AEDP has always been a multifaceted transformational therapy. Naturally occurring, adaptive, affective change processes have always been at the heart of AEDP™ Psychotherapy’s healing oriented, radically relational, dyadically experiential transformational practice. These discrete AEDP affective change processes provide the scaffolding for AEDP clinical practice and transformational theory. They in essence operationalize and account for how change takes place in AEDP Psychotherapy. Furthermore the clinical, practice-based theory of AEDP has also grown: It has expanded, deepened and been put to the test hundreds of thousands of times in transformational moments between patients and us, their AEDP therapists, worldwide.
With the advent of empirical research into AEDP Psychotherapy effectiveness (DiCorcia et al., 2022; Iwakabe et al, 2020; Iwakabe et al., 2022; Notsu et al., 2022), the need to systematize, codify and measure outcome and process in AEDP psychotherapy has led to the development of what we have come to call The Magnificent 9 +1 Affective Change Processes Scale. This scale, also evolving, attempts to capture what makes AEDP so effective for so many patients.
This course explores 9 affective change processes specific to AEDP, as well as the mystery factor, the “+1”. The 9 affective change processes are: i. Transformance detection & affirmation of the self; ii. Noticing & seizing a moment of emergence; iii. Undoing aloneness; iv. Experiential focus; v. Disarming defenses; vi. working to regulate dysregulated experience; vii. Experientially processing core affective experience, aiming toward a corrective emotional experience; viii. The broadening & building of transformational experience, i.e., metatherapeutic processing; ix. Expanding core state experiences and the integration of transformation into self.
This year’s course will also explore in some depth the 5 different subcategories of affective change process #VII, Experientially processing core affective experience: In addition to (a) the experiential processing of emotional experience; (b) experiential work with the experience of attachment in the here-and-now of the therapeutic relationship and (c) the experiential processing of intrarelational experience, we will attend to a couple of newcomers: (d) experiential work with SELF experience; and (e) work with dynamically significant autobiographical unfolding.
This Advanced Skills training is in keeping with the AEDP model: from experience comes insight and meaning. Insight and meaning are incredibly important and indeed transformational, however, understanding follows from experience. Which is why we are teaching the fundamentals of AEDP transformational theory at the end of your advanced AEDP training, not at the beginning. Now that you have had so much training in AEDP and so many experiences with and in AEDP, this is an opportunity to reflect and integrate and experience (via the realization affects) that a new and deeper understanding has the potential to re-organize everything that came before it, and thus can lead to more rounds of the transformational spiral.