Therapeutic reimagining, which empowers individuals to create their own portrayals outside of the
therapy room, is introduced. This experiential new process allows the transformational work to
continue between sessions, accelerating clients’ progress. The book I wrote about it, Reimagine
Your Life: How to Change Your Past and Transform Your Future (2024), empowers those who
can’t access or afford therapy to engage in an experiential life changing process. A detailed first-
person account 1 of one client’s use of the technique is used to illustrate how simple, yet,
transformational it can be. By using counterfactual thinking, an alternate timeline of events can be
created that allows healing without the need to revisit a traumatic memory “hot spot,” making it
particularly suited to clients with highly aversive traumatic memories. This article provides clinical
evidence to support this approach (Arntz, 2012), and a roadmap for how to do the process, “the
four guiding principles,” is explained. The process has been especially useful for “rewiring internal
models of attachment” (Frederick, 2021) in individuals with dismissive avoidant attachment styles,
who may be resistant to forming an attachment with a therapist.
Client work shown in the talk

In the talk, a video of a piece of work with “Adam” will be played, which is transcribed in full in
Chapter 5 of Reimagine Your Life, where we combine the use of an experiential somatic and spatial
anchoring technique with a piece of therapeutic reimagining done outside of the therapy room to
achieve transformational change. After watching it Diana Fosha said, “It was a stunning piece of
work, and a beautiful piece of work.”

View the PDF of the Article: Therapeutic Reimagining

Transformance: The AEDP Journal is the official journal of the AEDP Institute. Transformance has been published yearly since it’s inaugral  September 2010 and has published yearly since. It represented a quantum leap into a new era for a groundbreaking model of therapy that was introduced only 10 years earlier by Diana Fosha’s influential book, The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change. The publication also provided a much needed platform for disseminating the ever evolving advances, applications, and inspirations for the rapidly growing and highly productive AEDP community.   A quick scan of the titles will reveal the vast array of topics and the tremendous fount of clinical material, in the form of session transcripts, demonstrating the application of AEDP to clinical issues such as, eating disorders, sexual abuse, work with couples, addiction, racial trauma; methodological refinements such as, adjustments to attachment style, cultivating therapeutic presence; and innovation benefitting the general field of psychotherapy such as, harnessing termination as component of the healing process and the creation of an empirically validated model of short-term AEDP.  Additionally, Transformance has featured articles on cutting edge applications of neuroscience research as well as commentary on books and movies.