Psychodynamics and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

The difference between CBT (or cognitive behavioral therapy) and psychodynamic is also in the role of the therapist. In CBT, the therapist takes a role of more of like a teacher and in psychodynamic, it’s a person that is there to guide you to help you process events. So what happens with CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy? You’re going to explore your negative thoughts, those patterns that you keep on repeating. In psychodynamic you’re going to go more into the past and look into what has brought you here. A good analogy that I like to use for this is a band-aid analogy. So imagine that you got hurt and you have this horrible wound now. It’s an open wound, it’s bleeding. So the first thing to do is to go ahead and grab band-aid to stop the bleeding. Well, the band-aid does not do much. It stops the bleeding and it might take a little bit of the pain away, but the reality is the wound is still there and it will keep on hurting and it will show up maybe in other areas it might get infected and show up in other areas. CBT and psychodynamic work sort of in those ways. CBT is sort of like that band-aid – it will give you the tools to help you manage your symptoms that you’re struggling with right now. That doesn’t mean it heals. It will not heal your emotional wound. It just helps you cope with it. Psychodynamic goes more into the wound, deep into the wound to see how it took place and how we can start healing. So I know that I’m a little bit biased on this because I am a psychodynamic therapist, but the reality is that there are two different kinds and you can still (as a psychodynamic therapist) I can provide you with some tools, which I usually do such as breathing techniques to help you cope right away with your, your most intense symptoms.