotions, what you do with your emotions and how to understand yourself in deeper and meaningful ways.
We do this by noticing what happens in your body to bring awareness of your feelings. We will process and link things together to understand its impact on the present conflicts and problems you are faced with.
In therapy we encourage you to work through these internal conflicts experientially in the present moment, with me (your therapist) as a guide to help you heal from your past to revive healthy emotional connection and expression with yourself and others. Letting go of the defense mechanisms allows previously avoided feelings and insights/memories to rise to the surface, where they can be integrated into conscious awareness.
The therapy can be uncomfortable at times because of the nature of seeing what you have bee during difficult moments in life while allowing your therapist to help you heal from the inside out.
This approach helps you achieve genuine transformation, leading to reduced anxiety and improved emotional resilience.
Assumptions that make IS-TDP work:
Feeling the right emotions in your body produces healing, clarity, peace and calm within your psychology, biology and relationships.
People have a unconscious patterns that create suffering. Therapy needs to focus on the unconscious patterns that are self-defeating to produce healing by making these patterns conscious.
Past relationships have an impact today. This means that the way you were interacted with and interacted with others in the past has shaped how you interact with the world around you today. Often times this starts in early childhood before you have words to communicate these feelings/experiences.
Unresolved emotions create anxiety in the body. Anxiety is then dealt with by the use of defenses (or coping strategies) that distract or distort problems psychologically, biologically and relationally. The defenses in action are what creates suffering.
Focusing internally is how therapy helps. We cannot change the outside world, but we can look at how you are dealing with yourself and others in helpful and unhelpful ways.
Feelings or impulses may happen unexplainably in session with me, which can be confusing. When this happens, talking through these difficult and overwhelming feelings or impulses is what takes you from stuck to free.
IS-TDP is good at helping with:
Most anxiety related problems
Personality disorders
Treatment resistant depression or anxiety
This is when therapy or medications dont alleviate the depression or anxiety symptoms sufficiently.
Trauma/PTSD
Substance/Alcohol abuse
Medically unexplained symptoms (also known as Somatic disorders, Conversion or mystery illness)
Chronic pain
Spiritual issues
How long is IS-TDP treatment?
Treatment can be as long as you need it to be, but most people are engaged in therapy for a year to sustain inner healing forever. Therapy sessions can be held online or in-person or a mix of both modalities to help you meet your mental health goals. IS-TDP treatment for each person looks different and is highly customizable based on your emotional, relational and mental health goals. Some people report significant changes as soon as the first session, most within a month of starting counseling that solidifies as character change after a year.
In most cases I suggest we meet for 3 hours (180 minutes) for our first session so that we can learn quickly what your needs are and if you think we can work well together. Then most sessions are 45 minutes to 90 minutes and repeat weekly for 20-40 sessions for best results.
You can get more information about costs related to therapy here.
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