Upcoming Seminars

Please select the blue "View & Purchase" button below next to the event you wish to attend.

Course Information

Dopamine & Being Seen: The Neurobiology of Vitality & Recognition Processes: A Framework for Working with Dissociation in AEDP

In working with trauma, the calm-inducing, nervous-system-soothing effects of oxytocin cannot be overestimated. We do not learn and explore and dare to take risks when our nervous systems are in a state of fearful physiological reactivity. Oxytocin is a powerful antagonist of fear. The nervous system calms and the social engagement system comes online. However, dissociation and the de-activation of the autonomic nervous system, and resulting experiences of numbness, deadness and futility constitute a different set of the tragic sequelae of trauma, require something more. In treating dissociation, safety and calm as goals of trauma processing are essential, but not a guarantee that feelings of aliveness will suffuse the experience of the self. That's the realm of dopamine mediated processes, and feeling the motivation to live life with zest and meaning.

AEDP is well suited to bring both oxytocin-mediated AND dopamine mediated experiences online in safe and regulated fashion. With its orientation toward the co-construction of safety and techniques for the rapid achievement of earned security, AEDP has a systematic methodology for bringing oxytocin online for both patient and therapist. However, AEDP is also distinguished for its metatherapeutic techniques with transformational experience that systematically and reliably give rise to the transformational affects. Feelings of exuberance and curiosity and the motivation to act on behalf of the self reflect the world of dopamine mediated experiences and their power to lead to new learning, greater memory reconsolidation, as well as to the vitally important felt sense of aliveness, for vitality and energy are so needed to counter the deadening numbing effects of dissocation.

This workshop will explore the neurobiology of vitality, i.e., recent advances in the understanding of the neurobiological core self (Damasio, Panksepp), intimately linked with dopaminergic pathways. Making extensive use of clinical videotapes, we will delve into AEDP work, with a focus on the co-creation of relational safety and work with recognition processes. These constitute powerful elements for a neurobiologically based psychotherapeutic process with dissociative phenomena, one that, in the course of co-creating safety and trauma processing, also seeks to bring vitality and energy into the previously depleted system. Clinical work will show how recognition processes can be used to bypass the fragmentation of self experience: by making the most of experiences marked by "the click of recognition" patients who usually rely on dissociative mechanisms are able to have a new "whole self" experience, felt sense of it and all.

 

Presenter

Diana Fosha, PhD, is the developer of AEDP™ psychotherapy, a healing-based, transformation-oriented treatment model. And she is Founder and Director of the AEDP Institute. For the last 20 years, Diana has been active in promoting a scientific basis for a healing-oriented, attachment-emotion-transformation focused trauma treatment model. Fosha’s work focuses on integrating positive neuroplasticity, recognition science and developmental dyadic research into experiential and transformational clinical work with patients. Her most recent work focuses on promoting flourishing as a seamless part of the AEDP therapeutic process of transforming emotional suffering. Drawing on affective neuroscience, attachment theory, mother-infant developmental research, and research documenting the undreamed-of plasticity in the adult brain, AEDP is an experiential clinical practice which reflects the integration of science, research and practice in psychotherapy.

Based in New York City, where she lives and practices, Fosha has been on the faculties of the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology of NYU and St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Medical Centers (now Mount Sinai) in NYC, and of the doctoral programs in clinical psychology at the Derner Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University and at The City University of New York.

She is the author of The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change (Basic Books, 2000); co-author, with Natasha Prenn, of Supervision Essentials for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (APA, 2016); 1st editor, with Dan Siegel and Marion Solomon, of  The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice (Norton, 2009), and editor of the newest book on AEDP, Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0 (APA, 2021). Diana is the author of numerous articles on AEDP’s attachment-emotion-transformation focused experiential treatment model. She has contributed chapters to, among others, Clinical Pearls of Wisdom: 21 Leading Therapists Offer their Key Insights, edited by M. Kerman (Norton, 2009); Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders: An Evidence-Based Clinician’s Guide, edited by C. Courtois & J. D. Ford (Guilford, 2009);  Healing Moments in Psychotherapy, edited by Dan Siegel and Marion Solomon (Norton, 2013); Advances in Contemplative Psychotherapy: Accelerating Transformation, edited by Loizzo, Neale & Wolf (Norton, 2017), Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis: Interaction and Change in the Therapeutic Encounter, edited by Lord (Routledge: 2017) and The Comprehensive Handbook of Psychotherapy, Volume 1: Psychodynamic and Object Relations Therapies, edited by J. J. Magnavita (Wiley, 2002). Four DVDs of her live AEDP clinical work, including one documenting a complete 6-session treatment, and one on clinical supervision, have been issued by the American Psychological Association (APA). Learn more and purchase here.

Described by psychoanalyst James Grotstein as a “prizefighter of intimacy,” and by David Malan as “the Winnicott of [experiential] psychotherapy,” Diana Fosha is known for her powerful, precise yet simultaneously poetic and evocative affective writing and presenting style. Diana’s phrases — “undoing aloneness,” “existing in the heart and mind of the other,” “True Other,” “make the implicit explicit and the explicit experiential,” “stay with it and stay with me,” “rigor without shame” and “judicious self-disclosure” — capture the ethos of AEDP.

 

Agenda:

 

Learning Objectives:

  • Participants will understand the terapeutic relevance of a core knowledge of the neurobiology of vitality and of the core self.
  • Participants will be able to utilize three skills in developing a co-created environment of safety.
  • Participants will learn to identify experiences that are characterized by the click of recognition, and develop three skills for metatherapeutic processing of such experience.
  • Participants will be able to identify key aspects of dissociative experiences that reveal opportunities for their transformation, by focusing on glimmers marked by positive affect.