This Talk: In this upcoming Transformance Talk, Natasha Prenn will discuss her transcript based article: How to Set Transformance Into Action: The AEDP Protocol. This session, transcript and article were in the inaugural issue of Transformance: The AEDP Journal and were originally one of Natasha’s certification tapes. 

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. This first session with a new patient illustrates many of the fundamental principles and hallmarks of AEDP. These include the therapist’s working to establish safety from the very beginning, focusing on the physical experience of emotion that ‘comes up’ inside the patient, and educating the patient to notice and stay with her affective experience. Two affectively laden portrayals are central to this session; they mobilize waves of healing and energy release associated with the healing affects (Fosha 2000, 2004; Russell and Fosha, 2008). These are then followed by the mastery affects: the pride of “I did it!” and with the bubbling up of healing affects comes the emotional pain of a real mourning of the self (Fosha, 2000, 2005, 2007) with the haunting realization that she cannot go back in time and redo what has been done: “I can never be before that again.” The healing affects, the mastery affects and the emotional pain associated with mourning the self are all transformational affects that arise during the Metatherapeutic processing of transformational experience. As I recognize this patient, she recognizes her self (Fosha, 2009); in these first moments of meeting I am a True Other to her True Self (Fosha, 2005). 

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.