August, 2019
Editor’s Introduction
by Gil Tunnell, PhD
Welcome to our issue for “light” Summer Reading! I say “light” because there are only three articles, and each one is short.
Two articles are reviews of recently published self-help books written by Hilary Jacobs Hendel (2018) and Senior Faculty member Ron Frederick (2019). As Stephen McDonnell and Carrie Ruggieri say in their reviews, each book can be recommended to (a) lay people, (b) clients who want to know more about AEDP, (c) colleagues new to AEDP, and (d) AEDP clinicians who want a refresher course. >>>>
User-Friendly AEDP: A Review of Hilary Jacobs Hendel’s It’s Not Always Depression
It’s Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self.
By Hilary Jacobs Hendel (2018). New York: Spiegel & Grau. 298 pp.
By Stephen McDonnell, LCSW
Hilary Jacobs Hendel, LCSW, has written a friendly and simple “User’s Guide” to AEDP therapy, core emotions and defenses, attachment and trauma, and “the gold” of Core State, or as Hilary has nicknamed Core State for a general audience, the Openhearted State. It’s a great book that could be offered to clients who would like an informed supplement to our experiential therapy with them, a book to recommend to others in our lives for whom we might want to plant seeds about trying therapy, or to those who might need some self-help for their emotional regulation (a friend of mine just sent it to her son in college). Also, other clinicians—those new to AEDP as well as well-seasoned AEDP therapists—will find the book useful in learning how another therapist practices AEDP. >>>>
AEDP Author as True Other: A Successful Application of AEDP Ethos in a Self-Help Book: A Review of Ron Frederick’s Loving Like You Mean It
Loving Like You Mean It: Use the Power of Emotional Mindfulness to
Rewire Your Brain and Transform Your Relationships.
By Ronald J. Frederick (2019). Las Vegas, Nevada: Central Recovery Press. 241 pp.
By Carrie Ruggieri, LMHC, BCETS, Transformance Associate Editor
Loving Like You Mean It is a sequel to Ron Frederick’s 2009 best-selling book, Living Like You Mean It. On the surface it is a self-help book. But in fact, it is whatever a reader needs it to be (an AEDP primer, a model for how to scaffold complex information yet retain the complexity, how to write suspenseful vignettes, how to rewire a brain, how to author as a True Other, and how to free oneself to love like you meant it). This is not simply masterful; it is wizardry.
Frederick enables the reader, at once and throughout, to apprehend the mysteries of the human heart in animate layers. Through a cognitive illumination of how our earliest relationships wire our brains… >>>>
Is This AEDP? Six Unique Characteristics of AEDP
By Hans Welling
Often asked during workshops on Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy is the question, “Is this AEDP?” The difficulty understanding what AEDP exactly stands for comes from the fact that AEDP is a highly integrative model that brings together elements from many different psychotherapy orientations (Fosha, 2000). Thus, observing AEDP therapists at work reminds workshop attendees of other therapies and can raise the question about what is different about AEDP.
AEDP is experiential, is relational, works with attachment, focuses on the positive, and works with the defenses and emotions. In that sense, AEDP bears resemblance to short-term dynamic therapies, relational and interpersonal therapies, emotion-focused therapies, and body-focused therapies. Yet AEDP is much more than just the sum of these elements; when we see an AEDP therapist at work there is something about the style and type of interventions that can be quickly recognized as distinctively AEDP. >>>>
That’s all for Volume 9
More about the AEDP Journal, Transformance: