Todd Junkins,
LCSW

How I think about therapy

In my practice, I seek to create an open, accepting, and creative environment for this exploration. I explore with clients how they encounter the world, including understanding how they have inhabited social roles, formed relational patterns, and developed their sense of self. This exploration can give greater freedom and flexibility in deciding how to engage, modify, and adapt these roles, patterns, and sense of self.

My approach is grounded in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thinking — ways of understanding that take seriously the depth and complexity of a person’s inner life, and the ways that life has been shaped by experience, relationship, and time. I work with each person as someone specific, not as a set of symptoms to be managed, and I am as curious about what has gone unnoticed in someone as I am about what has been difficult.

Where I’m coming from

I grew up in Chicago and spent years building my practice and my life there. A few years ago, my partner and I made the decision to leave — to build something new in Stockholm, in a country and a culture neither of us had grown up in. That experience of leaving one home to construct another, of discovering that identity is more portable and more fragile than you thought, has shaped how I understand the people I work with in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.

I am now a parent to a toddler, which has its own particular way of returning you to questions you thought you had settled. I spend a lot of time outdoors, am genuinely curious about how natural systems work, and find that the same quality of attention I bring to understanding people serves me well when I’m trying to understand almost anything else.

I work with people in English, and see clients in Stockholm and Chicago, as well as remotely across Europe and the United States.