Dr. Abigail McNally, PhD, Licensed Psychologist

Major Life Transition Insecure Attachment Trauma Self-Esteem Deficits Parent Guidance Personality Disorders Eating Disorders

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.