Course description

Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) is a healing centered, transformation-focused model of psychotherapy that integrates experiential, relational and psychodynamic approaches with ideas drawn from the study of neuroplasticity and positive emotion. It posits that side by side with psychopathology and resistance to change, there exists in people an intrinsic hard-wired capacity to heal, adapt and grow.   

 

In this training sponsored by the Minnesota Trauma project and AEDP Minnesota, Jerry Lamagna will introduce AEDP as an integrative approach to treating chronic trauma and neglect. In addressing its impact on the individual, Mr. Lamagna will demonstrate through lecture and videotaped sessions, how AEDP employs moment to moment relational mindfulness to undo a client’s unbearable state of aloneness and more effectively “share the emotional load” during difficult moments in treatment.  In addition, there will be an exploration of AEDP’s four state model of change —from defense and self inhibition, to emotion processing to experiential work with the felt sense of change-for-the-better.  

 

Mr. Lamagna will also present on Intra-relational AEDP, an AEDP-informed approach to parts work that specifically addresses the inner aloneness and marginalization of frightening/painful experiences resulting from trauma and dissociation. Here the presenter will demonstrate how the explicit "tending and befriending” of one’s own suffering and the positive affects linked to shared resonance, recognition, compassion, understanding, expansion of consciousness and wholeness can provide experiential “fuel” for transformational moments in treatment.  

 

The training will also demonstrate how, as a therapeutic approach, AEDP concepts and techniques can readily complement other treatment approaches like EMDR, IFS, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and SE. 

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Learning Objectives

1. The participants will be able to list the sequential stages of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy’s four state transformational process.

 

2. The participants will define the AEDP intervention known as Meta-therapeutic processing and name two ways it facilitates integration of transformational moments in trauma therapy.

 

3. The participants will describe two AEDP interventions used to promote emotion regulation and positive affective experiences linked to safety, worth and reflective capacity in trauma clients.

 

4. Participants will name two affective change processes in AEDP that can help stabilize patients in early trauma treatment. 

 

5. Participants will be able to list and describe two therapeutic interventions specific to Intra-relational AEDP work that assist patient’s in regulating overwhelming emotional experience.