Introduction: AEDP after 20 years.

Abstract

T wo decades ago, I published The Transforming Power of Affect (Fosha, 2000b) and introduced accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), a new clinical model. I would sometimes say that, at that time, there was only one AEDP practitioner in the world-namely, me. Now, 2 decades later, I am no longer alone. Far from it!In the 20 years since the publication of The Transforming of Affect, the number of AEDP practitioners worldwide has grown into the thousands. There is an AEDP Institute with a faculty of more than 20 members and growing; many certified supervisors; scores of certified therapists; and a passionate, engaged, and lively worldwide community. There is a thriving AEDP Practice Research Network , where private practice therapists and psychotherapy researchers collaborate to make possible clinically relevant

The long-term outcome of accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy: 6- and 12-month follow-up results.

“…However, beyond its transdiagnostic focus, AEDP is, at its essence, healing-oriented and focuses on working actively with transformational experience (Fosha, 2017). AEDP seeks to simultaneously reduce the suffering associated with psychopathology and facilitate the emergence of in-session flourishing (Fosha et al, 2019), with AEDP therapists guided by a therapeutic roadmap grounded in the phenomenology of transformational experience (Fosha, 2021a). In keeping with AEDP’s essential ethos, we predicted a specific pattern of outcome findings: not only reduced symptoms of pathology, but also improvements in positive mental health.…”

“…Therapist intervention strategies included: (a) focusing on and working with glimmers of transformance from the get-go ;(b) strategies to restructure or bypass patient defenses; (c) dyadic affect regulation and other relational strategies aimed at building relational capacities; (d) experiential-affective strategies to process patients’ painful emotions; and (e) metatherapeutic processing strategies to deepen and expand the emerging positive affective experiences associated with transformational experiences. To navigate which of the five strategies to focus on at any given moment, the therapists used the four-state map that articulates the phenomenology of the transformational process to guide moment-to-moment decision-making for interventions (Fosha, 2021a; Russell, 2015).…”

“…Accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP; Fosha, 2000, 2021b) is an experiential, mind–body, healing-oriented, “attachment and emotion and transformation model” (Fosha, 2021a, p. 7; italics in the original). With roots in developmentally oriented relational psychoanalysis and the short-term psychodynamic psychotherapies from which the approach originated, AEDP is an integrative model of psychotherapy that brings together relational work, experiential techniques, transformational techniques, and a systematic experiential focus on the process of change and healing itself.…”

“…Transdiagnostic in its focus (Gleiser et al, 2008; Iwakabe et al, 2020) AEDP targets a set of central psychopathological processes (Lamagna, 2021: Lamagna & Gleiser, 2007), specifically the individual’s unwilled and unwanted aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotional experience (Fosha, 2017) believed to underlie a variety of diagnoses and symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, and various maladaptive behaviors and interpersonal patterns (see Sauer-Zavala et al, 2017). However, rather than focusing solely or even primarily on psychopathology, AEDP therapists systematically focus on adaptive affective change processes (Fosha, 2021a), psychological processes with transformational potential that underlie resilience, and well-being (Russell, 2015). As advocated by Keyes (2002), AEDP theory gives primacy to the belief that emotional suffering coexists with the ever-present potential for flourishing (Fosha & Thoma, 2020).…”

“…More positive, transformational affective phenomena thus emerge, which are then further nurtured, experientially processed, and expanded upon, leading to upward spirals (Fosha, 2000; Fredrickson & Joiner, 2018). The in-session flourishing that metatherapeutic processing brings about is thus a natural culmination of the process of working with emotional suffering in AEDP (Fosha, 2021a).…”