Existing in Each Other's Hearts and Minds: A Spirit and a Set of Values A spirit and a set of values informs all the endeavors and activities—clinical, intellectual, and community-building—that constitute AEDP, and form the mission of the AEDP Institute. I would like to share those with you.
We are committed and devoted to foster and promote: a healing and growth orientation; engagement; connection; shared passion; openness of heart; openness of mind; rigor guided by phenomenological precision; safety and (informed) therapist risk-taking emergence
We proceed from a belief in the value of openness to divergence and  commitment to exploration. We grow --in our selves, in our practice, in our theory, in our community-- through staying open to and being challenged by new ways of thinking and working, through staying open to and being challenged by each other. Reveling in our resonances and embracing our differences -- this is how we foster the emergence of phenomena which are the stuff of professional, personal, and organizational growth. Welcome!

Transformance: The Motive Force of AEDP

Transformance is a fundamental concept that I introduced and developed in 2008 in a paper, called "Transformance, recognition of self by self, and effective action" (Fosha, 2008). It is at the core of what AEDP is all about. It refers to the need that we all have to grow, to heal, and to transform into becoming who we know ourselves to be.

We all have a fundamental need for transformation. We are wired for growth and healing. And we are wired for self-righting, and resuming impeded growth. We have a need for the expansion and liberation of the self, the letting down of defensive barriers, and the dismantling of the false self. We are shaped by a deep desire to be known, seen, and recognized as we strive to come into contact with parts of ourselves that are frozen.

Transformance is my term for the overarching motivational force, operating both in development and therapy, that strives toward maximal vitality, authenticity, and genuine contact. Transformance drives change processes that, in the right environment, eventuate in healing and thriving. A felt sense of vitality and energy characterizes transformance-based emergent phenomena.

The AEDP Institute

Through its activities—live, published, and online—the AEDP Institute is devoted to providing a forum for an emergent community of clinicians.  We seek to co-create environments—clinical, intellectual, collegial—of shared values. We are aiming to create a community of safety and security, from which boundless exploration can take place.

It is important to us to facilitate training atmospheres where clinicians can share clinical material from a position of openness. We seek to have a shared experiential data base, as well as a shared intellectual/theoretical base. The AEDP Institute aims to create forum in which we can share ideas, ask questions, learn from one another, raise issues, share therapy experiences, and integrate new ideas into an ever-evolving, emergent model of thinking and clinical practice.
The ethos is to exist in each other’s hearts and minds. Which is how AEDP grows and stays healthy and vibrant.

As the network of AEDP practitioners, teachers, and supervisors is growing nationally and worldwide, the AEDP Institute is committed to promoting ongoing communications between AEDP and other therapeutic approaches and disciplines, and to having AEDP be an active participant the exciting emergent developments that are transforming how we understand ourselves and each other, and how we practice.

	HEALING ATTACHMENT (sprinkled with INTERSUBJECTIVE DELIGHT) DYADIC AFFECT REGULATION THE EXPERIENCE OF EMOTION  FOCUS ON TRANSFORMATION & POSITIVE AFFECTS SAFETY, EXPERIENCE, AFFIRMATION OF TRANSFORMATION, INTEGRATION

Finally, On A Personal Note

Being able to share my life’s work and ideas through writings and presentations, and having them met by you,  colleagues, senior and junior, with resonance, responsiveness, interest, enthusiasm and excitement is an honor, a joy and a privilege beyond words.

With appreciation for what has been, and joyful anticipation of what is to come,

Diana Fosha

Here we go!

HEALING
We are not just bundles of pathology.
Lodged deeply in our brains and bodies, there for the awakening and activating in facilitating environments, lie innate, wired-in dispositions for self-healing and self-righting, as well as for core state, a state of calm, flow, ease, clarity, confidence, generosity, and true self being.
Healing oriented, rather than psychopathology-based, AEDP privileges these innate healing motivational tendencies and sees change as involving the activation of naturally occurring, adaptive affective change processes: our aim, guided by the positive markers that identify them, is to entrain them, and harness their healing potential.

ATTACHMENT (sprinkled with INTERSUBJECTIVE DELIGHT)
We are wired to care. The AEDP therapist aims to facilitate and co-construct a patient-therapist relationship  characterized by secure attachment. Such a relationship is dyadic, explicitly empathic, affirming, mutual (though asymmetric), affect-regulating, mutually enjoyable, and emotionally engaged. true self being.

The therapeutic relationship aims to be the secure base from which fear, shame, and distress can be dyadically regulated, and from which the experiential explorations of deep, painful emotional experiences can be risked.

DYADIC AFFECT REGULATION
A fundamental tenet of AEDP is that the patient is never alone with overwhelming emotional experiences.

THE EXPERIENCE OF EMOTION 
 The aim of AEDP is the provision of a new experience and working to ensure that that experience be good.

The experiential method involves facilitating the patient’s having an experience in which the body must be involved through tracking moment-to-moment fluctuations in the emotional experience of patient, therapist, and dyad.

The visceral experience of core affects in the here-and-now of the patient-therapist relationship is the central agent of change in AEDP. Core affects are wired-in adaptive experiences which, when (i) activated, (ii) moment-to-moment tracked, and (iii) worked through to completion, access inner resources and resilience.

TRANSFORMATION & POSITIVE AFFECTS
The recognition and exploration of the experience of transformation is a transformational agent in and of itself.

AEDP has discovered that focusing on, affirming, and experientially exploring the experience of transformation, particularly the experience of the transformation of the self in the context of a healing relationship, led to the discovery that the experiential exploration of transformation is in itself an affective change process, a process that releases a cascade of further transformations, and one that has  characteristic somatic affective markers, which are invariably positive.

Positive affects and positive affective interactions are both the constituents and the wired-in affective markers of healing transformational processes and adaptive experiences. Given that the experience of change --change for the better, that is-- feels good and right, and given that positive, resonant, attuned, dyadic interactions have been shown to be the constituents of healthy, secure attachments and the correlates of neurochemical environments that are conducive to optimal brain growth,  AEDP is both guided by these moment-to-moment signals and markers, and aims to facilitate their occurrence.