Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) and Stress Management

ISTDP addresses stress by helping you build more capacity to tolerate stress and use it adaptively, or to reduce the stress triggered in certain relationships and/or situations.

ISTDP aims to gain clarity about the specific factors contributing to your distress. In this therapy, we look at not only the current triggers for stress, but also unresolved issues stemming from your early attachment relationships, which are being activated. Together with a therapist, you decide whether the issue is to build your capacity to tolerate emotional conflict without excessive anxiety, and/or to change some of your patterns of behaviour in life and relationships, to reduce the stress these cause.

With better emotional awareness and capacity, you can lead a more balanced life, where stress itself enhances your growth and development.

Increasing Anxiety Regulation Capacity:

A primary goal of ISTDP is to help people increase their capacity to recognise unhealthy rises in anxiety and to stay more regulated. Anxiety is a response to internal emotional conflicts and unconscious feelings. The triggers for these conflicts can be different for different people. ISTDP helps you identify the triggers for your stress and to face the emotions that arise without this generating excessive anxiety. It enables you to tolerate, understand and process emotions without the overwhelm that excessive stress can create.

As you become more adept at managing your anxiety, you are less likely to experience the debilitating effects of distress and more likely to handle stressors effectively. And this leads to increased and optimal functioning in yourself, and in your relationships, study, and workplace.

Restructuring Defenses

Defence mechanisms are psychological strategies used unconsciously to protect ourselves from anxiety-provoking emotions. While they can be protective, defenses often become maladaptive, leading to increased distress.

In ISTDP, the therapist works with a patient to identify and understand these defence mechanisms, and how they contribute to the patient’s psychological distress. For example, if you use compliance and self-neglect in relationships, you may tend to take on too much responsibility, whether in close personal relationships, workplace relationships, or in sporting or interest groups. Taking on more than a reasonable share of responsibility can result in stress. ISTDP therapy would help you notice how you operate in relationships and to identify the emotional conflicts you avoid in doing so. It would help you set goals for healthier ways of operating, build capacity to face conflicted emotions without excessive anxiety, and, ultimately, make healthier choices, thus reducing stress. ISTDP restructures your defences into more adaptive coping strategies so you can more effectively deal with internal conflicts and stressors.

In conclusion, ISTDP’s focus on increasing capacity to recognise, tolerate, and effectively use emotions increases a person’s ability to use emotions adaptively. Anxiety regulation is improved. Harmful defenses are replaced with adaptive coping strategies, helping to transform distress into beneficial eustress. ISTDP helps individuals identify situations in which they are behaving less than optimally and to build capacity to make necessary changes. There is a focus not only on what is not working in the individual’s current life, but addressing and re-working past relationships in which these patterns of responding to emotions was formed.

So, ISTDP addresses the root causes of distress, fosters a healthier relationship with stress, and empowers you to either reduce stress or to experience it as a motivating and growth-promoting force. The outcome is better mental health, resilience, and overall well-being.