17. Psychodynamic therapy & ISTDP: The full conversation with Johannes Kieding [extended episode]

[transcript of full episode]

In this episode, I speak with Johannes Kieding. He is an ISTDP therapist, a teacher, and a trainer. We speak about psychodynamic therapy in general, as well as ISTDP, which stands for Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy [ISTDP]. This is a particular form of psychodynamic therapy developed by Dr. 

Habib Davanloo. 

This therapy is quite focused on emotions. And I speak with Johannes about why that is, the power of this approach, who it might be suitable for,

and some of the key components which you might experience if you decide to seek out ISTDP for yourself. Or if you’re a therapist who is interested in the approach. Johannes is a very experienced clinician who has been teaching and training other therapists in ISTDP around the world. 

So it was a real pleasure to speak with him. 

Enjoy this extended version of our conversation,

as well as bite-sized pieces of it over at the 10 Minute Mood section.

Johannes, what is psychodynamic therapy?

So the term psychodynamic, for someone who has no idea or they might’ve heard the term, how would you explain what that means? And then what is psychodynamic therapy? 

Sure, so psycho or psyche is the psyche. It is the soul. And dynamic are moving parts.

The soul of a person has different parts going on and they’re in movement with one another. This is the kind of starting premise? Yep, okay. 

Some of the moving parts are, you know, here’s what I want over here, but I also want this over here. And those two things can be at odds. And suddenly I find myself conflicted. 

And so at base, psychodynamic therapy is about the emotional conflict that comes about through being human and having different motivations.

. I guess what I’m taking from that is that the idea is that we are looking inward.

Mm hmm. 

Psychodynamic is referring to a focus on the different moving parts of an individual psyche that are often in conflict, or can be in conflict. Motivational states that might be in conflict.

And I imagine that most people experience that at some level. I think very few people just have a perfect picture, rosy life where everything goes without a hitch and happily ever after. I mean, who actually has that life, you know?

So I think 

most of us actually experience the reality of what psychodynamic theory points to on a day to day basis.

So psychodynamic therapy is about addressing those conflicts inside. The complex nature of our emotional landscape yeah. So that’s what psychodynamic therapy as an umbrella term is capturing, I think.

The focus is going to be on that aspect. As opposed to something more like CBT, which would be like: “let’s look at the way you’re thinking about certain situations. Let’s see if there are some areas in your thinking and we can look to the past and look at examples”. 

It’s much more thought-based. 

Yeah, but even through a CBT or cognitive behavioral type lens where you’re looking at thoughts, that could also include and incorporate the kind of conflicts that I’m referring to. 

Sure. What do you see as the difference then? What are the things that stand out for you?

If you imagine a therapist who is very purely CBT based, and then you imagine one who’s been trained psychodynamically?

Well, I’m not trained in CBT, but what comes to mind is to say that psychodynamic therapy is not about giving the person seeking therapy an instruction manual. You know, “follow these steps one through five and you will be fine”. 

Yeah. 

I think what we’re both driving at is the idea that there’s something inherently conflictual about being human. And that a big part of psychodynamic therapy is to face that and accept that.

Sure, we try to work through some of those conflicts, but at the end of the day, we’re always going to be a work in .progress. And to be conflicted is to be human. 

Yes, I think, the facing and accepting is, like you say, very different. And so something more like a third wave kind of acceptance-based

version of CBT so – I’m thinking about something like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or maybe even mindfulness-based CBTs – I think they move more into that direction of acceptance as opposed to “let’s get in there and sort of try and purposely reconfigure how we’re thinking”. It is more of a movement towards “let’s just look at the honesty of what is there and find new ways to be with that which feel less

abrasive”. BUt the manner in which they do it – I think the difference becomes about how they go about trying to get to a place of acceptance. Because acceptance is a very loaded word. 

And what that means to different people is very different.

When you’re using that term, related to psychodynamic therapy, what does acceptance mean for you?

It’s about learning how to hold two opposing ideas or feelings at the same time.

They don’t go together. They’re opposed to each other. Like, I love my mum and I want to give her a hug, but I’m also angry at her and I want to lash out at her. 

So 

that tension between those polar opposite feeling states, they can generate quite a bit of anxiety for a lot of people. And so what I mean by accepting is learning how to tolerate and hold both ideas or both feelings that are not so congruent, but learning how to actually embrace both of those.

Yes, that is very different. There’s something about, drilling down into the complexity of emotional experience here that, perhaps just in general as a culture, but also just based on our life history, perhaps we hold a very superficial understanding of emotions. And I think part of what you’re describing here with the psychodynamic approach is building a more complex understanding of what emotions are, how they operate, how they can be helpful, how they can be conflictual, what we can do when we notice the conflict. As opposed to what is often happening for people –

they might just be noticing that they’re experiencing lots of anxiety. They are judging themselves for not being able to choose one feeling over another, or this kind of thing. 

Right. And, you know, the kicker is that when we are able to hold both, you know, two different ideas, two different feelings,

it softens the conflict. It doesn’t cancel out or negate the conflict. I mean, we still have those conflicting feelings and impulses and ideas, but it softens it. And so, we’re always going to be conflicted, but we can learn how to be with those conflicts in ways where we’re not riddled with anxiety or we’re not getting down on ourselves or we’re not getting into one abusive relationship after another.

We can actually sort of sail through the conflicts without that added acrimony. 

Yeah, , that is a really nice way of thinking about what the acceptance means there. In the noticing and being able to experience just holding both, , this softening , as opposed to it feeling like there is something wrong, right?

Like that there’s something wrong here and it’s sort of the battle that goes on inside. So it is learning to be with our emotions in a new way. But it’s also, I think, expanding our understanding as well I think the key point is that the acceptance is in relation to learning to be with complex feelings, complex mixed feelings in a new way that actually enhances our wellbeing overall, reduces the suffering that comes from what it would otherwise be like 

without the acceptance.

That’s right, that’s right. And just to circle back to what you were driving at earlier about contrasting psychodynamic therapy from perhaps other models.

Part of the attitude or the outlook through which we approach psychotherapy through the psychodynamic model is actually helping the person who’s seeking help to be with their own experience in a way where they can be unburdened by the need to manage or fix that experience. 

There is a kind of liberation that can come through giving up on trying to manage our experience or curate our experience.

And I think that there might be other ways of approaching therapy that lean more into management mode. 

That is the “facing” part. You know, you’re talking about “facing and accepting”. Yeah, that is the facing part. It is the attempt to try and get as clear as possible just on the reality on the ground of what is happening on the emotional layer 

with, 

I think what you’re saying too, is with the idea that we can’t choose that. Just at the emotional layer.

It’s the trying to look at the reality of what is happening there without equating that with some kind of agency or some kind of comment on our choices and our actions. 

Mm hmm. I agree with that. Although, ironically, in my experience, the more we can embrace and accept and surrender to the reality of what we experience and not choose it, because it’s just there, right, we have that much more choice and agency when it comes to how we respond to that experience.

Yeah, 

agreed, agreed. 

I think that’s the beauty of the approach. 

And 

it really is something [00:10:00] experiential that we could talk about, but until someone really experiences that distinction, I think it’s not so clear. But I think that’s because part of what happens with the psychodynamic approach is that it is also making quite clear the distinction between something like the emotional experience inside and noticing what that is,

versus how are we going to be in the world? You know, who are we going to choose to be with our actions? I think in the detailed inquiry into that internal emotional landscape, part of what that does is it leads to a clearer distinction.

Whereas I think for many people, that separation isn’t so clear and that can be part of what causes so much agony for people. They are sort of mistake what’s happening inside for being some comment on who they are, or they’re confusing emotions with actions like there’s this murkiness.

So, I think something about paying attention very deeply just to that part of ourselves, our psyche. That often isn’t happening in therapy in a roundabout way. So that’s what I like about psychodynamic therapy is that it is paying attention to just to the psyche. 

So I agree with you. It can be a lot to untangle. But once we work through enough layers of our own hearts and minds, there’s so much energy that’s freed up. Because it’s, you know, before we do that we’re trying to move through life with an arm tied behind our back.

There’s so much energy that goes into repression and avoidance. It just really debilitates our ability to effectively navigate life. Whereas if we can just take our courage in our hands and just begin to face the truth of what’s really there, even though it can be excruciating. And not at all fun in the moment. But it frees us up we get through that pain and then it frees us up and we can actually move through life. And we’re just that much more effective and we’re able to bring our internal resources to bear on any given moment that we’re in.

Yeah, often on the other side of this sort of work, there’s a confidence in our ability to be with our emotions, even the excruciating ones, in a new way. And I think that there is a timing component to that. That the emotions, even the very painful ones,

have a passing. There is sort of like a starting and an end point. Whereas what often happens is people are getting stuck. They’re getting stuck in this more sort of repressive place. And there’s almost an endless states of suffering. It’s just a baseline

of anxiety that never moves. It really never moves on. And that is an agony because then there’s sort of no way out of it. It’s just always happening. And people are trying to use their mind to understand why. Yeah, I think there’s a confidence about our ability to be with pain that changes as well.

That goes hand in hand with that freeing up and that vitality that you’re talking about. 

Right, right. You’re describing a living nightmare. Yeah, that’s right. That’s the promise of really good psychodynamic therapy, is that it can really help you turn a corner on that. 

One thing we haven’t touched on as we talk about, psychodynamic as a term, is the role of the unconscious, or unconscious processes that might be at play. 

What do we mean when we’re talking about the unconscious? 

Well, in a nutshell, we go through life and we get banged up here and there. Some more than others. Things happen that are painful and not fun. And, especially for a young child, it’s often too overwhelming and too painful.

And just too threatening. And so the child has to figure out a way not to feel those things. And so those feelings and experiences get relegated into the realm of what we call the unconscious. In sort of plain English, it just gets tuned out. And part of the reason for that is that, for better or worse, children don’t have what we call the ego strength to really hide what they feel.

It’s written all over them. And so if the child is with adults that are punitive or threatening, or they withdraw in the face of certain feelings, well, it’s pretty smart for that kiddo to learn how to not feel it. Because if they do feel it, it’s going to show. And so it gets relegated into what we call the unconscious, which means that the process of healing is about learning how to make that conscious again, so we can metabolize and work through those feelings that were too frightening or too painful to deal with when we were young.

Yeah, sounds like what you’re referring to there, are like automated processes that started off in young life, that are there because there’s some kind of protective quality to them at the time. You know, children need to be able to be around their caregivers, and so there are all sorts of ways that as the brain is developing, it’s learning “these things are okay for you to show to people in terms of what you’re feeling” and “these aren’t”. And that these sorts of processes are being developed – shortcuts and heuristics are being developed – to the point that actually the child is starting to only become aware consciously of certain feelings they’re having. Now they’re completely tuned out from other things because there’s no purpose to them.

There’s no help that they can provide to be aware of those feelings. They might lead to danger. So , there’s a way that the brain is sort of choosing and trying to help the child to remain in relationship with their caregivers to some degree- to keep them alive, right? That often requires them to break off parts of their experience and almost forget parts of themselves and their feelings.

Yeah. 

Yeah. If, whenever there is anger on my face or sadness on my face or exuberance and joy on my face, my parents or one of them gives me the cold shoulder and doesn’t talk to me for a week. Then I’m going to be pretty motivated not to show that on my face again. In order for that not to show then, if I’m young enough, I have to figure out a way not to feel it at all.

Yeah. So is there a difference then? I think there is from what you just said. But a difference between someone who might still sort of be aware that they’re having this feeling, but they’ve learned really good automatic ways of never letting it come out and never letting it be seen by another person. Versus something that is much more unconscious.

And what I mean by that is a person’s just not even aware they’re feeling angry. You know, they might even feel a completely different emotion in its place. 

There is. You know, we can hypothesize that the person who’s not even aware of their feelings – that the trauma, the attachment trauma that they experienced, it happened at an earlier age. 

By virtue of what I talked about, how the kid doesn’t have that ego strength to hide what they feel. So they actually have to hide it – even from their own selves. 

So , there’s a way in which we are already relating to our feelings that might give clues potentially. Like if we think about in the therapy room, it might be giving clues as to when some of this started.

That’s right. 

I guess what I’m hearing is that a psychodynamic approach involves a greater focus on emotions. And, holding multiple emotions at once. Our ability to do that. But it also involves taking into consideration that some of what we feel might not even be accessible to us consciously when we enter the therapy room to begin.

And so part of the work would be working to try and understand better what might be happening under the hood, or what has been tuned out, and trying to bring it back into our experience so that we can then work with it as we do this kind of navigation towards learning how to be with complex feelings again.

It’s getting reacquainted with ourselves, you could say.

That leads me to ISTDP, or Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy. This is a school of psychodynamic therapy. It’s a particular approach within a psychodynamic umbrella term. , I know you’ve been practicing it, and studying it , and teaching it for a very long time.

How do you describe ISTDP to someone who is completely naive to the approach? Perhaps not even a therapist. How do you distill it into its nuts and bolts? 

Well, it can be a very loving way of getting in someone’s face and encouraging them to look at what they are sweeping underneath the rug.

It’s direct. It can be a little bit confrontational. It can have a sense of pressure. But I say loving because if it’s done well, it’s going to be really, really clear to the person getting the help that the therapist is really in their corner, and they’re not steamrolling them.

They’re not bulldozing them. But they really are extending invitations for the client to stretch themselves, to try to step out of their comfort zone.

Yeah, that’s a beautiful way of putting it. There’s an intensity to it. And continually trying to reorient to the heart of the matter. 

Or an attempt to get to the heart of the matter, that I think can be quite different to if someone has been to see a therapist in the past that uses a different approach. Something more like CBT that can feel quite different to that too.

So how does ISTDP differ from a longer term psychodynamic or psychoanalytically-informed therapy? What do you see as the key distinction that makes it its own school?

Well, I’m not an expert on long term analytic work, so I can only speak to it from someone who studied ISTDP a lot, and I have some knowledge of psychoanalytic therapy and long term therapy.

So, with that caveat in mind – the immediacy is key. Of pointing out what’s happening in real [00:20:00] time. Like at this very moment – “you see how you’re avoiding eye contact?”, or “do you see how you’re off to one more story?”, or “what’s happening now in your torso? You’re describing a pinching attention. Tell me more about that right here in terms of what you’re feeling right now”.

So it isn’t just out there in the ethers, you know. It’s not “generally speaking, here’s how I function”, or “here’s what tends to happen to me”. But that element of immediacy is what brings in the experiential component. And that accelerates things. And it also seems to create sort of a pressure-cooker type container where, somehow or other, the kind of problems that brought you to therapy to begin with begin to manifest with the therapist in real time.

And that can be a bit unsettling, but the good news is that then it gives you an opportunity to actually try to understand what’s driving it. Then you can actually resolve it.

As you’re trying to do therapy, noticing what is going on there and what gets in the way there. That’s really, really powerful because it’s a live example often. Rather than trying to remember things and bring up examples from last week.

It’s happening in the here and 

now. 

And it’s something that can really be focused on. ,

I often have people ask me, well what is ISTDP best suited for? What kinds of challenges are “best” for an ISTDP approach?

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think at this point, there’s enough research that is looking at outcome data where we can basically say that ISTDP is good for a garden variety of all manner of issues. I think for a while there it was mostly talked about in terms of being really good for personality disorders or somatic complaints, psychogenic, or physical symptoms.

But I think now there’s enough outcome data to really point to that it can be super helpful for a whole lot of general psychological and interpersonal difficulties. 

Yeah, I agree. I see it has a big impact just on people who come in who are experiencing a lot of anxiety all the time and don’t know why. They don’t know why they’re feeling anxious.

They’re always feeling anxious. It’s very uncomfortable. They’ve often tried all sorts of things, you know, like on social media. And the breathing exercises and polyvagal interventions and all this stuff that they’re seeing everywhere. And it may give them sort of momentary relief sometimes

because it’s tapping into the physiological system and the parasympathetic system and all these things. But it’s really not getting to the root of what is going on there. And so there’s sort of just these band aid approaches over and over. I find it can bring a lot of relief for people that are experiencing that kind of anxiety, as well.

Mm hmm. 

And the other thing I see is I see lots and lots of people now becoming much more aware of the impact of things like attachment and attachment rupture when you’re younger – attachment based trauma. And so now as young adults they are starting to think about what’s happening for them and they often talk about it as being like a complex trauma that they’ve experienced in their younger years. And they’re coming in to purposely address that, and the way that that’s playing out for them in relationships in current day life. And I found that ISTDP is really useful for that as well.

Do you think couples can benefit from an ISTDP approach? 

Yeah, I love working with couples and I have adapted ISTDP to the couples format.

It’s a slightly different animal. So with couples I have found that it’s generally not a great idea to try to help each of them get to the engine of their suffering, the way you might in individual therapy. So the aim is a bit different. 

The aim is to help them work out a more satisfying relationship, which is different than sort of reaching the top of the mountain and really getting to the bottom of your neuroses.

So if someone is going in for ISTDP therapy, what can they expect? How does it go?

Well, I would suggest that if you’re interested in trying out doing ISTDP, get a feel for the therapist first. Chemistry is important.

So you want to have a sense of being comfortable. And you want to have a sense that there is personal chemistry between you and the therapist. And so that’s number one. So assuming you have that, then, you can expect the therapist to take a very active interest in what brings you to therapy.

Personally, you know when I practice ISTDP, I’ll say things like “what kind of changes are you envisioning for yourself if we were to be successful together?”. So the therapist generally is quite focused on your priorities, what you want to get out of the sessions, and It’s not a kind of idle fireplace chat.

It’s not a place where you just get things off your chest. So if you find that you’re in that kind of a venting mode, the therapist might interrupt that and say “you know, I’m getting lost in the stream of words” or whatever. And try to get to what’s driving that. 

That is also very different for some people, and perhaps for their expectations, too. That this kind of therapy is not about turning up each week or each fortnight and just talking about what’s been going on

with someone who’s supportive and listening and compassionate. It’s much more focused than that. And the therapist is potentially interrupting or trying to refocus and reorient, that can be quite common in ISTDP depending on what’s going on.

So I think that’s good to know, too. And that it’s done in the service of trying to reach the goal that has been established. To get to the heart of matters with some momentum and hopefully not going on and on for years and years. Yeah, that’s right.

Yeah, wonderful. Last last question I’ll ask you – the Triangle Of Conflict, I think, is a really important conceptualisation that is not out there, not understood generally. Could you just speak really briefly about what is the triangle of conflict? How that operates? 

Sure. Well, it’s a theoretical construct that tells us something about causality inside the psyche.

For instance, if we go back to that discussion about the kid whose parent turns a cold shoulder if they’re having a certain feeling. The kid is feeling a certain way. Maybe angry, maybe sad, maybe happy. And the parent gives them the cold shoulder. So the triangle of conflict tells a story of what’s happening for that child at an emotional level.

And so we can imagine that the child doesn’t like what’s happening. Right? They love their dad. They need their dad for survival, but the dad is now turning a cold shoulder. So one emotional reality is, “I don’t like this. I’m angry at my dad for doing that.” But then, again, if it was the anger that precipitated the father turning his cold shoulder to begin with, well – now I’m in a bind.

As the kiddo, I’m in a bind. So now I’m going to get anxious. Basically the alarm bells are going off going, “okay, this is potentially dangerous right now because I was angry, my dad saw it, he gave me the cold shoulder, now I’m even more angry”. But, “now I’m also really anxious, because this feels quite dangerous and like it could jeopardize my connection with my dad”.

So the triangle of conflict tells the story of: 

1) I’m hurt about what happened. I’m angry about it. Maybe other feelings too. But, 

2) they feel scary and risky, it could jeopardize this relationship, so now I’m really anxious. So now 

3) I have to figure out how to manage this anxiety and move away from what’s causing that anxiety – which is the feelings and the impulses.

And so those defenses could be all manner of things. It could be putting on a happy face. It could be moving to happy talk instead of saying I’m actually angry. It could be people pleasing. It could be defiance. It could be rebelliousness. It could be substance use. It could be self sabotage. It could be a thousand and one things. But the core functions are about trying to manage that anxiety. To get away from the feelings that are causing that anxiety.

Yeah. Yeah. That was really well explained. I like the example. , I think you really captured the way that anxiety can be conceptualized in this form of therapy a bit different to the way that people are used to talking about it. And that really anxiety here, in this example, is like you say, an alarm bell.

It’s a signal of threat emerging. But the threat that it’s identifying is actually the emotional state. It is the “oh, no, I’m feeling angry. I can’t feel angry in this relationship because that leads to rejection or punishment”. And so the noticing the not liking what the father is doing in that example… it’s the noticing the not liking that leads to the anxiety, right?

That actually what can happen for people is that they mostly just become aware of that anxiety part of the triangle. That that feeling that initiated the alarm bells going off is often forgotten or not experienced. This is what we mean too with some of the distinction about conscious versus unconscious. And it can explain why for lots of people they’re just feeling anxious all the time.

And so just to be clear that the triangle there is that: 1) there’s a feeling state or an emotional state at the bottom, which in this case might be anger. And then 2) there is the anxiety that feeling generates, which is often what the person becomes aware of feeling and is very, very uncomfortable and we’re motivated to get out of that.

So, what’s causing the anxiety is the anger. Then we’re motivated to do something to get out of the anxiety. , to move us away. And so then that leads to 3) a [00:30:00] defense. A defense is what we call it. It’s an action, something we do, a strategy we might automatically employ, to try to get the anxiety down. It can be all those things that you described: act happy to the point that we might actually think we are happy; say something really nice about your father and that pleases him;

it might be to go silent and very small and sort of paralysed and passive; substance abuse; all these things. It could be all sorts of things. But it’s something that helps us to get away from the anxiety. So if we can start to learn to be with our emotional states anew, so that they’re no longer interpreted as a threatening stimulus, then that massive anxiety is no longer created just from the emergence of the anger, in this example. Then we can also get away obviously from the discomfort of that anxiety, but then the need for that defensive stuff falls away.

Then we’re often not engaging in these otherwise automatic behaviors of going very small and quiet. Or going to substance use, or whatever it is. But it’s really just an attempt to get away from the anxiety. 

It captures it really well. 

Yeah. 

, It’s often not just the feeling that mobilizes anxiety, it’s what we want to do with the feeling. It’s the impulse attached to the feeling. And so if we’re angry, there might be some heat in the body, but that’s not that anxiety provoking.

What’s really anxiety provoking is I actually want to do violence to someone. I love my dad or mum or sister or brother or whatever. The fact that maybe there’s a part of me that wants to throw this person off the balcony – that’s pretty anxiety provoking. For a number of reasons. I mean one is that it could jeopardise the relationship like I spoke to already. But the other is what if I were to lose control? 

What if I actually were to throw this person off the balcony? Well that would be a disaster. So when we’re looking at adults who get anxious around their feelings, it can still be related to what I talked about – the kiddo who’s worried about jeopardising the relationship with the parent.

But, as adults, it’s actually often about what if I were to act on this? Like I could go to prison for murder. And so it’s a different kind of anxiety. 

Yeah, that impulse component is really important because, again, I don’t think we understand that 

in society at large. That feelings come with an impulse. And that’s quite separate from a real behavior. And that that’s quite normal. That’s a natural part of what an emotion, and the physiological process inside, comes with. And so if you go back to the child – if they never have that normalised for them, or no one ever speaks to them about that, they never come to learn that.. Then it’s often this very private experience. And like you say, all these things go underground. And their psyche learns all sorts of ways to manage the anxiety that comes with that.

That’s right. That’s right. 

I’ve been thinking for a long time about the principles of ISTDP and how useful they can be to new parents. Obviously thinking about how this starts young. What are the takeaways here that would be useful for new parents to know? I often have clients who become parents for the first time, and they’re like, “what am I’m doing here? I have no idea”. And there’s a thousand messages on social media about how they’re supposed to parent, and they’re often conflictual. 

Any comment you want to make on that?

Well I think the idea of attachment trauma – the idea that there is a rupture or strain between the child and a caretaker or parent – is really core to this discussion of how ISTDP might apply to parents. And so, what I think is important to remember as a parent, is that the way we ourselves were wounded, in one form or fashion, typically it involves some variety of our feelings and our needs not being taken seriously. That they were not taken seriously, in some form or fashion. And overindulging a child can be another way, by the way, of actually not being focused on what’s in their best interest.

So, I’m not advocating for giving a child everything they want, for instance. That’s not what I’m talking about. But I think that’s a core idea. And then the idea of separating what the child is feeling from how they deal with that feeling. Yes. 

So you want to say things like, “it’s okay if you’re angry, or if you want me to get run over by a bus. But it’s not okay for you to throw things. Or for you to steal this or that. We don’t do that in this house”.

So you have a line of demarcation between: 1) what you feel is okay, and I’m always going to try to make sense of your feelings and be there for you so you can feel heard and understood in what you feel, but 2) how you deal with them – there is parameters. 

I like that. And that also links to when we’re talking at the start about psychodynamic therapy, and how I see its power is that it is helping an adult to really just make a distinction between those two realms as well.

And so this is trying to do that from young. Really helping a child to understand that from their first years. As opposed to waiting to becoming an adult. And I think the being really interested in the person of the child is key here too. And trying to separate that from potentially our own anxiety management systems, in terms of what can often happen too with something like an overindulging. Really trying to stay on the track of just getting to know the person of the child, and showing true interest in them as an individual, separate from everything you might want them to be, you know. That is really, really important.

But yeah, this way that we deal with emotions in young children. I think that is part of what is confusing out there in terms of the advice. And I really appreciate ISTDP for what it’s taught me about the difference between an impulse and an action in the world. And that bit is completely missing out there.

There is talk about feelings in the body. But that impulse bit – that’s really missing. I saw it definitely when my kids were young. How they would talk about that sort of thing. Like wanting to throw me in the bin. And, you know, I was just so thankful that I had ISTDP as an understanding there. Because I can understand how, for some parents, they could be very quick to say, like, “how disrespectful that is”, or how “you’ve hurt my feelings by saying that!”. So I was just so thankful to have that. And that’s part of what I think would be so useful for new parents to understand.

To be able to not just sort of validate or normalise a feeling, but also the impulse that they might be describing that comes with it. And then to make that demarcation “that’s not what we do in real life”, right? And then how you might deal with noticing all that inside you. And that you are there with them – if they want you to be – to work with that and to always be open to them in that regard.

I think that’s really key. 

Yes. Whereas if the kid can hear “Gosh, I must have really hurt you if you’re that angry at me. Let’s talk about it. What did what did I do? What happened? Why are you so mad? I want to understand it.” Not like why are you so mad, you shouldn’t be. Just, “I’m actually curious. Let’s talk about it”.

It’s an invitation to get to know the child better, too. 

They’re trying in a roundabout way, they’re trying to tell you something about themselves and their experience. And trying to step out of what any other kind of automatic. , response that might come up inside you – to hear your child say that to you when you’re sleep deprived and have a thousand other things on your mind, and you’re just trying to get through the moment, and you’re already half an hour late somewhere. 

It’s not easy. But, having those principles in mind really helps. Yeah.

Yeah Thank you for listening to this extended version of my conversation with Johannes Kieding. If you’re interested in his work or contacting him for therapy or training, I will leave the contact details in the description.

As always, if you enjoyed this podcast, if you are interested in more episodes or interested in the services that we provide, please check out our website: sydneycitypsychology .com.au

We work with children, adolescents, and adults across Australia – in our office on Macquarie Street in Sydney, or online. We provide psychology sessions, couples counseling, psychometric assessment, family therapy, corporate trainings and workshops, forensic reports,

online group programs, medical services through our GP, and neurodiversity services. We would love to hear from you. And we would love to hear what other topics you’re interested in for future episodes. Thank you for listening.