Insights from 16 Session AEDP
Transformance Talk 18
Presented by Gail Woods, LCSW, LMFT, and Richard Harrison, Ph.D
Recorded July 2023
About The Talk
In this Transformance Talk Gail Woods, LCSW, LMFT, and Richard Harrison, PhD, will share their experience in 16 session research AEDP—-as described in Gail’s article “Time & Slowing, Attachment & Loss in 16-Session AEDP Therapy” and Richard’s article “Together We Say Goodbye: Termination in 16-Session AEDP” from July 2023 Volume 11 of Transformance: The AEDP Journal.
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.
Meet your Presenters: Richard Harrison, PhD & Gail Woods, LCSW, LMFT:
Richard Harrison, PhD:
“Together we say goodbye: Termination in 16-session AEDP” explores strategies for bringing a 16-session AEDP treatment to completion. The “termination” phase of therapy is construed and approached as a launching and graduation: A time for celebrating therapeutic achievements, as well as for processing emotions related to separation and loss. Moreover, the ending of AEDP therapy has the potential to be anadditive and healing component of treatment that contributes to an ongoing process of change in the patient’s life, which extends beyond the final goodbye. Facing and going through the goodbye together provides a unique opportunity to disconfirm earlier attachment-based expectations, revise inner working models, and help patients grow in self-confidence as they face, accept, and thrive in the wake of loss. Potential challenges in this process, including a therapist’s own feelings about endings, are also addressed.
Gail Woods, LCSW, LMFT:
“Time and Slowing, Attachment & Loss in 16-Session AEDP Therapy” describes specific interventions research therapists, with Diana Fosha and Jennifer Edlin’s guidance, have found helpful in processing beginnings, middles and endings in 16 Session AEDP. Her article, a case study of maternal loss, gives special attention to the impact of Time—-how setting the time frame (“clock-time”) from the beginning and going slowly with deep emotion /affective time (“existential time”) paradoxically mobilizes transformance. The reality of a planned end creates a unique opportunity for corrective experience of loss and separation where the felt sense of secure meaningful therapist-patient connection carries forward beyond the therapy. “It’s attachment even more-so!” (Jenn Edlin, personal communication, 12/3/20). Out of traumatic loss and disconnection, in key moments of embodied empathic connection, clock-time feels suspended. Time stretches, integration and transformational growth emerge.