Understanding Relationships from the Inside Out

PCFINE's faculty takes an integrative approach that weaves together elements of psychodynamic therapy, family systems, and attachment theories.

From our perspective, each person's current interpersonal behavior reflects adaptations to their early home environment — adaptive and defensive strategies developed to sustain connections to early attachment figures and to maintain a sense of one's self as loveable and safe.

We believe that early implicit relational and emotional schemas are painfully triggered in close relationships — and that in converging, they create familiar patterns where past and present, self and other, and perception and reality can become difficult to disentangle.

In couples, this often means partners become locked in cycles where each person's history is reenacted in the dynamics between them.

In families, these patterns can span generations — shaping unspoken rules about roles, emotions, and how closeness and autonomy are negotiated, leaving family members feeling unseen or trapped.

It is the work of the therapist — ideally, with proper psychodynamic training — to help clients recognize how the past is being reenacted in their present relationships.

While insight into the historic roots of relational patterns helps illuminate what each person contributes to the difficulty, such insight is usually not sufficient to bring about enduring change.

True change occurs through the repeated experiencing of new patterns of feeling, thinking, and relating — patterns that liberate people from archaic roles and allow for greater agency and self-expression. This process fosters an emerging capacity for mutual perspective taking, compassion, and deeper understanding of the meanings and motives of their interactions.

We teach strategies that are effective in calming and containing strong affect in order to engage reflective capacities. This is an important element in creating a safe, non-pathologizing environment that promotes a strong therapeutic alliance — with each individual and with the couple or family as a unit.

Once this atmosphere is established, the therapist is able to challenge assumptions, differentiate past and present, and guide clients to a deeper, more mutual understanding of their repetitive and problematic interactional patterns.