Sessions are collaborative endeavours in identifying patterns and, in becoming conscious of them, understanding and changing them.
Mozafari strives to provide a comforting, educational, and private environment for all her clients. Sessions are collaborative endeavours in identifying patterns and, in becoming conscious of them, leads the individual to understanding and changing them.
Mozafari focuses on interactive psychological forces that affect personality and underlying motives of behavior by using a psychodynamic, client-centered approach. Psychoeducational work is done in the clinical situation focusing on the psychological hurdles that one had to overcome as a child to become an adult, with an emphasis on the social and cultural environment that informed the individual. By means of illuminating one’s awareness of both their inner and outer worlds, the aim is to collaboratively help clients with acute psychological disorders through talk therapy.
Illuminating inner and outer worlds through talk therapy.
Psychoanalytic or psychodynamic psychotherapy is heavily influenced by psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. By illuminating awareness of the inner world, this model aims to help individuals with acute psychological difficulties — restoring meaning, well-being, and the capacity to manage life more effectively.
There is special emphasis on the relationship with the therapist. In a confidential, private setting, unconscious patterns of the client’s inner world may become reflected in the therapeutic relationship — a process generally called transference. Identifying these patterns develops the capacity to understand and change them.
Trauma is a complex, dynamic experience involving both a shattering experience and efforts at restoration. It is better characterized as ‘a severe shock to the system’, which can be caused by either a bodily injury or a psychical, emotional blow or wound to one’s system. It is the aftermath of the psychical trauma that psychoanalytic psychotherapy can attempt to remedy and work through.
A lack of resolution or restoration can foster a ‘repetition compulsion’ or a recurring pattern of re-visiting of the trauma through dreams, or an unconscious impulse to put oneself in other, similar, traumatic situations. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy can help clients to advance and develop emotional and behavioral strategies, as well as build on pre-existing strengths, to adequately deal with the trauma.
A traumatic experience is usually beyond words and has never been spoken about by most survivors. In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a unique form of talk therapy, one can begin to unravel the layers of the experience, slowly and often through speaking about the current symptoms that have manifested as a result, which may include anxiety, substance dependency, self-injurious behavior, psycho-somatic symptoms, depression, etc.
The first step is to make an appointment and get started on getting to know your psychoanalytic psychotherapist through building a therapeutic rapport. Be committed to the process and the rest will follow.
Anxiety, substance dependency, self-injurious behavior, psycho-somatic symptoms, depression, and other forms of distress may be the language through which the unspeakable first appears.
A traumatic experience is often beyond words. In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, one can begin to unravel layers of the experience — slowly, often through current symptoms that have manifested as a result.
The first step is to make an appointment and begin building therapeutic rapport. Be committed to the process — and the rest will follow.
Reasons people come to psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
Issues stemming from past and present complex, deep-seated, and often unconsciously based emotional and relationship problems are explored to diminish symptoms and offer relief.
During assessment, planning, intervention, review and evaluation, Mozafari uses — but is not limited by — the following approaches:
Adaptations of psychoanalytic theory that zero in on interactive psychological forces affecting personality and underlying motives of behavior — including a “person-in-situation” psychosocial lens that joins internal strength with resources in the environment.
Examines the “4 Ps”: person, problem, place, and process — assessing the whole person and their context to increase coping capacity, without reducing life to tasks alone.
A short-term model to assist victims and survivors to return toward pre-crisis functioning, attending first to safety and feeling while identifying major problems and practical alternatives.
Practical goals, tasks, and time limits that improve capacity to deal with difficulties pragmatically — empowering clients to resolve current problems and prepare for future ones.
The client as active participant. Empathy, respect for subjective experience, and a focus on the client’s meanings and story establish collaboration and support self-actualization.
Farnoush Mozafari received her Ph.D. from York University in sociology. During her doctoral studies she specialized in social psychology, psychoanalysis, and trauma models and theories, and taught Sociological Perspectives in Social Psychology at York University for a number of years.
In 2016, while conducting doctoral research on trauma interventions, she was accepted into the Advanced Training Program for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society & Institute, in affiliation with the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry — and opened a private practice with a special focus on trauma.
Working with couples, families, small groups, and individual clients, Mozafari draws on current trauma research to respond carefully and skillfully to each person’s needs — regardless of social location, background, or origin.
