What is AEDP?
AEDP (Accelerated Experiential-Dynamic Psychotherapy) privileges positive experiences over pathology.
This deep, powerful approach integrates research findings from attachment theory, developmental studies, contemporary affective neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, and somatic therapies. AEDP practitioners explicitly draw on the therapeutic relationship to create conditions of safety that nurture clients’ innate potential for resilience, growth, and healing. From the get-go, we help our clients access this wired-in, human capacity. Together, from this secure healthy base, we explore and tend to the places that need healing. In this way we undo aloneness and restore optimal development.
AEDP therapists recognize that change often involves letting go of strategies that people initially developed to protect themselves. Giving up familiar patterns and habits (even those which are no longer helpful or adaptive) can be scary. AEDP therapists skillfully help clients regulate anxiety in the face of change. We support clients to tune into the wisdom of their core, adaptive feelings. When experienced fully, these healthy emotions provide important information about basic needs and guide people to act in ways that better fulfill these needs. This empowers our clients to live more fully and freely, with greater satisfaction.
This inviting, experiential approach is particularly well suited to clients who want to enhance their sense of connection with themselves and others, and to people who want to experience greater self esteem and self-trust.
The Founder of AEDP: Diana Fosha, Ph.D.
Diana Fosha, Ph.D., the director of the AEDP Institute, is the developer of AEDP, a healing-based, transformation-oriented model of psychotherapy. She is the author of The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change (Basic Books, 2000), and of numerous articles and chapters on transformational processes in experiential psychotherapy and trauma treatment. She is the editor, along with Dan Siegel and Marion Solomon, of The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development, and Clinical Practice (Norton, 2009) part of Norton's Interpersonal Neurobiology Series. A DVD of her AEDP work with a patient has been released by the American Psychological Association, as part of their Systems of Psychotherapy Video Series (APA, 2006).Throughout her career, she has been interested in exploring different aspects of the change process. Her work on transformational studies has focused on integrating recent developments in attachment theory, affective neuroscience, emotion theory and developmentally-based understandings of the dyadic regulation of affect into clinical work with patients. Recently, Diana Fosha introduced the construct of transformance, key to transformational theory, and has been exploring the role of positive affective experiences as wired-in somatic markers of precisely the kind of transformational processes that are involved in healing psychic suffering and in the fostering of flourishing and well-being.