Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing

This book updates clinical guidance and theory for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), an approach that gives patients corrective emotional and relational experiences that mobilize changes in the brain.

Practitioners of AEDP understand psychopathology as a byproduct of internal working models, borne out of insecure attachment experiences, that now thwart adaptive functioning in adulthood. The goal of AEDP is to be therapeutically present with patients and their pain and to guide them to have a new experience—a good experience—thus rewiring memory and capacity to reflect. Updates to the AEDP approach (moving it into its second iteration, or "2.0") leverage emerging findings from the field of affective neuroscience to enhance individuals' healing and transformation.

The authors demonstrate the power of relational work by sharing excerpts and analysis of clinical session transcripts. In each chapter, they engage different aspects of the AEDP model to show how emotional suffering can be transformed into adaptive connection, even for individuals with histories of neglect, abuse, and complex trauma.

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: AEDP After Twenty Years
Diana Fosha

Part I. Healing From the Get-go

1. How AEDP Works
   ​Diana Fosha
2. The First Session in AEDP: Harnessing Transformance and Cocreating a Secure Attachment
   Karen Kranz

Part II. Context and Scaffolding

3. Historical Context: AEDP’s Place in the World of Psychotherapy
   Gil Tunnell and Jenna Osiason
4. What Just Happened? And What is Happening Now? The Art and Science of Moment-to-Moment Tracking in AEDP
   Yuko Hanakawa
5. A Shift in Focus: Making Use of Therapist Experience in AEDP
   Ben Lipton
6. Using AEDP’s Representational Schemas to Scaffold the Therapist’s Attunement and Engagement
   Karen Pando-Mars

Part III. How to Work With Core Affective Experience: Attachment, Emotion, Self

7. Neuroplasticity in Action: Rewiring Internal Working Models of Attachment
   Ron Frederick
8. Portrayals in AEDP: Processing Core Affective Experience and Bringing it to Completion
   Ben Medley
9. Agency, Will, and Desire as Core Affective Experience: Undoing Disempowerment to Foster the Emergence of the Agentic Self
   Eileen Russell

Part IV. How to Work With Maladaptive Affective Experience and Complex Trauma

10. Fierce Love: Championing the Core Self to Transform Trauma and Pathogenic States
    SueAnne Piliero
11. Finding Healing in the Broken Places: Intra-Relational AEDP Work With Traumatic Aloneness
    Jerry Lamagna
12. Relational Prisms: Navigating Experiential Attachment Work With Dissociation and Multiplicity in AEDP
    Kari Gleise

Part V. Integration, Flourishing, Core State, and the Core Self

13. What Went Right? What Happens in the Brain During AEDP’s Metatherapeutic Processing
    Danny Yeung
14. “We Are Organized to Be Better Than Fine”: Building the Transformational Theory of AEDP 2.0
    Diana Fosha
15. Future Directions for AEDP
    Diana Fosha

Appendix

Index

About the Editor

Diana Fosha, PhD, is the developer of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), a healing-oriented psychotherapy to treat attachment trauma and help people connect to their vitality. She is director of the AEDP Institute. Her work focuses on integrating neuroplasticity, recognition science, and developmental dyadic research into experiential clinical process work with patients.

With an interest in the phenomenology of experience, she is on the cutting edge of transformational theory and practice. AEDP’s transformational theory, putting neuroplasticity and attachment into clinical action, is similarly receiving recognition.

She lives and practices in New York City and leads workshops and trainings worldwide. Follow Dr. Fosha on Twitteropens in new window, Instagramopens in new window, LinkedInopens in new window, and Amazon Author Pageopens in new window.

In Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0, Diana Fosha and her colleagues document the evolving nature of AEDP as a therapeutic model. In the 20 years since Fosha introduced AEDP, it has attracted thousands of therapists and improved the lives of thousands of clients. In this edited volume the reader is able to grasp the power of AEDP as a treatment model, to appreciate the intellectual scope of the theoretical and empirical bases, and to explore its broad clinical implications.
—Stephen W. Porges, PhD, Distinguished University Scientist, Founding Director, Traumatic Stress Research Consortium, Kinsey Institute, Indiana University Bloomington; Professor of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Welcome to the clinician and practitioner resources for Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0. Here you will find downloadable diagrams designed to help therapists learn Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), or further develop their skills in their current AEDP practice. They depict the phenomenology of AEDP’s four-state transformational process, as well as the representational schema that guide relational processing work.

All the figures listed below appear in the printed book, ebook, and full-text subscription database versions. We provide them here for your convenience. Feel free to download these graphics for your personal use. If you wish to repost, reprint, or adapt them for publication, permission is required from the publisher or, where indicated, from the creators.

© 2021 American Psychological Association.

• The Phenomenology of the Four-State Transformational Process in AEDP (Figure 1.1 & Appendix Figure 1)opens in new window
• The Triangle of Experience (Figures 4.1, 6.1, 7.1, 11.1, & Appendix Figure 3)opens in new window
• The Triangle of Experience: Two Versions of the Triangle of Experience—The Self-at-Worst and the Self-at-Best (Figures 4.2, 6.2, 11.2, & Appendix Figure 4)opens in new window
• The Self–Other–Emotion Triangle: Two Versions of the Self–Other–Emotion Triangle—The Self-at-Worst and the Self-at-Best (Figures 6.3, 7.2, 11.3, & Appendix Figure 5)opens in new window
• The Triangle of Relational Comparisons (Figures 6.4, 7.3, & Appendix Figure 6)opens in new window
• The Phenomenology of the Four-State Transformational Process in AEDP, Including the Maladaptive Affective Experiences (Figure 9.1 & Appendix Figure 2)opens in new window
• The Intra-Relational Triangle: Three Axes of Connectivity (Figure 12.1)opens in new window
• The Genesis of Internalized, Disorganized Attachment Patterns (Figure 12.2)opens in new window
• Progression of Relational and Intra-Relational Transformation (Figure 12.3)opens in new window
• Location of the Orbitofrontal Cortex and Insular Cortex in the Brain (Figure 13.1)opens in new window