Reading Together

Journal: Transformance Journal Vol. 15(2):
Reading: Culturally Attuned AEDP for Attachment Integration: Four Internal Working Models of a Taiwanese Adopted Migrant Boy

Abstract: This article offers a new perspective on culturally attuned AEDP, highlighting how early emotional experiences and unmet attachment needs shape survival strategies and responsiveness to therapy—beyond race, ethnicity, or language. Through the life story of Michael (birth name Jian-Hua), an adult third culture kid (TCK) who navigated migration and adoption, this article illustrates th unique identity confusion, attachment wounding and challenges of integrating dissociated internal parts that arise when one grows up between multiple cultural worlds, and emphasizes the therapist’s role in providing a secure, culturally attuned, and emotionally present space in which suppressed emotions can be felt, named, and transformed. In some cases, a “small self or no-self” phenomenon emerges, in which earlier, vulnerable selves remain partially disconnected, requiring relational safety for reintegration. In sociocultural contexts where existence or voice must be earned, this “dance” of attunement demonstrates how attachment wounds rooted in Third Culture experience—intersecting with migration, adoption and cultural norms —may fragment identity, and how thoughtful AEDP practice can foster integration. Using the vignette of Michael’s four internal parts—Little Jian-Hua, Little Michael, Big Michael, and Big Jian-Hua—healing begins within this intra-relational space, supporting gradual integration and laying the foundation for eventual Self-with-Other connection.

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Journal: Transformance Journal Vol. 15(2):
Reading: Therapeutic Delight or Cultural Discomfort? Enhancing Receptive Affective Capacity Across Cultures

Abstract: A central AEDP practice makes the implicit explicit through direct appreciation and inter-subjective delight, expanding clients’ receptive affective capacity. Yet in Israeli cultural contexts, these expressions often evoke discomfort, defensiveness, or inauthenticity for both clients and therapists. This paper explores the cultural dissonance that arises when explicit verbal appreciation — a norm in American therapeutic training — enters Israeli therapy rooms. The core dilemma: distinguishing resistance rooted in personal trauma from resistance rooted in cultural defense. Drawing on sociolinguistic research and clinical vignettes, the article demonstrates how Israeli clients’ responses often reflect cultural norms rather than trauma-based affective restriction. Proposed diagnostic and interventional strategies serve a dual purpose — bridging the cultural gap while revealing the source of resistance through the speed and quality of the client’s response. These culturally attuned adaptations bypass cultural defenses, maintain AEDP fidelity, and enhance therapeutic safety and bonding.

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Journal: Transformance Journal Vol. 15(1):
Reading Transformation of Transgenerational Trauma: A Cross-Cultural Context

Abstract: This article centers on three main points illustrated through a case study of my work with a Chinese client impacted by transgenerational trauma The first concerns treatment considerations specific to transgenerational trauma and highlights how AEDP is particularly well-suited to addressing them. The second point illustrates how AEDP naturally assists work in cross-cultural contexts through its focus on phenomenology and its recognition of universal human strivings for safety, attachment and growth – each with their matching non-verbal, emotional and physiological markers. I will demonstrate how techniques of moment-to-moment tracking and metaprocessing, intuitively translated into deep and profound transformation for my Chinese client. The third point concerns core state. I propose that core state is a place for the therapist to remain active and harness its momentum to foster further transformation. The case of Wei illustrates that a session may begin in core state, shaping the work and accelerating readiness for another round of deep trauma processing. Secondly, the vitalized core self in core state – with its activated reflective self-function – is essential for the developmental task of differentiation, a process central to healing transgenerational trauma. 

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Transformance Journal Vol. 10: Here

Reading 1: The Being is the Doing: The Foundational Place of Therapeutic Presence in AEDP.

Abstract: The primary didactic objective that bridges all my teaching is to convey that in AEDP, the “doing” of therapy is, first and foremost, the therapist’s way of being as a therapist, and that this being transcends the concept of therapeutic stance. Everything we “do” in AEDP begins with the therapist’s ability to be present in body and mind, while being oriented to what is happening in the client, and staying open to being explicitly impacted by what is happening in the intersubjective space of the moment between therapist and client. This is what Diana Fosha has named “feeling and dealing while relating,” what is now known more broadly recognized in the work of Shari Geller as Therapeutic Presence (TP). In this article I propose my model of therapeutic presence, Active Empathy: Presence, Attunement, Intention, Resonance, and Reflection (PAIRR), built upon my synthesis of embodied presence phenomena, and emphasizing the active, relational thrust of the processes. Active Empathy is engaged when we surrender to the improvisational emergent truth of the moment while trusting that our left-brain knowing will come to our aid when necessary. A session transcript demonstrates the application of Active Empathy and highlights the act of being in embodied therapeutic presence.

Reading 2: Therapeutic Presence with Emerging Adults: An AEDP-Informed Approach Vol.10

Abstract. As the developmental period of emerging adulthood (ages 18 to 25) is now recognized more broadly, so are the mental health challenges facing this particular generation of emerging adults (EAs). Anxiety and depression rates for EAs have increased by more than 60% in a recent 10-year period, as college counseling centers struggle to keep up with their needs. This article explores how to use therapeutic presence within Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) to treat EAs. With the overall goal of helping EAs successfully emerge into adulthood, treatment with these clients has the potential to use their innate, developmental desire for growth, and their heightened transformance drive, to fuel the change process. As AEDP therapists meet EAs with delight and adult-to-adult respect within an explicitly differentiated dyad, EAs can safely explore and step into their wise, capable adult-selves-at-best.

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Reading: Transformance Journal Vol. 8: Download the PDF Here

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Abstract:
Attachment experiences between caregiver and child are powerful sculptors of personality, and become key determinants in how an individual relates to self, other and emotions over a lifetime.  When a child’s early attachment relationships are characterized by recurrent “errors of omission” ­– neglect, deprivation, misattunement, and lack of affection, recognition and/or affirmation — that child can develop areas of psychic darkness or invisibility, in which parts of the self that are not seen and mirrored become dissociated.

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Abstract. Positive affects in the context of positive dyadic interactions are fundamental to mental health and the development of the self, and are here considered from within the vantage point of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), an attachment and emotion model of psychotherapy. We explore three phenomenological/affective/behavioral sets of positive affects –mastery affects, healing affects, and core state–in the context of positive dyadic interactions and understand their adaptive values by referencing the realms of attachment, intersubjectivity and affective neuroscience. We detail an experiential process in which the regulation of painful emotion in the context of a positive dyadic therapeutic relationship naturally culminates in the emergence of positive affects and positive emotional states, which in turn are vehicles for accessing emotional resources and resilience associated with resilient functioning and emotional flourishing. Detailed transcripts from two videotaped sessions are microanalyzed so as to delineate the moment-to-moment phenomenology and dynamics of the AEDP therapeutic process and to document the spontaneous emergence of these positive affective phenomena in a therapeutic context designed to make the most of their therapeutic effectiveness.

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Transformance Journal Vol 1

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.

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Fosha, D. (2001). The dyadic regulation of affect. Journal of Clinical Psychology/In Session, 57 (2), 227-242.

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