Receiving Loving Gratitude
How a Therapist’s Mindful Embrace of a Patient’s Gratitude Facilitates Transformance
Yuko Hanakawa
When a patient earnestly expresses gratitude towards the therapist for the transformational therapeutic work, it oddly shakes up the therapist. The author argues that this may be because positive emotions are traditionally neglected both in the English speaking culture and the field of psychology.
Yet, recent neuroscience, attachment research, and emotion theories have shown the powerful influence of positive emotions on human development, interpersonal functioning, resilience, and expansive growth. This paper focuses on two specific positive emotions, gratitude and love, that emerge in the patient towards the therapist after completing deep transformational work. The term used to describe this interpersonal experience is loving gratitude. This paper proposes that the therapist’s recognition and acceptance of the patient’s loving gratitude towards the therapist facilitates an upward spiral of transformations beyond the already accomplished therapeutic gains and changes the landscape of the patient and therapist’s attachment styles when metaprocessed to completion.
The Work of AEDP: Repair, Growth, & Celebration
Jennifer L. Imming
Repair is an essential ingredient in the patient/therapist dyad, since ruptures are a naturally occurring part of all relationships. Through the process of repair, patients can heal within the context of therapy, in addition to extending this healing throughout other relationships in their lives, both past and present. Therapists can attend to ruptures that occur within the therapeutic relationship and actively facilitate repair of such ruptures, appreciating the patient’s experience, acknowledging their own part in the rupture, appropriately sharing their personal experience of the interaction, and providing a corrective emotional experience. This paper presents a detailed transcript of a patient’s videotaped session in which the process of rupture, repair, growth, and celebration takes place. The dynamics and moment-to-moment processing of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) are delineated throughout the manuscript, including concepts such as red-signal affects, green-signal affects, mastery affects, healing affects, heralding affects, emotional engagement, intersubjectivity, deepening positive affect, and the therapeutic interventions which facilitate this process. The manuscript also illustrates the significance of attending to the celebration phase of the session, in many ways the ethos of the AEDP model. Through privileging the positive, transformation takes place.
Laura Hillenbrand: Author as True Other: Inspiring Quantum Resilience
Carrie Ruggieri
“Steeled for the worst, we encounter the best. It is not only that some are strong at the broken places; it is also that, through trauma, others become strong, and discover they’re strong in ways they never knew. For sometimes trauma awakens extraordinary capacities that otherwise would lie dormant, unknown and untapped. Without the trauma, they would never see the light of day.” (Diana Fosha, 2001).
“You, in this thread and others, have helped us ALL to not only understand what is going on in Texas, in the context of our own local challenges (such as Hurricane Irene), and anniversaries (9/11), but to take stock of our personal legacies and resilience, the stories of how we came to be who and where we are, and why we are called to minister to others in distress, to elicit and ‘fan those sparks of courage’ (Ossefort-Russell) and resilience in them.” (emphasis mine) (Susan Walton, 2011).
Laura Hillenbrand is the best selling and award winning author of two non-fiction historical novels, Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001) [1], the story of a racehorse who inspired the nation during the Depression era, and Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010), the story of Louie Zamperini: a delinquent boy turned Olympic runner expected to break the 4 minute mile, turned fighter pilot hero, turned survivor of 47 days adrift at sea, turned POW survivor, turned survivor of PTSD and alcoholism, turned national inspirational speaker who thrives to this day in his mid-nineties [2].
This review of Laura Hillenbrand’s novels is, true to AEDP ethos, less about the stories as it is a reflection on the phenomena of inspiration and resilience; not everyday resilience, but extraordinary, quantum resilience. The central theme of this review is that quantum resilience can and does happen in everyday life – propelling an ordinary person into acts astounding even their own expectations.