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Course Information

AEDP Essential Skills (ES1) Retreat-Style Course, - NOW ONLINE

The AEDP Essential Skills course is absolutely one of the best psychotherapy trainings I have ever done. The format is a perfect balance of didactics, video observation and experiential practice (doing it!), with loads of supportive individual attention and feedback. I can’t recommend this training enough!
– Victoria Lemie Beckner, PhD

AEDP Essential Skills, aimed at practitioners, will provide practical skills for the application of AEDP. Our aim is to teach, in both left-brained and right-brained ways, skill sets, concrete and specific. Different skill sets will be introduced, explained, illustrated and practiced each week, so that participants will emerge with both an understanding and a felt sense of how to practice AEDP. The basic skill sets necessary to practice AEDP will be introduced each week, with theoretical foundations and with videotapes and group experiential exercises in the afternoon.

In AEDP, we pride ourselves in how thoroughly and deeply we seek to both (i) undo professional aloneness and (ii) engage in rigorous clinical teaching with skilled accompaniment. We are proud to say that our ES courses feature a high number of highly skilled assistants.

This course is for 65 CE

There is no conflict of interest or commercial support for this program.
 

Presenter


Ron Frederick, Ph.D

Ronald J. Frederick, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist, co-founder of the Center for Courageous Living in Los Angeles, California and author of the award winning book Living Like You Mean It (Jossey-Bass, 2009) and the forthcoming book Loving Like You Mean It (Central Recovery Press, 2019). Since 1994, Dr. Frederick has been training in, practicing, and teaching AEDP, and has received extensive training and supervision from Dr. Fosha. Past experience includes fourteen years as a Clinical Supervisor at Abbott Northwestern Hospital’s Park House Day Treatment Program, a post-doctoral fellowship in Medical Psychology and HIV in the AIDS Center Program at Roosevelt Hospital, NYC, where he later worked as a staff psychologist, and a year-long training rotation in Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy at Beth Israel Medical Center, NYC. Dr. Frederick supervises trainees in AEDP, and has co-facilitated, with Dr. Fosha, AEDP Immersion Courses in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Big Sur, and San Diego. Noted for his warmth, humor, and engaging presentation style, Dr. Frederick is a popular speaker and trainer for both general and professional audiences worldwide. He regularly leads workshops at the Esalen Institute, the Kripalu Center, and the Cape Cod Institute, has provided professional trainings for the Lifespan Learning Institute, Professional Psych Seminars (PPS), and Premier Education Solutions (PESI), and frequently speaks to national, state, and local organizations. Dr. Frederick now teaches and has a private practice in Los Angeles, California.

 

Target Audience:

This course is for Psychologists (Introductory-Intermediate Level), Psychotherapists, Psychiatrists, Psychoanalysts, Social Workers (Beginning-Intermediate Level), Counselors, MFTs, MD’s, Nurses, Creative Arts Therapists.

 

Course Objectives:

  • Demonstrate an AEDP therapist stance: welcome, affirm, validate, orient
  • Construct safety and undo aloneness
  • Apply moment-to-moment tracking to clinical practice
  • Construct dyadic safety and connection
  • Build and rebuild a secure attachment
  • Integrate healing and transformance from the get-go
  • Classify different aspects within the Triangle of Experience, including both verbal and somatic processes, to optimize attunement and accelerate the healing process
  • Analyze the 4 State Transformational Process: Working with relational trauma in a first session
  • Integrate Meta-therapeutic processing and transformational processes
  • Relate the experience of emotional experience: processing emotions to completion
  • Define attachment styles and utilize different interventions according to attachment style
  • Utilize various ways to regulate anxiety, bypass defenses and other inhibitory forces which block progress in therapy
  • Describe how to regulate/alleviate anxiety and traces of shame
  • Identify and access core affective experiences
  • Identify expressions of transformance in clients
  • Practice utilizing transformance strivings as a catalyst to maximize patient’s healing
 

Agenda

WEEK 1

DAY 1

9:00 – 9:30
Course Overview, Today’s Overview, Morning Meditation

9:30 – 11:15
Healing from the Get-Go:  Transformance–the wired in motivational force toward healing–is the bedrock of AEDP theory and practice.  Today we will learn the ways in which Transformance informs the AEDP therapeutic stance and fundamental technique of moment-to-moment tracking

11:15 – 11:30      Break

11:30 – 1:00
Clinical Decision Making via reviewing client sessions:We will use this knowledge along with the technical roadmap of the 4 State/3 State Transformation model to begin to facilitate the processing of emotional and relational experiences.

1:00 – 2:00      Lunch

2:00 – 2:15
Big Group Q&A and Review Directions for Experiential Exercises*

2:15 – 4:00
Small Group (Triad) Experiential Exercises* with Assistants

4:00 – 4:15      Break

4:15 – 5:00
Big Group Process/Q&A/Check Out

DAY 2

9:00 – 9:30
Course Overview, Today’s Overview, Morning Meditation

9:30 – 11:15
What Do I say, How Do I Say It and Then What Do I Do? We will learn entry points: how and when to intervene using the ‘experiential language’ of AEDP

11:15 – 11:30      Break

11:30 – 1:00
Clinical Decision Making via reviewing client sessions.  We will explore the use of self and self-disclosure to deepen the work and foster safety and connection in all our therapeutic dyads.

1:00 – 2:00      Lunch

2:00 – 2:15
Big Group Q&A and Review Directions for Experiential Exercises*

2:15 – 4:00
Small Group (Triad) Experiential Exercises* with Assistants

4:00 – 4:15      Break

4:15 – 5:00
Big Group Process/Q&A/Check Out

DAY 3

9:00 – 9:30
Course Overview, Today’s Overview, Morning Meditation

9:30 – 11:15
Building, Renovating, and Reconstructing a Secure Therapeutic Attachment: Its Not a Once and For All Kind of Deal This day we will look at how to build a secure therapeutic attachment from the beginning of treatment and beyond

11:15 – 11:30      Break

11:30 – 1:00
Clinical Decision Making via reviewing client sessions: The ongoing security of that attachment depends on each in the dyad to grow and change to accommodate greater risk taking, intimacy, safety, and exploration at deeper levels of vulnerability.

1:00 – 2:00      Lunch

2:00 – 2:15
Big Group Q&A and Review Directions for Experiential Exercises*

2:15 – 4:00
Small Group (Triad) Experiential Exercises with Assistants*

4:00 – 4:15      Break

4:15 – 5:00
Big Group Process/Q&A/Check Out

DAY 4

9:00 – 9:30
Course Overview, Today’s Overview, Morning Meditation

9:30 – 11:15
Working with Defense and Anxiety in AEDP: When Defenses Don’t Melt and Anxiety Doesn’t Dissipate This module will focus on how to work with defenses and inhibitory affects to promote access to State 2 coreaffective experience. You’ll learn how to use the Triangle of Experience to make sense of clinical phenomena and guide your choice of interventions

11:15 – 11:30      Break

11:30 – 1:00
Clinical Decision Making via reviewing client sessions; We will expand our repertoire of interventions for anxiety regulation and for defense work in AEDP, learning about bypassing, melting, validating and restructuring defenses.

1:00 – 2:00      Lunch

2:00 – 2:15
Big Group Q&A and Review Directions for Experiential Exercises*

2:15 – 4:00
Small Group (Triad) Experiential Exercises* with Assistants

4:00 – 4:15      Break

4:15 – 5:00
Big Group Process/Q&A/Check Out

DAY 5

9:00 – 9:30
Course Overview, Today’s Overview, Morning Meditation

9:30 – 11:15
Integration in Action:We will explore the crucial role of Meta-therapeutic Processing (Metaprocessing for short) to foster and amplify the transformational power of explicitly reflecting upon the experience of change for the better.

11:15 – 11:30      Break

11:30 – 1:00
Clinical Decision Making via reviewing client sessions: we will add the reflective technique of Metaprocessing to the experientially driven techniques of emotion and relational processing that we have already developed this week in order to facilitate the anchoring of new therapeutic experiences in explicit awareness and memory.

1:00 – 2:00      Lunch

2:00 – 2:15
Big Group Q&A and Review Directions for Experiential Exercises*

2:15 – 4:00
Small Group (Triad) Experiential Exercises* with Assistants

4:00 – 4:15      Break

4:15 – 5:00
Big Group Process/Q&A/Check Out

 

WEEK 2

DAY 1

9:00 – 9:30
Course Overview, Today’s Overview, Morning Meditation

9:30 – 11:15
Reviewing and Anticipating: Special Attention to State 2 Adaptive and Maladaptive Core Affective Experience (CAE) This session will recapture some of what was learned in week 1, forecast work with portrayals which will be elaborated later in the week, discuss the different kinds of State 2 CAE that we want to deepen and expand and give special attention to maladaptive CAE

11:15 – 11:30      Break

11:30 – 1:00
Clinical Decision Making via reviewing client sessions:While we are not deepening these, our witness, presence, capacity and willingness to co-regulate can offer tremendous healing potential.  Finally, we will look at the risk of leaving people alone in our attempts to “undo aloneness.”

1:00 – 2:00      Lunch

2:00 – 2:15
Big Group Q&A and Review Directions for Experiential Exercises*

2:15 – 4:00
Small Group (Triad) Experiential Exercises* with Assistants

4:00 – 4:15      Break

4:15 – 5:00
Big Group Process/Q&A/Check Out

DAY 2

9:00 – 9:30
Course Overview, Today’s Overview, Morning Meditation

9:30 – 11:15
Working with Defense and Anxiety in AEDP: When Defenses Don’t Melt and Anxiety Doesn’t Dissipate – Part 2 This module will focus on how to work with defenses and inhibitory affects to (a) transform self-at-worst into self-at-best and (b) promote access to State 2 core affective experience.

11:15 – 11:30      Break

11:30 – 1:00
Clinical Decision Making via reviewing client sessions.  we will also explore strategies from intra-relational AEDP and learn how to use parts work to deal with more recalcitrant trauma-based defenses and anxiety.

1:00 – 2:00      Lunch

2:00 – 2:15
Big Group Q&A and Review Directions for Experiential Exercises*

2:15 – 4:00
Small Group (Triad) Experiential Exercises* with Assistants

4:00 – 4:15      Break

4:15 – 5:00
Big Group Process/Q&A/Check Out

DAY 3

9:00 – 9:30
Course Overview, Today’s Overview, Morning Meditation

9:30 – 11:15
The Experience of Emotional Experience:  Processing Emotions to Completion Helping patients to access and viscerally experience previously blocked core emotions in the context of a secure therapy dyad is the central agent of therapeutic change in AEDP. In this module, we will focus on tracking where we are at any given moment in the 4 State model of emotion processing and we will learn State specific skills for accessing, deepening and sufficiently processing core emotions.

11:15 – 11:30      Break

11:30 – 1:00
Clinical Decision Making via reviewing client sessions: we will focus on the powerful technique of portrayals for helping patients to bring online cognition, emotion and somatic experiences associated with core emotion in order to release their adaptive action tendencies, transform trauma-based internal working models, and reduce the energetic drain of anxiety and defenses.

1:00 – 2:00      Lunch

2:00 – 2:15
Big Group Q&A and Review Directions for Experiential Exercises*

2:15 – 4:00
Small Group (Triad) Experiential Exercises with Assistants*

4:00 – 4:15      Break

4:15 – 5:00
Big Group Process/Q&A/Check Out

DAY 4

9:00 – 9:30
Course Overview, Today’s Overview, Morning Meditation

9:30 – 11:15
Working with Transformational Experience: Transformational Affects and Core State. AEDP is a treatment model that places transformation and the provision of new experiences at the center of its approach. Today’s training day explores how AEDP works to create the conditions for positive change and makes the most of these change moments when they occur.

11:15 – 11:30      Break

11:30 – 1:00
Clinical Decision Making via reviewing client sessions; a look at ways to facilitate moments that fuel “upward spirals” where healing begets waves of positive affect that in turn beget additional rounds of healing.

1:00 – 2:00      Lunch

2:00 – 2:15
Big Group Q&A and Review Directions for Experiential Exercises*

2:15 – 4:00
Small Group (Triad) Experiential Exercises* with Assistants

4:00 – 4:15      Break

4:15 – 5:00
Big Group Process/Q&A/Check Out

DAY 5

9:00 – 9:30
Course Overview, Today’s Overview, Morning Meditation

9:30 – 11:15
Reviewing What We’ve Learned: Watching and Tracking Together. This afternoon’s session will be more of a spontaneous, co-created response to the whole week, and indeed, the whole course.  We will take time to watch a video (or two) through the eyes of what we now know to solidify all the learning that has taken place during the course

11:15 – 11:30      Break

11:30 – 1:00
Clinical Decision Making via reviewing client sessions: There will also be more time than usual for review, discussion, and still-unanswered questions.

1:00 – 2:00      Lunch

2:00 – 2:15
Big Group Q&A and Review Directions for Experiential Exercises*

2:15 – 4:00
Small Group (Triad) Experiential Exercises* with Assistants

4:00 – 4:15      Break

4:15 – 5:00
Big Group Process/Q&A/Check Out