Essential Skills • 2013-2014 • New York

Our 2013-14 Essential Skills Course will be held in New York City and begins in October.  AEDP Essential Skills, aimed at practitioners, will be practical. Our aim is to teach, in both left-brained and right-brained ways, skill sets, concrete and specific. Different skill sets will be introduced, explained, illustrated and practiced each weekend, so that participants will emerge with both an understanding and a felt sense of how to practice AEDP.

This course has reached capacity and registration is now closed.

Meet Course Leader, Natasha Prenn, LCSW

Natasha is a Senior Faculty member of the AEDP Institute. She will teach the first weekend and then be joined by a stellar group of AEDP Institute Senior Faculty, including AEDP Director, Diana Fosha, for the final four weekends.

Course Dates and Faculty

Weekend 1: October 4th-6th
What Do I Say & How Do I Say It? And Then What Do I Do?
Natasha Prenn, LCSW
In our first weekend we will practice the language of actual interventions, we will introduce the steps and sequences that allow the work to flow, and the maps and protocols that inform our decision-making. The Essential Skills include: The experiential language of AEDP; Entry points: how and where to intervene; moment-to-moment tracking: what are we tracking and why; self-disclosure and its metaprocessing; and anxiety regulation and defense recognition.

Weekend 2: December 6th-8th
The Bonds That Free Us:  Working With Attachment Explicitly & Experientially In AEDP
Guest Faculty: Kari Gleiser, PhD
In the past decade, the rapidly evolving fields of attachment studies and developmental neuroscience have revolutionized our conceptualization of how relationships shape the human mind from infancy through adulthood. These theories now inform our understanding of psychopathology as well the transformative potential of the therapeutic relationship. However, theories don’t automatically translate into practice; specific clinical interventions are necessary to harness the power of the therapy relationship to effect healing and change. In this module, we will focus on learning and practicing AEDP’s explicit relational interventions such as: recognizing and bypassing relational defenses, enhancing receptive capacity, fostering safety and intimacy from the get-go, using therapeutic self-disclosure, processing relational affects, and meta-processing present moment relational experiences.

Weekend 3: January 24th-26th
Working With Defenses In AEDP
Guest Faculty: Diana Fosha, PhD
This module will be devoted to exploring what in AEDP we call “top of the triangle of experience” work or State 1 work, i.e., working with everything that stands in the way of dropping down into core affective experience. We will explore different AEDP strategies for working with defenses such as bypassing defenses; affirming defenses; working with defenses as a category of experience; restructuring defenses; and using intra-relational intervention (parts work) to work with defenses. We will also explore different AEDP strategies for anxiety regulation, for example how to use relational experience for anxiety regulation, and also what to so when using relational experience for anxiety regulation doesn’t do the trick.

Weekend 4: March 7th-9th
How To Work With Emotion In AEDP: Accessing, Experiencing & Processing Emotions To Completion
Guest Faculty: Benjamin Lipton, LCSW
In the context of a safe, secure therapeutic relationship, our facilitating a patient’s full, visceral experiencing of emotions and working together to process them through to completion is a foundational mechanism of therapeutic change for the better in AEDP. As a result of this process of feeling core emotions through to completion, patients consistently and predictably gain access to adaptive strategies for navigating life experiences and thriving in the world. In this module, we will focus on the specific skills required for working effectively with emotional experience. Participants will leave this weekend with a clear understanding of the landscape of emotion processing work in AEDP and the essential tools necessary to begin to facilitate this process in their own clinical work.

Weekend 5: April 25th-27th
Transformational Affects, Positive Affects, Core State & Engendering Resilience: The Fruits Of Metaprocessing
Guest Faculty: Eileen Russell, PhD
This module will focus how to pay attention to small and large transformations and what to do in the wake of them. Metaprocessing is one of AEDP’s most unique contributions to the field of psychotherapy and it is what facilitates the cascade of transformation. We will also look at AEDP’s model of resilience and how AEDP helps restore and enhance people’s capacities to be and act on behalf of their own selves. Finally, we will look at how to stay with intensely positive affects, sometimes directed toward the therapist, and how this part of the 4 States/3 State transformations shifts the dynamic between patient and therapist in important ways.   

Course Format
The course will be held over 5 three-day weekends according to the following schedule:  Fridays, 1 pm – 7 pm; Saturdays from 9 am – 5 pm; Sundays from 9 am – 2 pm. The basic skill sets necessary to practice AEDP will be introduced each weekend, with theoretical foundations and with videotapes, followed by live demonstrations and group experiential exercises in the afternoons.

Theory, Videotapes and Experiential Learning

Participants will learn the AEDP clinical roadmap, decision tree, protocol, and the right-brain language of experiential treatment. The training will include didactic material, clinical videotapes of actual sessions, experiential exercises, and small and large group processing.

Essential skills will be experientially explored and didactically demonstrated so that participants will develop both a (right brain mediated) felt sense as well as a (left brain mediated) understanding of them:

  • the entrainment of transformance and healing forces within the self
  • how to translate social engagement neuroscience to clinical work
  • how to engender secure attachment from the get-go, and thereafter
  • how to work with patients who do not take to AEDP
  • promoting right brain experience: gaze, contact, tone, lexicon
  • how to work with resistance to right-brain experience
  • self-at-best/self-at-worst
  • moment-to-moment tracking
  • the four state and three-state transformations of the transformational process
  • working with defenses: bypassing defenses, defense restructuring
  • undoing unbearable aloneness
  • pressuring with empathy
  • dyadic affect regulation: attunement, disruption, repair
  • phenomenology of affective experiences, transformational markers
  • metaprocessing: how AEDP interventions register inside the patient
  • metatherapeutic processing of transformational experience
  • the healing-oriented phenomenology of AEDP: categorical emotions, healing affects, receptive affective experiences
  • the integration of right-brain and left-brain experience to unleash cascading transformations, and solidify therapeutic gains

Course Readings

Continuing Education Credits

This program is eligible for 82.50 hours of continuing education credit through our co-sponsor R. Cassidy Seminars.  To view the CE accreditation statement click here.  CE Credits are included in the course fee.

Course Fee

The fee for the AEDP Essential Skills course is $3,400.  Course size is limited to 50 participants. A $200 discount is available if full payment is made at the time of registration

Cancellation & Refund Policy

A one-year financial commitment is required.  View our cancellation/refund policy.

Registration is now closed

Registration Closed

Questions: Contact the AEDP Administrator