Editor’s Letter: Kari Gleiser and Natasha Prenn
Wired for Healing: Diana Fosha
How to Set Transformance Into Action: Natasha Prenn
Self-transcendence as an Aspect of Core State: Kai MacDonald
Transformance and the Phenomenology of Transformation: Danny Yeung
AEDP for the Common Man: A Review of Living Like You Mean It: Gil Tunnell
Editors Letter
Kari Gleiser and Natasha Prenn
We would like to extend to all of you a warm and enthusiastic welcome to the inaugural issue of Transformance: The AEDP Journal! We are thrilled and honored to be at the helm of this launching, as it marks a momentous quantum leap forward for our community.
On the eve of our first publication, we have been reflecting on what it means for us (and by “us” we mean all of you out there reading this!) to lay claim to our very own journal. Transformance marks a symbolic moment of growth of our community, not only in size, but in maturity and depth as well.
This journal offers space to showcase well-crafted musings, newly sprouting theories — representing the very edges of new growth, as well as to reinforce and feel the groundedness of our roots in a shared knowledge base, so that we may grow as trees do — at once expansively and exuberantly upward, as well as deepening and securing in the ground. While our listserv has been a fount of spontaneous outpouring of reflective, day-to-day happenings and contemplations, this journal provides a more seasoned forum to nurture even deeper and more integrative thinking. Writing a full-length article means living with ideas for months at a time, fermenting like old wine in an oak barrel, to produce a new kind of richness, clarity and fullness. Finally, true to the nature of its name, Transformance was an inevitable emergence, a springing up of unstoppable growth. The time was right; it had to happen and it did.
And here we are.
As with any prodigious undertaking, the final product only emerges as a result of a collective and sustained effort. We would like to recognize and deeply appreciate the countless hours of collaborative work of several individuals in the inception, shaping, and refining of this journal. Danny Yeung and Kai MacDonald joined us at the outset as assistant editors and comprised the committee dedicated to articulating the format and details of this journal. Much gratitude to Diana Fosha for her unfailing guidance, support and feedback during the past year. We would also like to thank each of our authors, Diana Fosha, Natasha Prenn, Danny Yeung, Kai MacDonald, and Gil Tunnell for their contributions to make this a veritable feast for the intellect. Finally we would like to thank the patients past, present and future, who allow these intimate and sacred moments of therapy to be shared with a wider audience so that healing processes continue to ripple out into the world.
We wish you hours of pleasurable and stimulating reading; breakthrough moments in your clinical work inspired by these articles; and, hopefully, the irresistible urge to write and submit an article of your own in the near future!
Warmly,
Kari Gleiser & Natasha Prenn, Editors
Wired for Healing
Thirteen Ways of Looking at AEDP
Diana Fosha
Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, this paper represents musings on thirteen of AEDP’s many aspects. The Stevens poem [see Appendix] modeled a liberating structure for describing AEDP’s fundamentally holographic, ever-emergent, non-linear, complex and dynamic nature.
I like the idea of ‘ways of looking.’ The choice of which one, or which combination, is most salient for any patient-therapist dyad, in any particular session, at any given moment, is neither uniform nor dictated, neither proscribed nor prescribed. It is emergent. It is how the uniqueness of each dyad, each session, each moment, declares itself. Precision and rigor in AEDP clinical work do not come from a how-to manual: AEDP work is deeply informed by a change-based understanding of clinical process, i.e., transformational theory, and is guided moment-to-moment by an articulated phenomenology, i.e., the phenomenology of the transformational process. The 13th way of looking at AEDP—“this is what I did, and this is what happened”—begins to articulate a dialectic principle of phenomenology-based and transformational theory-informed practice.
How to Set Transformance Into Action
The AEDP Protocol
Natasha Prenn
“The existential need for recognition and the functional need for effective action on behalf of the self are powerful motives; they are both manifestations of transformance.” (Fosha, 2008, p. 3).
This quotation captures the dual focus of AEDP: it is a profoundly relational model requiring attunement to the attachment needs of the patient in each moment, and it is simultaneously a powerfully intrapsychic emotion-centered psychotherapy focusing on the biologically-driven adaptive action tendencies contained within us all. This article and transcript will illustrate how to set transformance, our innate urge to heal, into action. I will lay out a protocol with special attention to the language of actual interventions as a guide to facilitating the kind of experiential, transformative, therapeutic work that AEDP seeks to bring about. In keeping with AEDP’s attention to moment-to-moment phenomenology, throughout the transcript I will pinpoint the specific in-session signposts that guide my interventions.
Self-transcendence as an Aspect of Core State
Interoception and the Feeling Self
Kai MacDonald
HANDLES: Carry Them Home.
- One of the primary brain areas involved in the awareness of the feeling self is the insula, an area which contains a neural representation of the “state of the feeling body.”
- Circuits and states of mind involving the insula may be convergence points between acts of deliberate interoception, dyadic emotional resonance, and important state shifts in experiential psychotherapy.
Imagine, if you will, our brief journey’s guide: an aged and scarlet-hooded Dante, his stooped back mirroring the arc at the top of the curved staff on which he leans.
Imagine further that this same curve intimates a question: that mark whose hooked top grabs your mind with one end and points it somewhere with the other.
Suddenly, tearing off his hood, we see that our guide today is not Dante, but the eminent neuroscientist A.D. Craig, whose recent review: “How do you feel—Now? The anterior insula and human awareness” [1] will be our guidebook.
Today, thankfully, our guide is leading us not into the sinner-strewn hell of the Inferno, but into a hidden part of the brain called the insula. With his title-worthy question (which, one will note, is also an apt entrée point of experiential therapy), Craig deftly shepherds us into a startling, synesthetic world of feeling-focused functional neuroscience, crafting a felt-sense centered theory of awareness that has startling resonance with a host of experiential psychotherapies including AEDP. Given these resonances, and the importance of the insula in many aspects of emotional awareness and human brain function, I herein highlight a few key aspects of Craig’s theory and touch on their implications for psychotherapy. For psychotherapists who work with emotion directly, the convergence of many components of Craig’s model with the “present, feeling focus” of experiential therapy in general–and AEDP in particular–is nothing but remarkable.
Transformance and the Phenomenology of Transformation
Self-transcendence as an Aspect of Core State
By Danny Yeung
Transformance, a central construct in Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), is the overarching motivational force driving positive change. Transformance is the clinical parallel of neuroplasticity in neuroscience (Fosha, 2010). A forward-moving, generative force, transformance fosters optimal growth and maximizes vitality and psychic energy. This energy resonates with that found in several ancient wisdom traditions. For example, transformance echoes the pervasive creative principle of change described in the ancient Chinese wisdom found in the Book of Changes (Wilhelm, R. & Baynes, C.F. 1967).
Within the framework of transformance, this paper will begin with a concise overview of the theory of change in AEDP, followed by a clinical case presentation illustrating how the principles are applied in psychotherapeutic treatment. Centering on transformative phenomena, this paper aims to underscore AEDP’s process of moving beyond a self that is constrictive, and ultimately limiting, into a series of ever-expansive self-states, with ego-transcending capacities. In this context, I introduce “self-transcendence,” a phenomenon that sometimes emerges as a result of many rounds of “metaprocessing”, as is shown in the first session presented here. Self-transcendence refers to the relentless act, empowered by the transformance drive, of going beyond our usual narcissistic, ultimately limiting, egotistical false self. (Fosha 2005, Winnicott, 1990) Self-transformation is viewed as the culmination of contemplative practice in many spiritual traditions.
AEDP for the Common Man: A Review of Living Like You Mean It
Use the Wisdom and Power of Your Emotions to Get the Life You Really Want
By Gil Tunnell
Living Like You Mean It: Use the Wisdom and Power of Your Emotions to Get the Life You Really Want by Ronald J. Frederick, Ph.D., Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2009, 184pp.
The central theme in Ron Frederick’s, Living Like You Mean It, is that becoming “emotionally mindful” can change your life. This theme is stated even more forcefully in the preface: “No real change in how we feel or behave is going to take place until we deal with our feelings” (p. xvi). Over and over, Ron Frederick, a master therapist and now excellent writer, invites the reader to get curious about emotions. He makes the point that emotions are hard-wired into the physiology of human beings for a reason: they are powerful, prudent guides to navigating life. Yet most of us fear our emotions, and Frederick explains why in simple terms in his chapter, “How the Heck Did I Get This Way?” (Hint without being a plot spoiler: It has a lot to do about maintaining the bond with our parents on whom we were utterly dependent.)