Oct 2026: Books currently closed. Will re-open from Feb 2027 for March availability.
Individual psychodynamic therapy for relationship patterns, attachment and intimacy — with a Melbourne-based registered psychologist. Sessions online, weekday mornings AEST.
*For individuals, not couples.
Relationships can be a source of connection and belonging, but they can also bring difficulties that are hard to understand. You might struggle to communicate what you need, find yourself giving too much or holding back, or have difficulty setting boundaries. You might repeatedly end up in conflict, feel responsible for other people’s feelings, or find yourself drawn into familiar relationship dynamics even when you want something different.
For some people, closeness itself can be difficult. You might want connection but find it hard to trust, fear rejection or abandonment, lose your sense of yourself in relationships, or pull away when someone gets too close. You may also find yourself questioning why certain patterns keep emerging, or why you respond in ways that don’t quite fit with how you want to relate to others.
Relationship challenges can be explored through individual therapy. You don’t need to bring a partner, and you don’t need to be in a relationship at all. Therapy can provide space to understand your own experiences and patterns in relationships, including what you expect from others, how you respond to closeness and conflict, and what may be getting in the way of the connections you want.
It’s a fair question: how can individual therapy help with relationships when only one person is in the room?
The focus is on understanding your own patterns, reactions, needs and fears, and how these shape the way you relate to others. When you begin to understand why you respond in particular ways, what you find difficult about closeness or conflict, and what you may be repeating without realising it, you can begin to respond with greater awareness and choice. This can change the way you participate in a relationship, which can in turn change the dynamic between you and the other person.
This work can be useful whether you’re partnered, single, somewhere in between, or wanting to understand a pattern before you carry it into your next relationship. You don’t need to be in a relationship to explore how you relate to others. Sometimes the time between relationships can offer valuable space to reflect on what has happened and what you want to be different in the future.
Alicia works with individuals and does not provide couples therapy. If you’re looking to understand your own experiences and patterns in relationships, individual therapy provides space to do that work.
People come to therapy with many different relationship concerns. You may recognise yourself in one of the areas below, or find that several overlap.
Choosing similar partners. Reacting in familiar ways during conflict. Falling into a role you know well, even when you don’t want to. Many people notice that similar dynamics emerge across different relationships, despite genuinely wanting something different. These patterns can be shaped by earlier experiences and reinforced over time, making them difficult to recognise, let alone change, from the inside. Relationship patterns therapy can help you understand what keeps these patterns going and begin to find other ways of relating.
How we experience closeness and relationships is shaped by many factors, including our early experiences of being close to others. For some people, this can show up as anxiety in relationships, a fear of abandonment, a need for reassurance, or difficulty feeling secure. For others, closeness can feel uncomfortable, leading to distance, withdrawal, or a preference for emotional independence. These aren’t fixed traits or flaws. They are ways of relating that developed in particular circumstances, and understanding them can make it easier to respond differently.
Wanting closeness and finding it frightening at the same time is more common than it sounds. Intimacy can feel exposing or unsafe, and emotional unavailability, whether in yourself or in the people you’re drawn to, can become a way of managing that vulnerability. Therapy can help you understand what makes closeness feel risky, what you expect from intimacy, and how these experiences may have developed.
If you find yourself saying yes when you mean no, prioritising everyone else’s needs over your own, or feeling responsible for other people’s feelings, relationships can become quietly depleting. People-pleasing and difficulty setting boundaries can develop through earlier experiences of what was needed to stay connected, accepted, or safe. Understanding these patterns can make it easier to recognise your own needs and begin setting boundaries that feel genuine rather than simply following advice about what you “should” do.
Sometimes a relationship can become organised around the needs, moods, or wellbeing of the other person to the point that it becomes difficult to know where their feelings end and yours begin. Codependency can involve caretaking and taking excessive responsibility for someone else, but it can also involve relying heavily on a relationship for reassurance, stability, or a sense of self. You may find it difficult to separate from the relationship, tolerate distance, or recognise what you need outside of it. Therapy can help you understand how these patterns developed and reconnect with your own needs, feelings, and sense of self.
Difficulty trusting can follow specific experiences such as infidelity, dishonesty, betrayal, or repeated disappointment. It can also be part of a longer-standing pattern, where trusting someone feels difficult even when there is no obvious reason to doubt them. You might find yourself questioning someone’s intentions, expecting to be let down, needing repeated reassurance, or looking for signs that something is wrong even when a relationship is going well.
You may also be seeking therapy after breaking someone’s trust yourself, wanting to understand what led you to act as you did and what it means for your relationship. Whether you’ve been hurt by someone else’s actions, have struggled to be trustworthy yourself, or find trust difficult even when things are going well, therapy can provide space to understand the experiences and patterns involved.
Loneliness isn’t only about being alone. You can feel lonely within a relationship, friendship, family, or social group, particularly when you don’t feel truly known or understood. You might have people around you but struggle to form deeper connections, find it difficult to let others in, or feel like you don’t quite belong. You may want closer relationships but find yourself withdrawing, avoiding vulnerability, or unsure how to ask for what you need. Therapy can provide space to understand what may be getting in the way of connection, while also making sense of the experiences that have shaped how you relate to other people.
The way you see and treat yourself can shape how you experience relationships with other people. Harsh self-criticism, low self-worth, or a tendency to put your own needs aside can affect what you expect from others and what you feel entitled to ask for. Therapy can help you understand these patterns and develop a more grounded sense of yourself in your relationships.
Some relationships can leave you anxious, confused, or increasingly unsure of yourself. You might find yourself walking on eggshells, constantly monitoring someone else’s mood, questioning your own perceptions, or feeling that you’re always the one at fault. You may be dealing with criticism, manipulation, blame, unpredictable behaviour, or boundaries that are repeatedly ignored. You might feel increasingly isolated, lose confidence in your own judgement, or notice that you’ve become a smaller version of yourself within the relationship.
Sometimes these experiences occur in relationships involving coercive control or family violence. At other times, difficult dynamics can develop without being so clearly defined. Therapy can provide space to talk about what you’re experiencing and reconnect with your own sense of what you feel, what you need, and what feels right for you.
You may be aware of ways you behave in relationships that you don’t feel good about, or that you know are affecting someone else. Perhaps you become jealous or controlling, struggle to manage anger, withdraw or shut down during conflict, repeatedly cross boundaries, or find yourself demanding reassurance when you’re afraid of being rejected. You may regret things you’ve said or done but still find it difficult to understand what happens in the moment.
Therapy can provide space to understand what sits underneath these patterns, including fear, insecurity, shame, anger, or difficulty tolerating vulnerability. Understanding where these behaviours come from doesn’t excuse their impact on someone else. It can, however, help you take greater responsibility for your behaviour and begin to develop different ways of responding in relationships.
This is an important part of psychodynamic therapy, which pays attention to the ways we can repeat familiar relational patterns without fully understanding why. These patterns often have connections to earlier experiences, including the relationships in which we first learned how to relate to other people.
These patterns might show up as repeatedly choosing similar partners, reacting in familiar ways during conflict, or falling into certain roles without consciously deciding to. They can be difficult to change, even when you can see the pattern clearly and genuinely want things to be different. You may understand what is happening and still find yourself responding in much the same way, which can be frustrating and confusing.
Psychodynamic therapy helps you notice and understand these patterns as they emerge, including within the therapeutic relationship itself. The relationship with your therapist can become a place where your ways of relating are experienced and explored in real time. This can make it possible to understand something about yourself not only intellectually, but through what is happening between you and another person.
The aim isn’t simply to change a particular behaviour, but to develop a deeper understanding of the emotional and relational processes that keep these patterns in place. This can make change feel more meaningful and lasting. Where these patterns are connected to earlier trauma or difficult experiences, those experiences can be explored as part of the work.
You might be troubled by a pattern that keeps repeating, feel unhappy or disconnected in your relationships, or be concerned about the way you behave towards someone you care about. Sometimes you simply want to understand yourself better and develop a different way of relating to others.
It may be worth speaking with a psychologist if:
Therapy can provide space to slow down and think about how you relate to other people, what you want from your relationships, and what may be getting in the way. Understanding these patterns can create more choice in how you respond and how you participate in your relationships.
Alicia Shevlin (she/her) is a registered psychologist and clinical psychology registrar, based in Melbourne and working with adults across Australia via telehealth. She holds a Master of Applied Psychology (Clinical Psychology) from Victoria University, where her training took an integrative approach spanning both cognitive behavioural and psychodynamic traditions. In her current practice, she works psychodynamically — an approach especially suited to understanding relationship patterns.
Alicia began her career in mental health in 2016 in the domestic and family violence sector, and has since worked across community, university and public health settings before entering private practice. Relationship difficulties, identity and the ways people relate to themselves and others are core parts of her practice. She works with adults aged 18 and over, and with people of all genders, sexual orientations and sex characteristics, including intersex people, and is experienced in supporting members of the transgender community.
Alicia works with individuals on relationship difficulties and does not provide couples therapy.
AHPRA registration: PSY0002275993
Member: Australian Psychological Society
Alicia works psychodynamically, which means therapy explores not only the difficulties in your relationships now, but the patterns and experiences underneath them — including how they emerge within the therapeutic relationship itself.
Alicia works with individuals and does not provide couples therapy. Sessions are for therapeutic support and are not conducted for medico-legal purposes such as court reports. Third-party funding via WorkCover, TAC or DVA is not currently available.
Alicia is Melbourne-based and works entirely via telehealth, with sessions held over Zoom.
Individual therapy works particularly well via telehealth, without the logistics of bringing two people into the same room. Attending from a familiar private space can also make it easier to speak openly about relationships, particularly when the things you’re discussing feel vulnerable.
Practically, you’ll need a private space where you won’t be overheard, a stable internet connection, and a device with a camera. Headphones help.
Appointments are available on weekday mornings only, scheduled in Australian Eastern Standard Time (or AEDT during Victorian daylight saving), both before and after 9:00 am AEST.
Service area: Because of the session times, relationship therapy with Alicia is typically most suitable for people in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory. Whether you’re looking for a relationship psychologist offering telehealth from Melbourne, an attachment therapist in Victoria, or online relationship therapy elsewhere in eastern and central Australia, sessions are available within those time zones.
No. Alicia works with individuals only and does not provide couples therapy. That said, individual therapy can still be genuinely valuable for your relationships — working on your own patterns, reactions and needs can shift a relationship even when only one person is in the room.
Yes, it can. Understanding your own patterns, reactions and needs can change the way you participate in a relationship, which can in turn affect the dynamic between you and another person. When you begin to respond differently, the pattern between you can change too. Individual therapy can also help you understand what you want and need from relationships more broadly, whether or not you’re currently in one.
Couples therapy involves both partners attending together, with the relationship itself as the focus. Individual therapy is one-on-one work focused on your own experience, including your patterns, your history, and how you relate to others. Alicia provides individual therapy. This can be particularly useful when you want to understand your own responses and patterns in relationships, and consider what you might want to do differently, regardless of what the other person chooses to do.
Yes. Psychodynamic therapy pays particular attention to patterns that we may repeat without fully understanding why. These patterns can be connected to earlier experiences and may continue to shape how we relate to others, even when we consciously want things to be different. Therapy can help you notice and understand these patterns as they emerge, including within the therapeutic relationship itself. Over time, this can create more awareness and choice in how you respond, rather than automatically falling back into familiar ways of relating.
No. Many people do this work while single or between relationships. It can be a useful time to reflect on your experiences and patterns in relationships without being directly caught up in a current relationship. The work is about understanding yourself in connection with others, which doesn’t require a current relationship.
It varies depending on what you’re working on and the nature of the difficulties you’re experiencing. Because relationship patterns are often longstanding, psychodynamic therapy is generally a medium- to long-term approach, with the pace and duration of therapy discussed throughout the work. Under a Mental Health Treatment Plan, Medicare rebates are available for up to 10 individual sessions per calendar year.
It can. Rather than teaching communication techniques or scripts, psychodynamic therapy explores what makes certain things difficult to say, express, or ask for. This might include fears about how someone will respond, patterns you’ve developed in relationships, or earlier experiences that have shaped how comfortable you feel expressing your needs. Understanding what sits underneath these difficulties can make it possible to communicate with greater awareness and choice.
Our earlier experiences of relationships can influence how we experience closeness, trust and conflict later in life, often without us being fully aware of it. These experiences can shape what feels familiar, what feels safe or unsafe, and how we respond when relationships become difficult. Understanding these connections is an important part of psychodynamic therapy and can help make sense of relationship patterns that may otherwise be difficult to understand.
Understanding how you relate to other people, and where those patterns came from, can change more than a single relationship. It can help you develop a clearer understanding of yourself and create more choice in how you experience connection with others.
The free 15-minute phone call is a small first step.
The information below outlines what therapy involves, how telehealth sessions work, and practical details regarding fees and Medicare rebates.
Learn about how a range of mental health issues can be treated with psychodynamic therapy.
Access therapy without leaving home. Learn what to expect from beginning telehealth therapy.
Medicare rebates available for eligible patients. A referral from your GP or psychiatrist is required.