Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) is an integrative approach to therapy. It is healing-oriented, strengths-based, and experiential. This combination makes AEDP uniquely helpful to a diverse range of people in need.

AEDP assumes that all people strive for growth and change. The developer of AEDP, Diana Fosha, coined the term transformance to describe this concept. From this transformance lens, we look at our suffering not as pathology but as our efforts to adapt to meet our needs in an environment where these needs were not met and where we may even have faced physical and emotional harm. These adaptations, while necessary at the worst of times, may be let down when we are at our best to allow us to experience the world from a wonderful place of openness, flexibility, strength, confidence, and calmness.

Humans are social creatures, and we can face almost any challenge, if we do not face it alone. We are at our strongest in our experience of a nurturing and supportive “other,” someone who stands beside us in fear, comforts us in pain, and values us no matter what. Our suffering is motivated by unbearable states of aloneness that are experienced both in trauma and in moments sprinkled throughout our lives. The most impactful are those experienced in our childhood. Even the best caregivers are not perfect. In childhood, our brains are at their most mutable and wounds small and large drive rapid adaptation.

Therapy at its best is experiential. Change experienced in session is carried into the rest of our lives. We work together in the here and now to provide and make explicit the internalization of nurturance and a supportive “other.” Through our relationship, we will reinterpret painful memories, sit with and regulate overwhelming emotions, and face fears. For some, this may be a familiar experience, helping to heal from brief misattunments. For others this may bring attention to forgotten or overlooked attachment figures from throughout their lives. For others, this may be the first experience of secure attachment and the first opportunity to experience a bastion of safety in a seemingly unpredictable world.

Finally, the AEDP approach to therapy is an emotional process. Our secure attachment, self-at-best, and transformance must be felt to be known. While I may at times teach or do other cognitive work, the bulk of our work in session will focus on being open to how you feel. Ultimately, the goal of this approach to therapy is not to change you or make you a “better person.” The goal is to help you reconnect with your true self and to help you trust that you, at your core, were born good-enough. For many, this can be a powerful, incredibly moving experience. It is for me, and it is always an honor to share in this experience. More information on AEDP can be found here: https://www.verywellmind.com/aedp-is-therapy-for-trauma-4588035 and here: https://aedpinstitute.org/

At times, our traumas can cause the experience of a deep connection with our therapist itself to be terrifying, overwhelming, and retraumatizing. For those suffering from this pain, I may integrate into our work Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). EMDR uses judicious and mindful exposure to traumatic experiences through guided imagery to desensitize, or reduce the distressing impact of, and reprocess, or change the meaning of, these experiences. This is an integrative approach to therapy that directly addresses our beliefs about our self, the narrative we have of our life, and our felt sense of safety, control, and/or responsibility. This may include the use of bilateral or dual-attentive stimulation in which either eye-movement or tapping will be used to draw your attention in a repetitive alternating left-right pattern. For some people, this reduces the intensity of their experience and potentially increases their sense of safety, allowing them to access a more adaptive perspective. Further information on EMDR can be found here: https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/

Parts work applies our understanding of how implicit and procedural learning processes in our brain may cause certain behavior patterns to feel out of our control, almost as though they are distinct parts of our self. In more extreme cases, it may seem like our body is inhabited by a whole other person with a unique personality or even their own separate memories, a concept known as structural dissociation. I use the language of parts with everyone and, depending on need, will frequently use this concept directly to help people change how they relate with their self.