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ACCELERATED EXPERIENTIAL DYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY (AEDP) Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy There is no better way to capture the ethos of AEDP than to say that we try to help our patients—and ourselves—become stronger at the broken places. Working with trauma, loss, and the painful consequences of the limitations of human relatedness, we are surprised to discover places that have always been strong and were never broken: steeled for the worst, we encounter the best. Crisis and suffering can be opportunity: they sometimes awaken extraordinary capacities that otherwise would lie dormant, unknown and untapped, and that, without them, would never see the light of day. AEDP is about making the most of that opportunity. AEDPis a transformation-based, healing-oriented model of therapy. Developed by Dr. Diana Fosha, author of The Transforming Power of Affect, it has roots in and resonances with many disciplines (see Mission Statement), amongst them attachment theory, affective neuroscience, body-focused approaches, and transformational studies.
We proceed from a belief in the value of openness to divergence and commitment to exploration. We grow --in our selves, in our practice, in our theory, in our community-- through staying open to and being challenged by new ways of thinking and working, through staying open to and being challenged by each other. Reveling in our resonances and embracing our differences -- this is how we foster the emergence of phenomena which are the stuff of professional, personal, and organizational growth. Welcome! Transformance: The Motive Force of AEDP Transformance is a fundamental concept that I introduced and developed in 2008 in a paper, called "Transformance, recognition of self by self, and effective action" (Fosha, 2008). It is at the core of what AEDP is all about. It refers to the need that we all have to grow, to heal, and to transform into becoming who we know ourselves to be. We all have a fundamental need for transformation. We are wired for growth and healing. And we are wired for self-righting, and resuming impeded growth. We have a need for the expansion and liberation of the self, the letting down of defensive barriers, and the dismantling of the false self. We are shaped by a deep desire to be known, seen, and recognized as we strive to come into contact with parts of ourselves that are frozen. Transformance is my term for the overarching motivational force, operating both in development and therapy, that strives toward maximal vitality, authenticity, and genuine contact. Transformance drives change processes that, in the right environment, eventuate in healing and thriving. A felt sense of vitality and energy characterizes transformance-based emergent phenomena. The AEDP Institute Through its activities—live, published, and online—the AEDP Institute is devoted to providing a forum for an emergent community of clinicians. We seek to co-create environments—clinical, intellectual, collegial—of shared values. We are aiming to create a community of safety and security, from which boundless exploration can take place. It is important to us to facilitate training atmospheres where clinicians can share clinical material from a position of openness. We seek to have a shared experiential data base, as well as a shared intellectual/theoretical base. The AEDP Institute aims to create forum in which we can share ideas, ask questions, learn from one another, raise issues, share therapy experiences, and integrate new ideas into an ever-evolving, emergent model of thinking and clinical practice. The ethos is to exist in each other’s hearts and minds. Which is how AEDP grows and stays healthy and vibrant. As the network of AEDP practitioners, teachers, and supervisors is growing nationally and worldwide, the AEDP Institute is committed to promoting ongoing communications between AEDP and other therapeutic approaches and disciplines, and to having AEDP be an active participant the exciting emergent developments that are transforming how we understand ourselves and each other, and how we practice. AEDP Clinical Values: Healing Affects & Healing Interactions
AEDP: An Ever-Emergent Model In An Ever-Emergent Dialogue As an integrative framework, AEDP shares various basic assumptions and deep resonances with neighboring disciplines and the bodies of work of many different authors. Below are some of the approaches and the theoreticians/ researchers/ clinicians that AEDP is in I-Thou dialogue with:
Jerry Lamagna, New York City The most powerful tenets of AEDP are to establish safety and undo aloneness. From the first moments together the therapist and client are developing a relationship from which to explore unresolved and painful issues from the past and even more importantly to experience and process how they change and what comes from their new experiences. Karen Pando Mars, San Francisco In AEDP, we firmly believe that our patients have the potential to make something constructive and meaningful with their life. For that, we hold their hands and stand by them as long as they - with our very active help - keep on working on developing their trust and their curiosity to look inside their souls and find out what is their deepest yearning at that particular stage of their lives. Andrea Junqueira, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil We all have strivings toward connection, understanding, growth and transformation. The more these yearnings are thwarted by deprivation, misattunement, trauma or loss, the more profound and painful the longings and needs can become. The AEDP therapist seeks to awaken and restore these basic human drives through becoming a safe, nurturing, and responsive “true other.” If a deep, caring and authentic relationship is the vehicle for change, then it is feelings and full emotional processing that fuel the process of transformation, delivering patient and therapist alike to a place of peace, inner wisdom, self-actualization, energy, mutual delight and fulfillment. Kari Gleiser, Hanover, New Hampshire Most simply put, AEDP works through meeting and safely gratifying the patient’s deep longing to seen, heard and understood by the therapist and perhaps more importantly by him or herself. By the patient following emotions through to their completion, a deep sense of what is real and true directs the work during sessions. In an evolving dialectic process, the therapist and the patient jointly steer the vehicle of each session in a rising and deepening spiral of unfolding emotional awareness and integrity of speech. When the patient’s reality is held in such empathic and resonant attunement by the therapist, healing and forward momentum in treatment transcends ordinary expectations of what psychotherapy can be and do. David Mars, San Francisco Both psychotherapy and integrative framework, AEDP seeks to theoretically elucidate and clinically harness healing transformational processes. A whole-brain therapy, through its attachment-based stance, AEDP entrains right-brain-mediated affective experiences; works with subcortically generated primary emotions; and recruits left brain organization for the articulation of emotional experience. Then, alternating waves of experience and reflection give rise to the best the prefrontal cortex (especially the right pre-frontal cortex where emotionally meaningful autobiographical narratives are mediated) has to offer: integrative states of flow, clarity, ease, wisdom, compassion, curiosity, generosity, creativity, and calm, where the sense of the truth promotes deep acceptance and self-acceptance. Diana Fosha, New York City AEDP takes seriously and literally the plasticity and fluidity of the mind. Moment to moment the AEDP therapist notices, tracks and seizes upon areas of health and hope in the patient and sets about capitalizing upon them. This focus on the adaptive wired-in already present vitality of the patient leads to an organic resourcing of our patients from the very beginning of treatment. From infant-mother research, AEDP takes the stance of a real, relating, caring other. A real person who responds authentically and honestly is inherently a secure base. From this place the AEDP therapist is always working with a dual attention: the relationship and the emotional experience of patient and therapist. This dual focus accelerates change. The AEDP therapist has a protocol to follow and a phenomenology to anchor the work: the theoretical flowchart of AEDP tracks the patient from (i) anxiety and defense, to (ii) core affect, and then (iii) core state. As an emotion-based therapy the focus is always on helping the patient feel, and have the experience of feeling. Finally, metaprocessing teaches patients that there is value in talking about experience, that everything can be talked about, and that talking cements experience. Natasha Prenn, New York City AEDP works through creating a container of emotional and psychic safety that invites and even provokes a deep experience of being connected to ones self and the self of another. The therapist in the practice of AEDP engages an authenticity and vividness of self-expression that invokes a field of safety and interest, which in turn invites and ushers in experiences of heightened emotional presence within the patient. The patient’s deepened emotional experience and expression, then brings in turn, a heightened permeability and awareness within the therapist. What had been held off in the distance within the patient becomes vitally experience-near in each evolving moment to both the therapist and the patient. David Mars, San Francisco AEDP changes how our brains work. It is widely known that we all develop coping strategies and patterns from our early life experiences and relationships. Currently, the research in neuroscience shows how these patterns and reactions are wired in our brains and nervous systems. AEDP helps clients forge a safe and secure relationship with a therapist to strengthen and build their capacity to face the distress that has driven them to seek therapy. By learning new ways to process old feelings and emotions, AEDP literally changes neural pathways in the brain. This enables clients to process incoming information differently. What previously may have triggered a defensive reaction, can be recognized for what it is and thus responded to directly after AEDP. When change is experienced so viscerally, clients truly come to new places of self understanding, acceptance, and confidence from which they can engage more fully with life. Karen Pando-Mars, San Francisco |
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