Issues of Agency

In Issues of Agency, Dr. Eileen Russell addresses the topic of agency, or the agentic self. Agency is a felt sense of being able to act on one's own behalf in the world in important relationships and through one’s actions, a sense of mattering and of having an impact on one's life. A lack of agency may present as generalized passivity, a tendency to defer to others, an inability to follow through on goals, or to see oneself mostly as an object of fate.

In the therapy demonstration in this video, Dr. Russell uses accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) to give space for the client's emotions as the client reflects on and experiences her past and current relationship with her mother and father. Dr. Russell invites and encourages the client’s agentic self in deciding to reclaim her relationship with one parent while withholding this information from the other. This demonstration is bookended by a conversation between Dr. Eileen Russell and Wendy Summer, LPC, about agency and how deficiencies in agency present in therapy, including an analysis of the demonstration session.

AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) is an integrative model of psychotherapy that draws on attachment-theory, affective neuroscience, and studies of change processes. It uses an experiential moment-to-moment focus to help people process and integrate emotion, relationship- and self-experiences. AEDP is a change and healing-oriented model that aims to help people have corrective emotional experiences. It understands pathology and suffering as deriving mostly from people being too alone with overwhelming experiences with insufficient internal or external resources to be able to process them. AEDP’s understanding of resilience is that it exists on a continuum and underlies both resistance (protection, defense) and what AEDP calls transformance, the human orientation toward growth and development.

Conditions of interpersonal safety are required for people to let go of defenses and lean into transformance drives for healing and growth, which then allows them to process affective experiences that have been warded off prior to entering therapy. Many people who have experienced early trauma, loss, and neglect have not had sufficient experiences of acting as an agent in their own lives, feeling an embodied experience of being an agentic self, mattering, and having an impact on their lives and important relationships.

This is a new focus of AEDP treatment: to look for opportunities to invite the patient to feel moments of having an embodied sense of being an agent who is capable of acting on their own behalf, of knowing the will of one’s own mind and the desires of one’s own heart. Often the therapeutic relationship is the safest one in which to explore these necessary self experiences, perhaps even for the first time.

Eileen M. Russell, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and a founding faculty member of the AEDP Institute. Dr. Russell has been an adjunct faculty member at NYU Medical/Bellevue Hospital Center where she completed her internship training and later worked as a senior psychologist with individuals struggling with addiction and psychiatric diagnoses. She is currently also on the faculty of the National Institute of the Psychotherapies (NIP) Integrative Trauma Program. Her passion is AEDP, which she has taught to individuals and groups since 2004 nationally and internationally. In addition to her practice with patients and consultees, Eileen enjoys expanding clinical and theoretical ideas through writing. She published the second professional book on AEDP called, Restoring Resilience: Discovering your Clients’ Capacity for Healing (W.W. Norton & Co., June 2015). Most recently she has been exploring the centrality of the sense of agency to healing and change in a chapter in Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing (APA, 2021).

In addition to AEDP, Dr. Russell is trained in EMDR and Focusing and has a deep interest in functional medicine and the delicate relationship between health and mental health. She has studied different contemplative approaches, practices meditation/prayer in her own life, and believes that developing a both/and mindset is critical to mental health and well-being. She is licensed and practices in New York and New Jersey. In 2024, Eileen opened a small group practice committed to training therapists in AEDP and offering AEDP to those looking for depth-oriented, experiential psychotherapy.

Fosha, D. (2000). The Healing Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change. New York: Basic Books.

Russell, E.M. (2015). Restoring Resilience: Discovering Your Clients’ Capacity for Healing. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Russell, E.M. (2021). "Agency, Will, and Desire as Core Affective Experience: Undoing Disempowerment to Foster the Emergence of the Agentic Self" in D. Fosha (Ed). Undoing Aloneness & the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing. Washington, DC: APA Press.

Fosha, D. (Ed.) (2021). Undoing Aloneness & the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing. Washington, DC: APA Press.

Fosha, D. (2009). "Emotion and Recognition at Work: Energy, Vitality, Pleasure, Truth, Desire & the Emergent Phenomenology of Transformational Experience" in D. Fosha, D. J. Siegel & M. F. Solomon (Eds.). The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development, Clinical Practice. New York: Norton.