I very much understand your frustrations with things like the way your therapist greets you and the lack of small talk. I pretty much stumbled upon my psychodynamic therapist a little over 2 years ago and picked him because I liked his website, but really had no idea what psychodynamic therapy was all about. I was immensely frustrated with the lack of greeting, smiles and small talk, and I even sent him a link to a 400 page textbook written by a professor of psychodynamic therapy at Columbia University. Despite this, he did not change his ways which made me wonder if perhaps he wasn’t very smart. I cannot tell you why I stuck with him, but maybe it was because I was too lazy to search for someone else. I spent at least a year, probably longer, being angry, skeptical and passive aggressive with him. I’m not sure how or when it changed, but our relationship has evolved into something completely different. I am apparently super slow to trust, but I do mostly feel like this person gets me on a level that is far more than just small talk and smiles, and is more than I could have imagined really. He does, by the way, smile when I enter and when I leave, and he does reveal more about himself than he used to, but he’s careful not to guide me and to make sure it is entirely about me and not him. That is still pretty scary to me sometimes. That being said, I completely understand that this type of therapy is for everyone. This is just my story.