Working With Eating Disorders Using AEDP
Transformance Talk 11
Presented by Transformance Journal author Jessica K. Slatus, LCSW
Recorded May 16, 2019
About The Talk
Ms. Slatus’s Transformance Talk will be based on her fascinating Transformance Journal article.
The Talk: For clients with eating disorders, food is a medium of emotional expression. Helping the client to develop a greater awareness of her affective experience, and to expand her capacity to internalize nourishing relational experiences, is critical to fostering sustained recovery. Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), with its explicit, experiential focus on privileging new and positive experiences of affect and connection, is well-suited to this work. This talk will offer strategies to appreciate and disarm the eating disorder client’s defenses, highlight specific AEDP interventions that foster receptivity to positive affects from the therapist as well as from other parts of the self, and illustrate the therapist modeling receptivity for the client.
Read the article here
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 the Presenter Jessica Slatus, LCSW
Jessica is a Certified AEDP Therapist and Supervisor in Colorado. She is an integral part of the AEDP Rocky Mountains community and has presented locally on a number of topics within AEDP, including the AEDP therapist stance, working with anxiety and defenses, building receptive affective capacity, and metaprocessing. More recently, she has focused on writing and teaching about working with eating disorders using AEDP, and has authored two publications on the topic: an article in Transformance, the AEDP journal, and a book chapter co-authored with Natasha Prenn in the book Trauma-Informed Approaches to Eating Disorders.Jessica received her Bachelor of Arts from Vassar College, her Masters in Social Work from New York University, and her post-graduate training in eating disorders at the Center for the Study of Anorexia & Bulimia (CSAB). Jessica was a participant in the inaugural AEDP Essential Skills course in 2010 and has not looked back since! A native New Yorker, Jessica has had the privilege of training with, and being mentored by, a number of AEDP Senior Faculty, including Natasha Prenn, Ben Lipton, Eileen Russell, and (last but not least) Diana Fosha. She has served as an experiential assistant at many Immersion, ES 1 and ES 2 courses over the years, and loves helping others learn and apply the model. In addition to her clinical practice, Jessica offers individual and group supervision in both her Boulder and Denver offices, as well as online.