Jessica Londa

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Dr. Jessica Londa is a licensed clinical psychologist, who provides psychotherapy to adolescents and adults in individual, and couples sessions; and supervision/consultation to students and clinicians in a private practice setting in Thetford, Vermont.

To make an appointment or request more information, please call Dr. Londa at 802-785-2434. Email cannot create the kind of personal communication that the work of psychotherapy necessitates.

Philosophy

The guiding philosophy of my practice is to help people understand themselves in the service of personal development within the context of a safe and reliable relationship with another person. I believe that deep and rich self-examination requires rigorous and systematic pursuit on the part of both therapist and patient as they work together.

I place a high value on curiosity, creativity, purposeful aims, tolerance of discomfort, and the strength for meaningful work and satisfying relationships. These cannot be attained in a vacuum, but rather are experienced or learned through the medium of the psychotherapeutic relationship. The internal world of imagination and the life of the mind are brought into balance with social relatedness and external realities. Therapist and patient endeavor to find verbal language to express the patient’s inner experience, feelings, thoughts, and that for which no words have yet been found.

The human mind, brain, body and experience are neither separable nor unconnected, but instead form a comprehensive, whole system. Although it is tempting to think of stressors, struggles, problems, issues, events, transitions, and diseases as discrete and unique, I understand symptoms, perceptions, traumas and diagnoses not as circumscribed and distinct entities, but as signposts of underlying, complex unconscious expressions. By recruiting present and/or past events, the unconscious mind disguises itself defensively, in order to remain hidden and unchanged.

Together, therapist and patient seek to discover the origins and symbolic meanings of symptoms, their purposes and functions, while accumulating new experiences formed by the proceedings of the psychotherapy process itself. In this way, patients find or re-discover authentic aspects of themselves, integrate or re-integrate shards of themselves that have been unconsciously split off or disconnected, and learn or re-learn how to interact with themselves, others and their environments. The result is the freeing of energy that has been bound up unproductively in the form of painful, unsatisfying, automatic and inhibiting symptoms, so that the energy may be re-directed toward consciously and voluntarily chosen, fulfilling, productive pursuits.

If, among the pioneers of modern science, we count Einstein, who forever changed our view of the universe, and Darwin, who forever changed our view of humanity’s place in nature, we must count Freud, who forever changed our view of the human mind, probably the most complex structure in the universe, as the third, and arguably the greatest, of these intellectual heroes. His discovery of psychological defenses against self-knowledge, and his methods of detecting and resolving those defenses, stand among the highest achievements of humankind.