My T is also very empathetic, compassionate, non judgmental and I lead the sessions completely. Which from your description would mean that we are following a person centered approach. At the same time, a large portion of our sessions is dealing with my transference; thus more psychodynamic based on your description. My T is in a psychodynamic training program. She is a pretty blank slate as it comes to talking about herself, her life, and her feelings/thoughts/opinions about her personal life. She is open with sharing if she feels it would be therapeutic. It is a different type of sharing and hard to describe. I have no doubts that she cares about me and loves me. Due to her psychodynamic nature, she sees progress differently. She does not believe it is linear and is willing to take a more global view of what progress maybe. For example, I've been going through a very stressful period of time in my life. I used to boost my AD from time to time to deal with the overwhelming feelings of sadness. I've managed to get through this period without taking an additional AD. When we talked about it, she saw that as an act of lowering my AD dosage, which is progress for her. There's other things and she's able to see changes in my overall mood, the way I talk, what I talk about as progress. She's not so caught up in behaviorism type changes (such as seeing my decrease in exercise as set backs or my increase in social activities as progress).

I think the whole psychodynamic modality is a bit more flexible than it might seem; however, a specific therapist might not be that flexible regardless of modality. It might be more important that you understand what you feel you need from the relationship and talk about that during the interview. It seems how one defines progress, how they see their role in your progress, how they handle stagnation in progress might be good things to discuss early on as they seem to be important topics for you. Also, since you've been around the block some, you might want to find out how they deal with transference up front and how you'd like it dealt with.