Befriending Your Unconscious through Depth Therapy

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung

While all forms of psychotherapy treatment seek to delve into our lives, depth psychology therapy is focused on accessing the deeper unconscious mind - namely, the psychological unconscious. It's an inner healing journey, focusing on the parts of ourselves we have little conscious awareness of in our day to day. Depth psychotherapy communes with unconscious processing in order to explore, heal, and integrate our innermost self, which includes both our conscious awareness and shadow work.

Unconscious exploration is nothing new. In clinical psychology, it's a key component of psychoanalytic therapy from Sigmund Freud's and Carl Jung's work and was their greatest shared therapeutic insight. While the unconscious mind can seem mystical and perhaps unknowable, depth-oriented therapy seeks to understand the unconscious through various therapeutic modalities to access unconscious patterns in whatever way best serves the therapy client. Some of these modalities include: psychodynamic counseling, modern psychoanalysis, somatic therapy, and transpersonal psychology.

If we understand the unconscious psychology simply as the part of ourselves that is just out of conscious awareness, we begin to open ourselves to the possibility of uncovering its therapeutic wisdom. Our unconscious processes are no different from our conscious processes. The only difference lies in our awareness of one over the other. Whether you are struggling with unresolved issues in your life you just can’t solve, dealing with trauma, or simply want to develop self-awareness, depth psychological therapy can help.

How is Depth Therapy Different from Regular Talk Therapy?

Traditional psychotherapy, or counseling therapy, can be an invaluable means of understanding psychological layers of the human psyche. Through therapeutic dialogue, the licensed therapist and the therapy client explore various aspects of the client's life experiences and relationship patterns. Talk therapy treatment is usually solution-focused therapy as it seeks to overcome negative thought patterns and behavioral issues by exploring their root causes and developing therapeutic coping strategies around them.

Depth psychological therapy utilizes all the advantages of clinical counseling, but it doesn't stop there. Using an array of holistic therapy, transpersonal psychology, and somatic healing techniques, depth psychotherapy seeks to access unconscious patterns for psychological exploration, emotional healing, and personal transformation.

Depth Therapy and Trauma

Depth therapy can be especially transformative in dealing with PTSD and trauma. Trauma runs deep in our bodies and minds, usually far beyond our awareness. The effects transcend the traumatic event, as even unconsciously triggered traumatic memories can dysregulate our entire bodies.

Depth therapy offers many paths to healing from trauma. Connecting with our unconscious can help integrate traumatic memories into a broader, more comprehensive picture of the event or events. Depth therapy techniques such as parts work (also known as Internal Family Systems) can help us get to the root causes of our trauma responses by exploring parts of ourselves we’ve long compartmentalized.

Depth Therapy Techniques to Access the Unconscious

There are several techniques therapists use to access the unconscious realms of their clients, including:

Free association therapy - Using therapeutic verbalization of stream-of-consciousness thoughts without mental filtering during a counseling session. This is a simple but effective psychoanalytic technique to become acquainted with those unconscious patterns that lie just beneath conscious awareness. It allows those repressed thoughts to surface, which can be helpful as they often cause psychological distress just by being stuck in the shadow aspects of our minds.

Dream therapy analysis - Interpreting the symbolic meaning through dream interpretation therapy. Processing dream symbolism with a depth therapist can reveal what your unconscious mind is processing.
Psychodynamic counseling - Connecting current emotional patterns with past trauma experiences. Often exploring childhood memories, whether conscious or repressed memories, a psychodynamic therapist seeks to help a client understand how early life experiences influence their present psychological patterns.
Jungian active imagination and symbolic therapy - Rooted in Jungian analysis, these therapeutic practices delve into the archetypal symbols and unconscious characters we might encounter in our deeper psyche. It allows us to interact with unconscious content, process psychological symbols, and integrate unconscious wisdom.

Transpersonal Psychotherapy

Just as the term describes, transpersonal psychotherapy explores consciousness beyond personal identity. Through a holistic therapy approach, transpersonal psychology seeks to integrate all aspects that impact a person's healing journey, including mental wellness, emotional healing, physical health, spiritual growth, and environmental wellness. It seeks to access expanded consciousness and explore what we refer to as 'peak experiences' through meditation therapy, guided visualization, and flow states.

Transpersonal counseling embraces spiritual psychology and universal interconnectedness. It is informed by Eastern healing traditions as well as humanistic psychotherapy in the West. Through its use of altered consciousness states, we explore realms beyond our conscious awareness through transformative therapy.

Somatic Therapy

Somatic therapy techniques take a body-centered therapy approach to mental health. Instead of just focusing on cognitive therapy, somatic psychology seeks to incorporate body awareness, physical sensations, and somatic experiencing to support holistic healing in the whole person: body-mind integration, emotional healing, and spiritual wellness. Somatic trauma therapy can be especially helpful in treating PTSD symptoms and facilitating trauma recovery.

Somatic Experiencing - Focusing on trauma, somatic experiencing explores how trauma feels in your body in order to ultimately release it.

Guided imagery - A technique used to induce relaxation in the body through a guided visualization. Guided imagery calls on the senses and inner voice to create a holistic experience that can be effective in managing stress, anxiety, and even physical pain.
Hakomi Mindful Somatic Therapy - Hakomi therapy utilizes the Eastern tenets of nonviolence and mindfulness to usher the client into a state of non-judgemental awareness and acceptance of the present moment. The therapist then helps the client notice signals of unconscious harmful beliefs in the body to work through and release them.

Depth therapy seeks to explore the fullness of the self through uncovering the unconscious. By skillfully implementing these techniques, we can discover who we truly are, why we are who we are, and who we are meant to be. If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to setup a free consultation call here.

What is Depth Therapy?