Object Relations Psychoanalysis
Patients come to analysis because they are hoping that their pain and suffering will be less. Many have already tried other forms of therapy and found them to be somewhat helpful, but unable to provide long term change.
Psychoanalysis will help you understand your unconscious motivations for doing the things you do.
It also allows you to experience being deeply understood. Working together we can discover how being understood changes who you think you are.
Focus on emotion
What you feel is important. Your feelings are links to both your unconscious inner world and your experience of others. Your emotions are guides if you listen to them. They tell you what is bothering you.
Finding language for what you feel also helps you cope with seemingly contradictory feelings. Object Relations analysis is very different from cognitive behavioral therapy that focuses on behaviors. “Knowing” what is wrong with your behavior does not mean you will be able to change it. Sometimes knowing what is wrong can make you feel like more of a failure. Intellectual understanding does not change anything. If it did, you would not need to consult a psychoanalyst. Analysis provides emotional understanding and insight that change your experience of yourself and the thoughts and feelings you have about who you are.
Object Relations Psychoanalysis focuses on the emotional experience you have with your analyst and gives you an emotional experience in the present that changes you.
Exploring your self-deceptions
All of us benefit from insights into our own emotions and thoughts. Perhaps you have been trying to figure out your problems yourself. If so, you may have noticed that you cannot discover what you are doing or thinking that makes you feel so bad. You may wonder why. Our minds automatically avoid unpleasant experiences and realizations.
We need intimate relationships with people who will give us honest feedback about ourselves. Honest feedback, like the responses you will get from me in analysis, will help you learn how you have been fooling yourself and repeating old familiar patterns without even knowing it. Perhaps you just change the subject without realizing you have moved away from an exploration that could have taught you something important about yourself.
Telling little half-truths, avoiding certain feelings if they make you uncomfortable, or deceiving yourself about yourself may relieve you in the short term, but it interferes with your long-term growth and development as an individual. These behaviors also interfere with your intimate relationships. Without honest feedback, we cannot know the ways we avoid the emotional truth about ourselves.
Recognize Patterns
Our familiar ways of being make it difficult to recognize current patterns and reoccurring behaviors that do not work for us. Sometimes, a person will say, "This is just me and I hate myself." This is just me implies that these ways of being cannot be changed. I believe they can change via relationship. We need others in order to see ourselves.
As a trained psychoanalyst, I notice how you repeat yourself and how these repetitions may interfere with your creativity, your productivity and your ability to have love and laughter in your life. Identifying and exploring your recurring dreams, your frustrations and regrets, and your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors may help you feel and understand what they mean to you.
You may already be aware of recurring patterns that are painful or self-defeating but feel unable to stop them. For example, you may know that you overeat when you are anxious but still cannot stop overeating even when you think of it. There may be other ways you are stuck in repeating patterns that you have not noticed. Using Object Relations, I will help you find the patterns that have been hidden from you by your own fear of the pain they cover. Together we will learn why these patterns have so much power in your life.
Examine Your Relationships
What do your relationships tell you about yourself? Object Relations is a two-person psychoanalysis that values the experiences you have had in your relationships.
Who you are today is a combination of your genetics and your relational experience with your mother and father as well as your extended family. Your temperament and your personality, what works for you and what does not, have come from that combination.
Understanding yourself in light of your psychological and hereditary history can help you accept what you cannot change and change how you see yourself and who you choose to love. Both good and bad aspects of your personality and self-concept have come from the emotional relationships in your life. Examining your relationships will give us clues about how you feel about yourself.
