aedp therapy: accelerated experiential-dynamic psychotherapy
Michael Mondoro is a Certified AEDP Therapist in NYC, a Certified AEDP Institute Supervisor and a North American AEDP Therapy Consultant for AEDP therapists in training.
Emotional pain, suffering and transition provide opportunities to awaken extraordinary capacities that might otherwise be unknown and untapped. AEDP therapy is about experientially making the most of these opportunities. We work together in the present and move into the experiential — focused on growth from the very first session.
When it is needed, we approach what’s felt previously unapproachable, together. Because active, caring focus on what hurts — often unfinished business — leads not only to profound healing, but also to a deep well of strength, energy, self-compassion, authenticity and balance — and more fulfilling relationships. Together, we discover places that we have always been strong, places that were never broken.
Unknowingly, our early lessons about emotion and relationships form instructional blueprints that get stored in our memory systems, outside of our awareness. Left unchallenged, they persist into adulthood and directly affect the ways we respond to our emotions and how we interact in our most important relationships. With its focus on the here-and-now relational experience, AEDP has the potential to unlock, rework and shift our present and future experience for the better.
Explore AEDP with Michael here
For more information on AEDP and AEDP therapist training, click here.
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Aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotion is the epicenter of emotional suffering; it is what compels us all to seek help.
Thus, the undoing of aloneness - in therapy - is essential to being able to process the turbulent emotions of trauma. AEDP therapy, one of the fastest-growing approaches to working with attachment and relational trauma, makes the undoing of aloneness the sine qua non of trauma work. Drawing on neuroplasticity, affective neurobiology, attachment theory, dyadic developmental research, and transformational studies, AEDP has developed a fundamentally relational, experiential, healing-oriented practice. This transformational sequence of AEDP allows for the emergence, reworking of, reconsolidating, and reintegration of unfinished business from the past.
As such, AEDP believes we all have a healthy core and emphasizes the importance of dyadic (person-to-person) experiential work with present-moment experiences of attachment, emotion, and transformation to undo aloneness, heal trauma and promote flourishing.
What we know is that pain, suffering, crisis and transition provide opportunities to awaken extraordinary capacities that otherwise might lie dormant, unknown and untapped. AEDP is about experientially making the most of these opportunities for both healing and transformation. AEDP is particularly helpful for relational, developmental, and attachment trauma as well as anxiety, depression, PTSD, grief, relationship difficulties or endings.
Through undoing of aloneness, and the in-depth processing of difficult emotional and relational experiences, as well as new transformational experiences, we foster new and healing experiences for each individual, and with them resources, resilience and a renewed zest for life.
Tracking moment by moment, an AEDP therapist works somatically to foster a corrective relational and emotional experience.
AEDP therapists “show up” as a real, warm, and present other (no blank faces or excessive head-nodding here) and join with their client to actively undo aloneness when experiencing pain and suffering and to explicitly help, care and guide while offering deep compassion for the individual.
Through this process, an individual has a new and good experience of themselves as safe, valuable, worthy, and loveable and of another who is safe, capable and willing to help (which translates to more safety and ability to connect in relationships, over all).
One of the major, key differences of AEDP is that we take the time to really process what it’s like to have a new, good and transformational experience.
The AEDP therapist sees the good from the get-go and amplify and deepen it. We know that glimmers of resilience, health, strength and our drive to heal are always present and seek to bring these positive, innate, wired-in experiences to the fore, for healing, growth, and expansion in the present moment. And we make it explicit and explore it. With metaprocessing (that’s a therapy term for reflecting on the process itself), these experiences are felt deeply and embodied. New neural pathways replace early procedural learning about our relationship to ourselves, to others and to the world. In turn, the way feel feel, relate, express, and live transform for the better.
AEDP therapists show up in their role as therapist and they show up as humans who love, make mistakes, repair, and judiciously self-disclose aspect of their experience. We are real and of course, professional. The client-therapist relationship, although asymmetrical, has the capacity for both clients and therapists to be in the complexity and wonder of their shared humanity. This is a healing experience, especially for attachment, relational and developmental trauma.
Championing our innate healing capacities, AEDP has roots in and resonances with many disciplines -- among them interpersonal neurobiology, attachment theory, emotion theory and affective neuroscience, body-focused approaches, and last but not least, transformational studies.
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AEDP is particularly helpful for attachment wounds, insecure, disorganized attachment, relational trauma, complex trauma, PTSD, Complex PTSD, as well as anxiety, panic, depression, grief, loss, transitions and relationship difficulties or endings.
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An AEDP therapist is active and guiding… right there with you, from the get-go, undoing the aloneness we all feel in the face of overwhelm, in the face of life’s twists and turns.
An AEDP therapist “shows up” as a real, warm, and present other (no blank faces or excessive head-nodding here). They join the individual they are helping in the “hard spaces,” actively undoing their aloneness when experiencing pain and emotional suffering. An AEDP therapist explicitly helps, cares and guides the therapy process while offering deep compassion for the individual.
Through the in-depth processing of difficult emotional and relational experiences, as well as new transformational (positive) experiences, we foster new and healing experiences for each individual, and with them resources, resilience and a renewed energy for life.
Although every AEDP experience is unique, here’s an article about one AEDP therapy session in The New York Times.
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AEDP therapy believes that emotions are essential for healing. The therapist helps the individual to access and express their emotions in a safe and healthy way. And we do this, with safety, in the moment, here-and-now.
Our emotions (and our responses to them) shape us. They enliven us, supplying the resources to live our lives to the fullest. They energize us to meet and cope with life’s challenges, and point us in the best direction in our relationships, our work, and our lives. Emotions bring us closer to the truth inside – and to ourselves and to others.
But it is common to be unknowingly afraid of feeling the full extent of our emotions (even joy or love), especially if we have suffered more than we can shoulder. So, in an effort to protect ourselves, we bury our feelings and this 1) keeps us detached from the wisdom and power inside us; 2) stifles our ability to authentically share ourselves with others; 3) and distances us from knowing ourselves and what we value. When we suppress our past and our real feelings, they go underground, drain us of vitality, and a “social” or “looking good” version of ourselves takes shape.
For some, this strategy works for a while, but eventually our feelings resurface as:
fear, anxiety, worry, restlessness, hyperactivity, insomnia
depression, poor self-image, self-doubt, lack of motivation, procrastination
emptiness, relationships problems, irritability, angry outbursts, edginess
stomach problems, teeth grinding, chronic fatigue sexual difficulties,
hypertension, headaches… and more
The good news is: individual psychotherapy can lessen or help resolve these experiences. AEDP psychotherapy is particularly helpful.
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AEDP therapy focuses on the present moment. The therapist is active, real, warm and helps the individual to stay in the present moment and to experience their emotions fully. No excessive head-nodding or blank faces here. AEDP leans in and helps from the get-go.
A huge part of that is the therapeutic relationship. It is often called the foundation of AEDP therapy. The therapist creates a safe and supportive space where the individual can be deeply listened to, feel seen, heard, and understood, and actively helped. Aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotion is at the center of emotional suffering. Undoing aloneness, in a safe relationship, is the key to being able to process the emotions of suffering and trauma and reap the benefits of the adaptive resources that come with those emotions.
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Positive Neuroplasticity is the science of training the brain to have more positive, beneficial experiences which improves our wellbeing.
“Experiential” in experiential therapy refers to an intensive focus on the present (i.e., here-and-now) internal experience, especially emotional experience as it is felt in the body, encouraging your attention to it, and then proceeding to work with it. From the get-go, AEDP seeks to put positive neuroplasticity into action, moment-by moment, session to session, in each and every therapeutic experience in the context of work to transform the negative emotions associated with trauma and emotional suffering. Then, through metatherapeutic processing (a therapy term for reflecting on the experience of therapy itself), the experience of change along with the positive emotions that accompany it, are also worked with to promote positive neuroplasticity.
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AEDP therapy recognizes that the body is a storehouse of memories and emotions. The therapist helps the individual to connect with their body and to use it as a resource for healing. Focusing on somatic sensation is a gentle way to process hard-to-experience feelings and memories. For some, the body is a useful access point to noticing feelings. For others, it gets in the way. It’s up to you. And your therapist should respect your process.
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Yes! Intra-Relational AEDP (AEDP parts work) represents a synthesis of direct care and work with parts, systems thinking, compassionate self-inquiry, and respect for the normal multiplicity of our minds.
Parts Work is a way to understand your inner world, and help it to transform and heal. It’s normal and neuroscientifically validated that we all have an inner system within the mind, much like an internal family or social network. Our mainstream culture just doesn’t talk about it. But if you’ve experienced reverberations from heavy experiences in the past or extreme mood shifts or habits, you have likely experienced your parts in action.
And just like a family or social group is made up of different individuals with their own unique personalities and roles, our internal world is composed of different “parts,” with different roles, qualities, desires, and intentions. Parts can even hold unique thoughts, emotions, beliefs, habits, physical sensations, attachment/relational patterns and emotional and/or audio-visual memories. These parts can sometimes conflict with each other and create internal struggles and difficulties in our lives. Often they feel incredibly burdened and alone. We’re here to undo that aloneness together and between parts, so healing can happen.
Here’s the bonus of Parts Work: at the center of our inner system is a resourceful, felt-sense of “just me,” a Self at the core of every person that is always undamaged, waiting for the right conditions to fully emerge. By working with parts they — and you as a whole - feel better connected and unencumbered, in the long run. This experience of our unique Core Self — a consistent sense of compassion, authenticity, calm, harmony, confidence and clarity — is one of the primary benefits, in addition to reduction of symptoms and internal and external challenges.
Not all AEDP therapists offer Parts Work and it’s important to work with an AEDP therapist trained in this method. Michael Mondoro offers and teaches AEDP Parts Work to those who have an interest.
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Attachment trauma is relational trauma, the interwoven mix of overwhelming early experiences of unmet needs and longings, embedded in painful emotion of all kinds, sometimes experienced as neglect, betrayal, abandonment and abuse, at the hands of adults we are wired to love and for whom we will do anything to be loved by.
AEDP psychotherapy is an empirically supported model that gives individuals corrective emotional and relational experiences that mobilize positive changes in the brain.
AEDP, in theory and method, asserts that if relationships have made us feel broken and unbearably alone, then it is relationships, still, that hold the promise of our fundamental wholeness and belonging. The common factors that live in the background of most therapy approaches are in the foreground in every moment of AEDP practice: the therapeutic relationship is crucial. It is co-created to offer specific corrective emotional, relationship and attachment experiences for each unique individual (client) within each unique pairing (client-therapist). This is how AEDP transforms—by fiercely pursuing experiences in therapy that are more powerful than the ones holding us back.
This, over time, re-wires and transforms the way we experience relationships, both with ourselves and with close others. Ultimately, it gives us a sense of portable security, self-trust, and trust in others. We experience present-day close friends, family and romantic partners as they are, no longer confused and blended with experiences of individuals in the past. It's safe to love and trust ourselves and others, once again or for the first time.
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Attachment-focused therapy is a type of psychotherapy that is based on attachment theory and research. It is a in-depth therapy that can help you to understand your attachment responses and experience and how it is affecting your experience of dating, relationships — as well as our relationship to ourself, and to life, as a whole. AEDP is an attachment-focused therapy.
Attachment theory states that all humans have an innate need to form close relationships with others. This need is thought to be rooted in our early childhood experiences, and it plays a significant role in our development and well-being throughout our lives.
Through attachment research, we have learned that there are four main attachment responses: secure, anxious-avoidant, anxious-ambivalent, and disorganized. Each attachment pattern is characterized by different ways of interacting with others and coping with stress. These can feel “permanent.” However, through ongoing work, our attachment experience and response can become more secure.
Secure attachment is the most adaptive attachment pattern. People with secure attachment feel comfortable and confident in their relationships, and they are able to rely on others for support when they need it.
Anxious-avoidant attachment is characterized by a fear of intimacy and a need for self-reliance. People with an anxious-avoidant attachment pattern may, unintentionally, emotionally withdraw, push others away or avoid close relationships altogether.
Anxious-ambivalent attachment is characterized by a need for closeness and often a fear of abandonment. People with an anxious-ambivalent attachment pattern may be more pursuing of connection or at times, demanding in their relationships. There is, sometimes, a fear of not being loved and feeling unlovable.
Disorganized attachment is the most challenging attachment pattern. People with disorganized attachment experience both a wish for relationships and a fear of them, simultaneously. They may have difficulty forming close relationships, and they may experience intense emotions such as anger, fear, shame and sadness. You may also experience dissociation, from time to time.
Attachment theory and research has been used to understand a wide range of psychological problems, including trauma, anxiety, depression, and personality disorders. It has also been used to develop effective treatments for these problems.
A therapist can help you to understand your attachment pattern and how it is affecting your life and relationships. They can also help you to develop new ways of interacting with others and coping with stress.
Attachment-focused therapy can help you to:
Develop a secure(r) attachment pattern
Improve your relationships with others
Cope with stress more effectively
Reduce anxiety and depression
Improve your self-esteem
Feel more confident and in control of your life
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Here’s what the American Psychological Association (APA) has to say:
Accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), is a healing-oriented, mind–body treatment that works experientially with trauma and attachment trauma (Fosha, 2000; 2017, 2018; Fosha et al., 2009; Gleiser et al., 2008; Lamagna & Gleiser, 2007; Lipton & Fosha, 2011; Prenn, 2009; Prenn & Fosha, 2016; Russell, 2015; Tunnell, 2011; Yeung & Fosha, 2015).
Experientially refers to an intensive focus on present-tense (i.e., here-and-now) internal experience, especially affective experience as it arises in the body, encouraging clients' attention to it, and then proceeding to work with it. From the get-go, AEDP seeks to put positive neuroplasticity into action, moment-by moment, session to session, in each and every therapeutic dyad in the context of work to transform the negative emotions associated with trauma and emotional suffering. Then, through metatherapeutic processing, the experience of change along with the positive emotions that accompany it, are also worked with to promote positive neuroplasticity.
Integrative, nonpathologizing, and transformation-focused, AEDP is healing oriented. It assumes a healthy core within all people, emphasizes adaptive motivational strivings, works actively and explicitly to cocreate the experience of safety in the therapeutic relationship, and stresses the importance of experiential work with evolutionarily adaptive affective change processes, like emotion, attachment, and transformation.
AEDP's healing-oriented, change-based metapsychology reflects an integration of many sources: neuroplasticity research (Davidson & Schuyler, 2015; Lazar et al., 2005), affective neuroscience (Craig, 2015; Damasio, 2003; Panksepp, 2009, 2010), attachment theory and research on developmental dyads (Schore, 2012; Trevarthen, 2009); interpersonal neurobiology (Porges, 2011; Siegel, 2015), emotion theory (Darwin, 1872; Ekman, 2015); transformational studies (Buber, 1965; James, 1902; Loizzo, et al., 2017; Stern et al., 1998); as well as two decades of AEDP practice by a growing number of practitioners worldwide (Fosha, 2018a; Fishman et al., 2019).
Its theory of therapeutic change as rooted in naturally occurring change mechanisms is supported by research demonstrating the potential for neuroplasticity from the cradle to the grave (Doidge, 2007; Davidson, et al., 2003; Hanson, 2017; Lazar, et al., 2005) and documenting the nature of the conditions that bring positive neuroplasticity to the fore (e.g., Davidson & Schuyler, 2015).
AEDP understands "psychopathology" as resulting from the individual's unwilled and unwanted aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotional experiences (Fosha, 2000). Thus, undoing aloneness and the dyadic processing of emotional experiences previously too overwhelming for the individual to deal with alone, are its overarching therapeutic aims.
Through the moment-to-moment, in-depth processing of difficult emotional and relational experiences, clients are helped to recover their sense of core self and experience increased resilience and renewed zest for life (Fosha, 2009a; Russell, 2015). The metatherapeutic processing of the experience of transformation is an AEDP technique for systematically facilitating flourishing in the client (Fosha, 2009b, 2013, 2017; Fosha, Thoma, & Yeung, in press; Iwakabe & Conceicao, 2015).
Four fundamental aspects of AEDP are
* an orientation toward healing and its emphasis on healing from the get-go
* undoing aloneness
* its experiential methodology
* the moment-to-moment guiding of intervention choice by an articulated four-state transformational phenomenology
The heart and soul of AEDP is our belief in the self-righting forces wired within us all. AEDP's healing orientation is its North Star: both its theory and moment-to-moment clinical work are guided by the foundational principle that healing (i.e., positive neuroplasticity) is a biological drive, ever present in all of us that can be brought to the experiential fore in the right conditions.
We call this innate, biological drive pulsing toward self-righting and self-expansion "transformance" (Fosha, 2008). The concept of transformance is viewed not just as a generalized inner capacity or drive but as a specific emotional process arising in the therapy room. From the get-go, that is, from the very first moments of psychotherapy, finding and amplifying "glimmers of transformance" and the accompanying "vitality affects" (Stern, 1985), the positive somatic/affective markers that identify it, is a central focus within AEDP.
AEDP has elaborated a detailed, four-state phenomenology of the transformational process (Fosha, 2009a, 2009c, 2018). This four-state phenomenology reveals an arc that organically links suffering with flourishing, negative emotion with positive emotion, trauma with transcendence, stuckness with flow, and languishing with resilience (Fosha, 2005, 2013, 2017).
The goal of the work is to help the client move through the four states, tracking affective phenomena moment-to-moment to pick up subtle fluctuations and significant state shifts. The moment-to-moment guidance of clinical practice by the phenomenology of the four states of the transformational process is foundational to how AEDP therapists work. Operating as both map and compass, it helps therapists orient where they are in the process and where they want to go, thus guiding their choice of interventions.
