Dr. Daniel J. Papapietro, PsyD Clinical Psychologist Psychotherapist
Psychotherapy Supervision/Consultation
Farmington, Ct
860.269.4756
Dr. Papapietro maintains a psychotherapy practice devoted exclusively to psychodynamic psychotherapy with individuals and couples. He is a licensed clinical psychologist with more than 40 years of clinical experience across a broad range of outpatient and inpatient psychiatric settings, including private, community, forensic, state, and VA hospitals.
For more than four decades, Dr. Papapietro has taught, trained, and supervised psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers in the theory and practice of psychodynamic psychotherapy. He holds a faculty appointment as Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Previously, he held a similar faculty appointment at the Yale School of Medicine for ten years.
AN IMPORTANT NOTE ON INDIVIDUAL AND COUPLES PSYCHOTHERAPY *
I do not participate in divorce or custody proceedings, workman's compensation or any civil or criminal process in any form, and I will not provide written reports, evaluations, or testimony for legal purposes. This boundary exists to protect the integrity of the therapeutic relationship itself — once the treatment room becomes entangled with the courtroom, the trust and neutrality that make this work possible are fundamentally compromised.
Why Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Psychotherapy?
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is fundamentally different from counseling or cognitive-behavioral approaches. Those treatments might offer quicker relief by targeting symptoms directly — and the symptoms may indeed improve. But symptoms often return because the therapy never addressed the unconscious source of the problem. Psychodynamic psychotherapy addresses both the symptom and its underlying unconscious causes.
This is a rigorous process. It takes time and does not offer quick fixes. It is not casual conversation — there are no homework assignments, cheerful encouragement, or advice on how to live your life. The goal is to help you understand how your current struggles — anxiety, depression, anger, substance use, among others — are actually symptoms of deeper emotional conflicts that very often reach deep into your childhood and family experiences. Psychotherapy is about understanding yourself and your past, and that requires time, patience, and trust. It is hard work, and it may not be for everyone.
Consider depression as an example. People often speak about being depressed as though that were the problem to treat. In reality, depression is a symptom of something else — and reaching the emotional root of that symptom requires careful exploration of your life: childhood and family experiences, possible traumas, relationship losses, and attachment difficulties that may have resulted in problems with intimacy and trust.
The same process applies to anxiety, interpersonal difficulties at home and at work, and certain addictions. This kind of therapy asks for a genuine willingness to look deeply at your life. To do that, you have to trust your therapist — and learning to trust takes time. It means taking emotional risks, being open and honest, even when that feels uncomfortable. The more fully you are able to do this, the more likely you are to free yourself from these symptoms, make better choices, build healthier relationships, and create the kind of stable emotional life you want.
Why Is Insurance Not Accepted?
Trust and privacy are essential to psychotherapy. You need to feel free to think and speak honestly about yourself without self-censoring — and that requires a setting where you know your confidentiality is absolute, as protected by federal law.
The problem with insurance is that providers typically require the release of personal clinical information in order to decide whether they will cover treatment. Insurance companies can — and sometimes do — use your psychotherapy records in making those decisions. Once your information is released to an insurer, neither you nor your therapist has any control over how it is used. Psychodynamic psychotherapy works best when you know that every thought you share is protected, fully and without exception.
The links below are video presentations on psychodynamic therapy by Dr. Jonathan Shedler, one of today's leading writers and researchers on contemporary psychoanalytic therapy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNWy1ksxIDo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Iin4f0sgI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UpHl9kuccc
Psychotherapy Is Effective for the Following Common Problems
Depression
Depression is one of the most common reasons people seek psychotherapy — and one of the most misunderstood. It is tempting to treat depression as the problem itself, and many approaches do exactly that, targeting symptoms directly with medication or behavioral techniques. But depression is most often a symptom of something else — a signal that something deeper needs attention. It may express unresolved grief or loss, anger that has nowhere to go, or early experiences of neglect or emotional unavailability that have left a person feeling fundamentally unworthy or unloved. For many people who pursue only symptom-focused treatment, relief comes but does not last — because the underlying emotional conflicts that gave rise to the depression have never been addressed.
Psychodynamic therapy takes a different view. Rather than managing the symptom, it works to understand what the symptom is expressing — exploring the unconscious conflicts, early experiences, and recurring relational patterns that drive and maintain depression. Research supports the effectiveness of this approach in producing not just relief but more genuine and lasting change. The goal is not simply to feel better, but to understand yourself well enough that you are no longer at the mercy of conflicts you cannot see.
Anxiety
Numerous studies have found that psychodynamic therapy often provides lasting relief from social anxiety, social phobia, and panic disorder. These conditions are understood psychodynamically not as disorders to be managed but as symptoms — signals that something in the person's inner life requires attention. Anxiety in its many forms rarely arrives without meaning. Beneath the dread of social situations, the sudden terror of a panic attack, or the persistent unease that colors everyday experience, there is almost always an unconscious conflict, a feared emotion, or an early experience of danger or helplessness that has never been fully processed or resolved. Psychodynamic therapy works to uncover those roots, helping you understand not just that you are anxious but why — and in that understanding, to find relief that is genuine and lasting rather than simply temporary.
Chronic Pain
Unexplained chronic pain — pain for which no clear physical cause can be found — can consume a person's life, narrowing their world and generating significant emotional distress, depression, and strained relationships. Psychodynamic therapy understands this kind of pain not as imaginary or exaggerated, but as real suffering that is psychological in origin. The body can express what the mind cannot — unresolved grief, suppressed anger, early trauma, or emotional conflicts that have never found another outlet. By exploring those psychological sources, psychodynamic therapy can bring meaningful relief to people who have often spent years searching for answers in purely medical settings.
Personality Disorders
Personality disorders are enduring patterns of inner experience and behavior that differ markedly from cultural expectations and remain stable across time and situations. Unlike anxiety or depression, which most people recognize as something wrong or foreign to themselves, personality disorders are woven into the fabric of how a person thinks, feels, and relates — they do not feel like symptoms but like reality, like simply the way things are and the way other people are. They often present as unstable moods, impulsivity, self-centeredness, insensitivity, or a lack of empathy, creating persistent and painful conflict in relationships at home, at work, and beyond.
Psychodynamic therapy understands these patterns as the legacy of early dysfunctional relationships: the ways we learned to see ourselves and others in childhood can become so deeply fixed that they quietly organize every relationship and every emotional experience in adult life, long after those early experiences are over. Psychodynamic psychotherapy understands personality pathology not as a collection of traits or deficits (personal failings), but as the result of early relational experiences that have become so thoroughly internalized that they shape every aspect of how a person perceives, feels, and relates to others. Because this work goes to the very foundation of how a person experiences themselves and others, it requires time, patience, and a strong therapeutic relationship. But it is among the most meaningful work psychodynamic therapy can do — gradually loosening the grip of patterns that have caused enormous suffering, often for decades, and creating the possibility of a freer and less conflicted life.
Anger
Chronic or poorly regulated anger is almost always a symptom of something deeper. It frequently has its roots in early experiences of frustration, neglect, or emotional unavailability — experiences that leave us with an unconscious tendency to perceive others as threatening, withholding, or unreliable. It often presents as unrealistic entitlement, a need to control others, irritability, poor frustration tolerance, and impulsivity. When anger becomes a habitual way of responding to the world — feeling entirely justified in the moment while repeatedly damaging relationships at home, at work, and beyond — it creates a pattern of suffering that is often difficult to recognize from the inside. Psychodynamic therapy helps you trace that anger back to its origins, understand what it has really been about, and gradually free yourself from its control over your life and relationships.
Relationship & Interpersonal Problems
Recurring patterns of conflict with family, friends, coworkers, and romantic partners often respond well to psychodynamic therapy. which offers a particularly powerful framework for understanding why these patterns are so persistent. From early childhood, we develop internalized representations of ourselves and others — psychological templates built from our most formative relationships — that unconsciously organize the way we experience and engage with people throughout our lives. When those early relationships were marked by inconsistency, neglect, loss, or emotional unavailability, the templates they leave behind can distort our perceptions, fuel recurring conflict, and make genuine intimacy feel elusive or threatening. Psychodynamic work makes those patterns visible and available for examination — creating the possibility of relationships that are no longer unconsciously scripted by the past.
Trauma
Physical or emotional trauma — whether in childhood or later in life — can condition a person to chronic, elevated anxiety and stress, resulting in depression, insomnia, anger, or other symptoms. What makes trauma particularly resistant to ordinary coping is that it is frequently unconscious — not remembered in any narrative sense, but carried in the body and in emotional life as a kind of unprocessed residue that continues to shape behavior, relationships, and self-perception long after the original experience. Psychodynamic psychotherapy works to bring traumatic experience gradually into consciousness — not to relive it, but to process it in a safe, boundaried setting where it can be understood and integrated. The goal is not the erasure of painful experience but the freedom to live without being governed by it.
Substance Use/Abuse
Addictions are rarely simply habits or failures of will. They most often begin as attempts to manage powerful, unconscious affects — anxiety, shame, grief, rage — whose roots lie in early experiences of abandonment, neglect, or trauma. Psychodynamic psychotherapy works to bring those experiences and their associated feelings into consciousness, where they can be examined, understood, and worked through. As that underlying emotional material becomes more available and less overwhelming, the need to medicate against it diminishes. Combined with active participation in a 12-step recovery program, this approach can provide a durable foundation for recovery.
A NOTE ON COUPLES THERAPY *
For couples therapy, my aim is to create the conditions for honest, productive conversation and exploration — to understand the nature of your conflict, each individual's unmet needs, and how the distance that can quietly grow between two people can create emotional detachment, infidelity, despair, and unhappiness. That process requires honesty and genuine engagement from both partners. Where repair is possible, I work toward it with care and commitment. Where a relationship has reached its end, I believe that the same careful process can help two people part ways with dignity and respect, and with as little stress and emotional harm as possible. How a relationship ends matters as much as how it is lived — and this is especially true when children are involved.
Couples work begins with a joint consultation session, followed by at least one individual meeting with each partner, and then a return to all of us meeting together. This initial structure serves an important clinical purpose — it allows me to gather and understand each person's history, experiences, and perspective more fully before we continue the work as a couple.
Only after that second joint meeting will a decision to move forward be made. Each of you — individually and as a couple — will decide whether you wish to continue working with me. And I will decide whether I believe I can work with you and be genuinely helpful to you. That mutual decision is itself part of the foundation on which good work is built.
Confidentiality in couples therapy operates differently than in individual treatment, and it is important to understand this from the outset. I do not hold secrets for either partner. Material disclosed in an individual session is not guaranteed to remain private — if I determine that something shared individually is relevant to our work together, I may choose to raise it in a joint session. This is not a punitive boundary but a clinical one. Couples therapy depends on a foundation of honesty, and that foundation cannot hold if the therapist is privately managing information that belongs in the room.
This is particularly important where infidelity is concerned. If something of that nature is revealed in an individual session, I will encourage you to bring it into the couples session yourself — but if you do not, I may determine that I must. If you are in couples therapy, the time for secrets is long past. Honesty is the only way through.
-SELF-PAY ONLY-
Individual Session $175
Couples sessions $250
Office Hours
By Appointment Only
Tuesdays & Wednesdays
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