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Lara Kennerly, PsyD
Depth Psychology Therapy in Sacramento & Across California
Depth psychology explores the parts of your mind that are normally inaccessible to you, staying outside of your awareness and hidden beneath the surface of your consciousness. Although you aren't aware of what lies beneath, it is a vast and deep ocean full of meaningful memories and experiences, which invisibly push and pull on you, shaping your life and current experiences. These invisible deep currents continue to direct how you think and feel, and are often the root cause of your deepest and most entrenched areas of emotional pain and problematic patterns that contribute to your current life difficulties.
Dr. Lara Kennerly uses Depth Psychology to help you begin to dive deep, explore the unconscious parts of yourself that you wouldn't otherwise have access to, finally identify and understand the root causes of your long-term emotional pain and difficulties, and work towards attaining long-term personal growth. Sessions are available in person in Sacramento and online across California.
What Is the Depth Psychology Approach to Therapy?
Depth Psychology is an approach to therapy based on the understanding that much of what shapes your emotions, decisions, and relationships is operating outside of your conscious awareness. The word “depth” refers to everything in your mental life sitting below what you can readily observe about yourself (your current conscious awareness), deeper down, which includes earlier experiences, unmet needs, and beliefs formed so early that they now are viewed as simply a "part of who you are" and are rarely questioned or examined outside of encountering problems in life that don't have an obviously identifiable cause or "quick fix."
Depth Psychology is defined as the psychological theory that explores the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, as well as the patterns and dynamics of motivation and the mind. Depth psychology states that who you are and how you live your life are partly conscious, partly unconscious, and partly semi-conscious.
Depth psychologists believe that the uncovering of deeper, often unconscious motives is intrinsically healing in and of itself. It seeks knowledge of the deep layers underlying behavior, beliefs, and how you think about and view your experiences in life. It views your internal experience as running on multiple levels of consciousness and awareness simultaneously, some of which you have partial or full access to under the right conditions, but much of which is totally hidden and inaccessible to you, sitting deep in your unconscious. Buried under decades of other memories and life experiences, it has been out of sight for so long it's been essentially "lost to history." However, because it is so deeply embedded, it can still influence how you think and feel in unexpected and confusing ways, and can create problematic patterns in life that, despite your best efforts, you find yourself unable to change.
Depth Therapy looks to explore underlying motives beyond an individual's awareness or understanding, as an approach to treating mental/mood disorders. This approach is especially well-suited for treating deep or complex trauma, chronic anxiety, major life transitions, existential crises, long-standing feelings of depression/emptiness/meaninglessness, chronic relationship problems with multiple past partners, and chronic struggles with social anxiety/discomfort.
Depth Therapy focuses on exploring those less accessible parts of you, helping guide you to explore your unconscious and semi-conscious mind's influence on your thoughts and feelings, in order to heal deeply rooted emotional pain. It focuses on discovering the root causes of current issues, and long-term lasting change over "quick fixes."
Hidden memories, fears, and unmet needs are brought into the light and explored, and then examined side-by-side with current difficulties in order to see how they are related and linked together. Discoveries around where the roots of problematic patterns lie allow you to start to untangle the influence these unconscious processes have on how you are currently living your life, and give you the insight needed to begin to make intentional changes to these patterns that no longer serve you.
How Depth Psychology Helps You Recognize Unconscious Patterns
Depth psychology helps you recognize unconscious patterns by connecting what you are dealing with now to earlier experiences and circumstances that initially informed how you would respond in similar contexts. Buried in the unconscious mind is a huge deep ocean of repressed or forgotten material that continues to influence behavior and emotional experiencing. Recent neuroscience research using fMRI technology has provided biological evidence for these unconscious processes, revealing that areas of the brain where emotional experiences and affective memories are processed and stored early in life (infancy and childhood) are similarly activated in adults encountering emotionally charged material that is similar.
Key aspects of Depth Psychology Therapy include three main components that are considered primary processes, the focus of clinical exploration and attention, and essential elements for effective treatment:
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Defense Mechanisms: Unconscious psychological strategies that individuals use to cope with emotional distress/pain/overwhelm to protect themselves from, avoid, and escape from uncomfortable thoughts or feelings. Common defenses include:
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Projection (attributing one's feelings to others)
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Denial (refusing to acknowledge reality)
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Sublimation (channeling impulses into constructive activities)
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Repression (pushing painful memories out of awareness)
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Internal Working Models: We develop mental templates of relationships based on early experiences. These templates unconsciously guide how we relate to others and ourselves.
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The Therapeutic Relationship: Depth therapists pay close attention to the therapeutic relationship. The relationship between therapist and client serves as a type of "living laboratory," where dynamics going on in real time between them offer a here-and-now opportunity to study the way old relationship patterns can surface in the present, even in the therapy room. Unconscious patterns can be observed, discussed, understood, and transformed.
Therapists use a variety of techniques aimed at bringing unconscious influences into conscious awareness, in order to identify root causes of distress and gain a deeper understanding of how past experiences influence current life difficulties. "Socratic questioning" is one technique often used to challenge clients to examine deeply held beliefs and motivations, promoting self-reflection and the integration of unconscious material into conscious awareness.
Therapists offer insights about patterns and connections they observe, helping clients gain new understanding of their experiences. Modern depth therapy emphasizes collaborative interpretation, where insights emerge through dialogue. Unconscious material is often uncovered organically while a client is engaged in collaborative dialogue and processes the observations, possible patterns, and proposed interpretations being offered by the therapist.
What Can Depth Psychology Help With?
Depth Psychology therapy is often a good fit for concerns that have proven persistent, including those that return after they seem resolved or have been present so long that they feel like part of your personality rather than something that can change.
Because it explores underlying motives beyond an individual's awareness or understanding as an approach to treating mental/mood disorders, Depth therapy is especially well-suited for treating deep or complex trauma, chronic anxiety, major life transitions, existential crises, long-standing feelings of emptiness or meaninglessness, chronic relationship problems with multiple past partners, and chronic struggles with social anxiety/discomfort. It is helpful for most mental health and mood disorders because it focuses on tracing current symptoms, such as anxiety, depression, addiction, and relationship distress, to unconscious patterns formed in earlier life experiences.
Depth psychology explores and fosters emotional resilience and often leads to long-lasting change, addressing deep-rooted issues rather than just surface symptoms.
Anxiety Without a Clear Trigger
Worry attached to nothing specific, a body that stays braced when nothing is happening, or a constant scan for what might go wrong next. Depth psychology considers how these responses may have developed in an environment where staying alert once served a purpose.
Depression Without an Obvious Cause
Flatness, loss of interest, and a sense of distance from your own life that is difficult to explain to anyone, particularly when your circumstances appear fine from the outside.
The Long-Term Effects of Trauma
Reactions that outlast the events that produced them, including hypervigilance, numbness, and a sense of safety that never fully returned. This includes the cumulative exposure common in high-stress and high-risk professions.
Grief and Loss
Losses that have not settled are complicated by the circumstances surrounding them or were never given room to be grieved when they occurred.
Repeating Relationship Patterns
The same conflict across different relationships, difficulty being close without losing yourself, or a distance you maintain without consciously deciding to.
Perfectionism and People-Pleasing
Standards that never ease regardless of what you accomplish, along with a habit of managing everyone else’s comfort at your own expense.
Burnout and Disconnection in Demanding Work
Exhaustion that rest does not resolve, along with the growing sense that the version of you at work has replaced the rest of you.
Depth Psychology Therapist in Sacramento, CA
I understand how current life struggles, problematic patterns, interpersonal difficulties, and chronic negative/numb emotions can persist regardless of past treatment or personal motivation to change, and that these are often rooted in difficult early experiences that are outside of your conscious awareness. Buried and forgotten, early life experiences continue to influence how we think, feel, react, and relate to others.
As a licensed psychologist in Sacramento, I use Depth Psychology in my work with adults who are navigating
lives where they look like "fine," successfully functioning adults on the outside, but on the inside struggle with deep-rooted emotional pain and feeling trapped in problematic patterns and experiences that they don't fully understand. In therapy, we take time to dive deep, explore the unconscious parts of yourself that you wouldn't otherwise have access to, bring unconscious influences into conscious awareness, in order to identify root causes of distress, reconcile inner conflicts, and work towards greater emotional and psychological health.
Many of the people I work with are high-achieving professionals, first responders, or individuals carrying significant responsibilities where the root causes of emotional pain often stay hidden beneath the surface.
I offer Depth Psychology therapy in person in Midtown Sacramento and online throughout California.
Frequently asked questions
The Pattern You Can Most Easily Identify Isn't the Most Easily Changed
You may be able to explain the pattern clearly and still find yourself repeating it. Depth psychology therapy can help you examine deeply held beliefs and motivations, promote self-reflection and the integration of unconscious material into conscious awareness, identify and address the root cause of distress, and gain a deeper understanding of how past experiences influence current life difficulties.
Sessions are available in person in Sacramento and online throughout California.