My Approach to Helping
Dr. Abigail McNally a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst with a private practice in Belmont, MA. With over 18 years of experience in the provision of clinical services, her approach is warm, inviting, humble, thoughtful, safe, ethical, and deeply respectful of the unique complexity of every human mind. She specializes in the provision of intensive individual psychotherapy for individuals looking to make deep and lasting changes in the ways they approach love, work, and play.
Dr. McNally is trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy (1-2xweek), psychoanalysis (3-5xweek), dialectical-behavior therapy, internal family systems, trauma-informed therapy, and psychotherapeutic integration. She works individually with adults, college students, and adolescents, and also provides parent guidance and professional supervision and consultation. Dr. McNally is the former Assistant Clinical Director of the Laurel Hill Inn Residential Eating Disorder Treatment Center and the former Psychology Training Director of Two Brattle Center, Ltd. She has previously held faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School (HMS), Massachusetts Mental Health Center at HMS, and Smith College School of Social Work, and is currently Faculty, Psychoanalyst, and Supervising Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP).
Specific Issue(s) I'm Skilled at Helping With
Major Life Transition
Insecure Attachment
Trauma
Self-Esteem Deficits
Parent Guidance
Personality Disorders
Eating Disorders
How Psychotherapy Can Help
Psychotherapy can be life-changing. Depth-oriented psychodynamic therapy and psychoanalysis can be extremely effective for addressing maladaptive or constricted engagement in one's life (e.g.: depressive withdrawal, anxious avoidance, low self-esteem, problematic relationship patterns, feeling stuck in motivation and work, unresolved grief, difficulty maintaining loving relationships, addictive tendencies, and feelings of meaninglessness). Psychodynamic theories share a core belief that our ways of being in the world are guided by unconscious motivations, feelings, beliefs, and conflicts. This perspective views adaptations to emotional pain during development as often leading to potentially maladaptive responses in the present. Psychodynamic approaches transform painful feelings, thoughts, and behaviors by getting "underneath" the overt symptoms themselves and trying to understand the meaning, original cause, and current relational patterning of the symptoms. Psychodynamic psychotherapy seeks to identify and understand our evolved manners of emotional self-protection, and then gradually open up alternative, more adaptive means of self-regulation. Through insight, exposure to once frightening feelings, new relational experience, and mourning of the past, psychotherapy can help people to people to live more freely, mindfully, and peacefully in the present.
