Transformance Talk based on Transformance: The AEDP Journal, Volume 6 Issue 1 (Published December 2015) by Eileen Russell, PhD
Book Review by Gil Tunnell, PhD
The Talk: Listen and watch Eileen Russell and her editor / interviewer Gil Tunnell – both Sr. Faculty at AEDP – plus members of the AEDP community in this Transformance Talk to learn about Ms. Russell’s highly regarded book, Restoring Resilience.
From Tunnel’s review:
Eileen Russell’s new book Restoring Resilience: Discovering your clients’ capacity for healing (New York: W. W. Norton., 2015) is a major contribution to the psychotherapy literature. It is the best professional book I have read in a long time.
Rich in new, jargon-free theory and filled with clinical vignettes that illustrate working with different forms of resilience … Russell is clear from the start that she is not talking about the everyday, ordinary notion of “resilience,” but rather a multi-faceted concept that manifests itself in different ways at each stage and state of the therapeutic process.
More than demonstrating what resilience looks like in its various facets, Russell describes numerous clinical interventions that can be used to nurture it. In my view, this is why the book is so important: The author goes beyond helping the reader identify resilience in all its forms, but provides explicit clinical interventions appropriate for cultivating each form. For example, in early treatment, she writes that it is insufficient simply for the clinician to note the patient’s resilience privately or even share their thoughts on the patient’s resilience with the patient. Instead, Russell invites therapists to get curious about resilience, become more adept in spotting it, get the patient curious about it, and, together with the patient, mine it and bring it into the light. …
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Meet the Presenter
Eileen M. Russell, PhD
Eileen M. Russell, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and a founding faculty member of the AEDP Institute. She began studying and training in AEDP in 1996 with Drs. Diana Fosha and Jenna Osiason. Dr. Russell has been an adjunct faculty member at NYU Medical/ Bellevue Hospital Center where she completed her internship training and later worked as a senior psychologist with individuals struggling with addiction and psychiatric diagnoses. She is currently also on the faculty of the National Institute of the Psychotherapies (NIP) Integrative Trauma Program. Her passion is AEDP, which she has taught to individuals and groups since 2004 nationally and internationally. She combines a warm and gentle clinical style with a probing and articulate interest in theory to bring out the depths of the AEDP approach. In addition to her practice with patients and consultees, Eileen enjoys expanding clinical and theoretical ideas through writing. (Read More…)
Gil Tunnell, PhD
Gil is a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York City. He is a founding Senior Faculty member of the AEDP Institute and now serves as Consulting Editor for Transformance: The AEDP Journal. With Jenna Osiason, he wrote “Historical Context: AEDP’s Place in the World of Psychotherapy,” Undoing Aloneness & the Transformance of Suffering into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0, APA Books, 2021. Dr. Tunnell is co-author with David Greenan of Couple Therapy with Gay Men (Guilford, 2002), and has presented and published widely on working with gay men, most recently, “Unequivocal affirmation” of True Self in 16-session AEDP with Gay Men: Using Relational Metaprocessing to Increase Receptive Affective Capacity, Transformance Journal, 2023, 11 (1). His special interest is applying AEDP to couple therapy. (Read More…)