In-Person Training (Nashville)

6 CE Hours

Issues in Therapy

AEDP: Undoing Aloneness & the Transformation of Suffering into Flourishing

Diana Fosha, PhD

Much of what we call psychopathology begins in aloneness: having had to face overwhelming emotions — terror, grief, shame, collapse — without help. Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP®), a healing-oriented, experiential, and radically relational therapy, begins by undoing that aloneness. From the first session, the therapist is an active emotional presence who, instead of focusing on what has gone wrong, focuses on what is right, i.e., what remains alive and available within the person. AEDP therapists are trained to detect and amplify transformance — the innate striving toward healing and vitality that persists in even the most suffering patients — and to make it the entry point for the work from the get-go and throughout.

Undoing aloneness is what makes the arduous emotional work possible. Emotions once unbearable become bearable in the presence of another, and can be processed rather than dissociated. AEDP works viscerally, in the body and in the moment, staying with grief, rage, fear, and shame through to completion. Trauma is processed, not managed. Dyadic affect regulation is the vehicle: two bodies and two psyches working in tandem so that what was overwhelming can be metabolized instead of avoided. This is the transformation of suffering.

However, what is the end of processing in most therapies is the beginning of the next phase of AEDP: processing the experience of change-for-the-better as rigorously as we processed trauma earlier. Through the technique of metatherapeutic processing, processing transformation begets further transformation, and what emerges is vitality, coherence, and contact with self: in-session flourishing, systematically cultivates.

These ideas will come to life through videotaped clinical sessions with real patients, examined through moment-to-moment microanalysis, much as we do in AEDP supervision.

Objectives

• Describe how unwanted aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotion contributes to psychopathology, and identify transformance strivings in clinical material as an entry point for the therapeutic work.
• Explain how dyadic affect regulation renders previously unbearable emotional and traumatic experience processable, and identify the markers of an emotion having been processed to completion.
• Apply the basic steps of metatherapeutic processing to in-session experiences of change-for-the-better, and elucidate how processing transformation gives rise to flourishing.

About the Speaker

Diana Fosha, PhD, AEDP Institute

Diana Fosha PhD is developer of AEDP®, a healing-oriented, radically relational, experiential psychotherapy to transform trauma, heal attachment wounds, and help people connect to their vitality. She is Founder and Director of the AEDP Institute, an internationally recognized school that trains therapists worldwide, and Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. For the last 25 years, Diana has been active in promoting a scientific basis for a healing-oriented, transformational trauma treatment model and has developed a systematic methodology, called metatherapeutic processing, for bringing flourishing online even for those in the midst of adversity.

AEDP starts from the premise that the drive toward healing and self-repair is wired in, present in every client from the first session, and that the therapist’s job is to find it and work with what is right rather than start from what’s broken. Grounded in affective neuroscience, attachment theory, mother-infant developmental research, and the neuroplasticity of the adult brain, AEDP treats the therapeutic relationship itself as a powerful engine of change and works to process emotional suffering all the way through to vitality and flourishing.

TLPCA Contact

If you any questions, please contact Robin Lee.