Unwilled and unwanted aloneness in the face of overwhelming experience often leaves people feeling unbearably disconnected from self and other. For some, their response to this disconnection takes the form of sympathetic hyperarousal. We see this in our clients who are reeling rather than feeling and dealing. These clients are easily flooded, impulsive, hypervigilent and overwhelmed by emotion, connection and experience. Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) fosters the healing of relational trauma through the use of the therapist’s self and the accompaniment of the client, processing together what was too much for the client to face alone. Through tracking and helping to regulate the moment-by-moment somatic experience of the client, providing a secure base (and helping the client to make use of this base), and harnessing the innate drive within all of us to heal and transform, we as therapists can help our clients to move from dysregulation to deeper connection with self and other and a renewed sense of self-compassion and their own efficacy in the world.
This workshop begins with an introduction to AEDP, focusing on the questions AEDP therapists ask themselves to help orient their work with dysregulated clients. The workshop focuses on both theory and clinical technique, and makes extensive use of videotaped clinical work to demonstrate the application of AEDP interventions and theory in work with dysregulated clients. We look at work over the course of treatment, session by session with one client and across years with another, and explore creating a sense of safety, accessing and processing core affective experiences to completion, and finally metaprocessing the new experiences of self and other to allow a profound shift from older internal working models that led to dysregulation and a sense of overwhelm, to new ways of relating to self and other. Significant time will be devoted to experiential exercises for participants to directly apply the learning each day.
This program is for 14.25 CE
There is no conflict of interest or commercial support for this program.