About

Dr Angela Cooper is an Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University, Halifax,Canada and a Clinical Psychologist specializing in Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP). She has completed 4 years of post-doctoral ISTDP training with Dr Patricia Coughlin and 3 years of advanced supervision with Dr Allan Abbass specializing in medically unexplained symptoms (MUS). This comprehensive training has significantly deepened her therapeutic knowledge, enabling her to assess and treat a diverse range of psychophysiological difficulties

Dr Cooper currently works at the Centre for Emotions and Health and is undertaking a three-year pilot project to provide consultation, assessment, treatment, teaching and research using ISTDP to address the unconscious emotional processes that are believed to underlie many physical and psychological difficulties. These include: chronic pain, chest pain, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal issues, headache, migraine, memory difficulties, muscle weakness and other mind body problems.  These difficulties are often co-morbid with anxiety, depression, personality issues and/or trauma.

The aim of the project is to evaluate the clinical and cost effectiveness of this approach as applied in a primary care setting.  This includes evaluating the direct therapeutic outcomes with patients, as well as the impact of teaching and training on physicians and other healthcare professionals.

Dr Cooper offers face to face or online supervision, teaching and training in ISTDP.  She has an ongoing passion for disseminating the ideas and learning from ISTDP in ways that all health professionals can benefit from. Especially, building emotional capacities in health professionals; without this we are at risk of stress, burnout, misalliances with patients and clinical errors.

Dr Cooper is committed to the dissemination and promotion of ISTDP as an integrated, open and inclusive model of therapy and is passionate about helping free people from their suffering. For general enquiries, supervision, teaching or training requests, she can be contacted at: info@drcooper1.com

What is ISTDP?

Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) is a form of short-term psychotherapy developed through empirical, video-recorded research by Habib Davanloo, MD.

ISTDP’s primary goal is to help the patient overcome internal conflicts to experiencing ALL of their true feelings about the present and past that have been warded off because they are either too frightening or too painful. The technique is intensive in that it aims to help the patient experience these warded-off feelings to the maximum degree possible; it is short-term in that it tries to achieve this experience as quickly as possible; it is dynamic because it involves working with unconscious forces and transference feelings.