Your unconscious mind is an intricate labyrinth. It’s the source of countless stories that shape your emotions, beliefs and your actions. You might think of it as a treasure chest of your most potent stories – from the fantastical to the mundane, from the pleasurable to the painful, and everything in between.

This deeper part of your mind is filled with memories, experiences, and emotions that have been suppressed or forgotten. It’s where your deepest desires, longing, hopes and dreams come from. Your unresolved fears, hurts, emotional conflicts and traumas hide there, too. And, it’s there where your creativity simmers and finds its roots and wings.

It is vital that you are in touch and connected with this rich and potent part of your mind. Essentially, you want to be able to invite your unconsciousness into your conscious mind to come together and start a conversation with each other. As you develop a more intimate connection between your conscious and unconscious mind, you’re able to create a life full of deep meaning and success.

But, when you have unresolved conflicts or trauma and haven’t done your emotional work, this union of the conscious and unconscious mind just isn’t possible.

Why not? What is holding you back?

1. You’re scared of your unconscious mind. You devote a portion of your life energy to keeping unconscious scripts buried. You disconnect from your emotions and these buried parts of yourself in order to try to keep yourself safe.
2. You’re lost in your unconscious, living a raw and unfiltered emotional life. Controlled by the unconscious stories, your everyday life is, filled with drama, reactivity, and defenses that further wreak havoc on your life. Your emotions run the show and you’re not able to emotionally – and thoughtfully – respond to a situation.

Either way, you’re missing the opportunities that emerge when your conscious mind is informed by the richness and depth of your unconscious. And, you also cannot “rewrite old scripts,” which happens when the unconscious stories within you are refined through your powerful conscious mind.

Instead of living a dynamic and enriching life, you’re stuck in one dimension: either your conscious mind or your unconscious. It’s like trying to make music without all instruments working together. It’s flat and/or disharmonious, with no depth or dimension and beauty.

When we haven’t done our emotional work, we get entangled in unconscious conflicts that come with their stories. And, some of the most influential narratives remain buried deep within our unconscious, subtly and swiftly controlling and directing our lives. With or without consent or awareness, we reenact self-sabotaging stories.

Old and unprocessed conflicts usually generate stories based on feelings like: abandoned, rejected, not good enough, unlovable, unproductive, or deprived.

You can uncover your hidden stories and learn how to access and rewrite your own unconscious scripts. This can be a transformative journey, offering a profound opportunity for healing and for creating a whole new way of being in the world.

Therapy is a powerful way to uncover buried stories and to transform them into more fulfilling stories. But, which form of therapy? 

An in-depth approach to therapy like psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy offers a powerful way to delve  into your unconscious mind.

A therapist trained in psychoanalytic or psychodynamic approaches can help you get back in touch with your inner world, so you can start tapping into inner unresolved conflicts and the old mental scripts that come with them.  

Once unconscious stories are brought to light, the healing process can start to  unfold. 

Embracing old stories with emotional respect, presence, and attention allows you to see them from new angles. In time, you can dissolve their rigid hold on you. It’s a transformational journey that involves recognizing and processing suppressed emotions, integrating fragmented parts of your psyche, releasing emotions trapped in your body.

This journey does require an empathic emotional witnessing. Buried stories are often linked to pain, shame, guilt, fear, and other challenging emotions. This process requires emotional attunement, rather than just intellectual understanding, in order to allow for genuine healing. It involves acknowledging past struggles and mistakes, forgiving yourself and others, and embracing imperfections. This journey is about patience and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths.

And this is what a psychoanalytic/psychodynamic therapist who has the emotional capacity and expertise can provide. A reflective and emotional presence can allow you to bring buried unconscious stories to light so you can begin to metabolize them and work towards healing and re-writing old and rigid narratives.

However, a good psychodynamic treatment takes time. So this is where EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) can come in. With EMDR you can face and clean old emotional conflicts faster and more efficiently.

As you start shining a light on old conflicts and bring them into your consciousness through psychoanalytic/psychodynamic methods (free association, dream analysis, transference, countertransference, projections) they can be more effectively processed with EMDR, which allows for the emotional hold to be released more quickly. Therefore, old conflicts may feel less immediate or real. They lose their impact on you, their details begin to fade, they no longer have their rigid grip on you. Then, you start to see, feel, and think about old experiences differently. You can see multiple truths to the story and you can rewrite old stories.

You can start living your life from a more fluid, compassionate, authentic, and more empowering emotional space or mindset. You can create a life from your core, your essence: a life that is fulfilling and that reflects your true self. 

I offer psychodynamic therapy, EMDR therapy (EMDR certified), psychoanalytic therapy (certified), combined with CBT, and grounded in the neuroscience of psychotherapy and relationships in order to help people discover how to live fully in the present and create more fulfilling, successful lives. 

In particular I have an expertise working with creatives, performers, and artists of all kinds – writers,  actors, fine artists, musicians, producers, directors, fashion designers, and creative entrepreneurs. My office is in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. I provide in-person and online psychotherapy to people across California.

If you are interested in EMDR therapy, please contact me for your free 15 minute consultation to see if this therapy is appropriate for you.