Rome April 14th – 17th, 2016
Undoing Aloneness & the Transformation of Emotional Suffering
At the Istituto Di Scienze Cognitive
With Diana Fosha, Ph.D.
This 4-Day Immersion Course in AEDP is recommended to all professionals doing therapy with individuals, including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, counselors, and students training in these professions. It will be of great interest to those wishing to transform their clinical practices by translating cutting edge developments in attachment and neuroscience research into systematic teachable and learnable interventions.
We are wired for growth, healing, and self-righting, and for resuming impeded growth. Until recently, focused on pathology, our field lacked concepts to capture the thrust toward health residing within us all. Transformance, Diana Fosha’s powerful construct, changes all that: supported by cutting edge research in neuroplasticity, transformance defines the innate motivation toward healing and self-repair, and is at the core of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), a transformational and healing-oriented – rather than psychopathology based – model of therapy. Drawing on emergent research in neuroscience, development, and neuroplasticity, and with transformance as its cornerstone, AEDP rectifies the bias towards pathology: building on our natural resilience, AEDP’s therapeutics is based in our innate healing capacities, including our innate capacities for deep connection.
One of the fastest-growing approaches to working with attachment trauma, AEDP emphasizes the importance of undoing aloneness and the co-creation of safety: with accompaniment, patients can risk revisiting past trauma and suffering. AEDP is unique in its intimate yet rigorous way of working with relational experience moment-to-moment. Healing and neuroplasticity are set in motion through fully experiencing previously feared emotions in a secure relationship, and through gentle, yet focused, explicit attention to the experience of healing within the patient-therapist relationship. Specific AEDP intervention strategies, rooted in the phenomenology of the transformational process, are designed to work explicitly, dyadically, and experientially with intense traumatic emotions in a way that brings resilience to the fore, and fosters patients’ feeling deeply seen, recognized, cared about and understood. Processing both traumatic and restorative emotional experiences, the transformational process AEDP unleashes culminates in vitality, energy, and the non-finite positive emotion-fueled spirals of resilience, well-being and creativity that are so highly correlated with health. As suffering is transformed, there is a deepening of receptive affective experiences of feeling seen, felt, loved and understood. Patients’ internal working models of attachment are also transformed.
AEDP works at the emergent edge of the human spirit where recognition, integration, and nonfinite transformational spirals activate resources and generate well-being, love, play, connection, resilience, immune health, creativity and compassion.
Through extensive audio-visually recorded actual therapy sessions, this immersion course will provide ample exposure to AEDP’s hallmark techniques that: (i) actively and explicitly work with the experience of the attachment, here-and-now, in the therapeutic dyad; (ii) use dyadic affect regulation to undo aloneness and process intense overwhelming emotions; and (iii) actively, explicitly and experientially work to process intense emotional experiences until adaptive healing resources are released. The clinical videotapes will also demonstrate the technique of metatherapeutic processing, AEDP’s unique and systematic set of interventions for processing transformational experience, which expands healing, fuels upward spirals of positive affect, vitality, and energy and which can consolidate therapeutic gains, foster resilience, and expand relational capacity.