Dear AEDP Community-
I am writing with great enthusiasm to announce that Yuka Mukai is now a certified AEDP therapist!
I have had the pleasure of being Yuka’s certification supervisor and witnessing Yuka’s beautiful AEDP work. Yuka is clinically astute, intellectually curious, emotionally engaged and dedicated to providing the best care possible to her clients. Her AEDP clinical work is exemplary: she embodies the AEDP stance, utilizes moment-to-moment tracking, invites her clients to slow down and drop down, dyadically regulates, skillfully metaprocesses, and expands core state experiences.
Most of our work together focused on connecting her clinical work to a felt understanding of the AEDP model and interventions. It was thrilling to accompany Yuka as she grounded her right brain skills and experience with her left brain intellect and knowledge. As a result, her annotated transcripts were precise, insightful and thorough.At the Institute level, Yuka has also contributed as an experiential assitant in AEDP Immersions and Essential Skills courses. Most recently, Yuka was also a part of the Japan AEDP Immersion team and helped interpret the english language presentations. I look forward to seeing how her role and contribution to AEDP will continue to grow!
I am excited to share what others have said about Yuka and her work, starting with her AEDP Supervisor Kaori Straum:
“From the very beginning of our AEDP journey together, I have been deeply moved by Yuka’s honesty, passion, and the sincerity she brings to her work. This has been evident not only in her clinical work with clients, but also in her engagement in supervision and her generous support of fellow therapists as an experiential assistant. She approaches her practice with integrity and curiosity, thoughtfully integrating insights from supervision into each subsequent session. It has been truly remarkable to witness her growth.
Her ability to attune to a client’s deepest pain, to cultivate a safe relational space, and to gently facilitate embodied and relational experiences reflects her strong clinical skill. Beyond technique, her therapeutic presence has deepened over time, bringing a quiet strength and radiance to her work.
Through her dedicated role as an experiential assistant across both the U.S. and Japan, she has also made significant contributions to the broader AEDP community, especially in supporting our Japanese community. I am delighted that her tireless efforts and steadfast commitment have culminated in her recognition as a certified AEDP therapist.”
The AEDP Certfication reviewers shared the following:
Reviewer #1:“It was pleasure to review Yuka’s materials and see her gorgeous clinical work. She demonstrates all the essentials of a skillful AEDP therapist. Yuka embodies a kind, warm, confident transformance detective who carefully tracks the moment-to-moment process in each session and communicates what she’s tracking with grace, openness and curiosity. Her depth of engagement combined with technical precision, gentle self-assuredness and phenomenological specificity delivers a powerful healing opportunity to each of her clients.
Yuka seems to effortlessly embody a security engendering attachment figure—delighting in her clients, making space for their own self-discovery, speaking when helpful but readily remaining on the sidelines when not, and unafraid to to propel the process to a deeper level of healing potential with challenging and necessary requests for deepening emotion metaprocessing transformations. Among many strengths, Yuka’s somatic attunement and attention as well as her tenacity when metaprocessing is exceptional. She takes the time to deepen and explore each emerging transformational experience—and there are many! ”
Reviewer #2:“As I watched her clients and listened to Yuka’s masterful abilities to lead, then follow, then accompany and elongate her clients’ experiences in beautifully unfolding state-work, I witnessed healing in quantum yet moment-by-moment magnitude. I felt a freedom throughout my own being as the session took all three of us through cathartic state-two process, spiraling into very profound and deeper state-work and Core States. Yuka’s microanalysis allowed their Japanese language to flow from the dyad, and although I’ve never studied Japanese, I felt included in their dialogue because the work felt so crisp, with palpable healing taking hold in front of my eyes. The early client’s recognition, of her aloneness in a career that sounds stressful and difficult, was undone seamlessly. The mid-case recognitions and healing pinnacles demonstrate huge transformation. Yuka’s depth of knowledge led this person into a beautiful recognition, both through metaphorical intra-relational imaging and inter-relational truths: Emotion is not only safe, but also incredibly freeing and joyful after a life filled with fear and experience of being blocked inside. Meta-processing was offered to each of them in small ways with each of Yuka’s interventions, then in much bigger ways as gifts, and both clients’ states deepened throughout their very clean and discernible AEDP processes.”
Finally, Yuka had this to share about her own experience and process:
“My encounter with AEDP began at a one-day workshop in Tokyo at the end of 2018, led by Yuko Hanakawa.
Without her dedication to bringing AEDP to Japan, I might never have found this path. During that workshop,
I witnessed a live demonstration session in which a client, held in the therapistʼs compassionate presence,
allowed profound vulnerability to emerge before nearly a hundred people. I remember feeling something open
inside me. Quietly, I thought, “This is what I have been searching for.”
Soon after, I registered for Immersion and traveled to New York in the summer of 2019, returning again that fall
for ES1. Then the pandemic began, and the latter half of ES1 moved online. I remember wondering, Can
experiential learning truly happen through a screen? AEDP is so rooted in embodied presence and subtle
relational attunement that I was unsure whether something so experiential could survive physical distance.
What unfolded surprised me. Even across oceans and time zones, I felt deeply moved and connected. I lost count
of how many nights I stayed awake until dawn in Japan to attend online courses. It was physically demanding,
yet those long nights became meaningful. Through engaging with therapists from around the world in training
courses, I came to realize that the doubts and struggles I carried as a therapist were not uniquely mine̶they
were shared and universal. That realization became a lived experience of undoing aloneness.
Integrating AEDP into my clinical work required courage. Allowing my authentic emotional presence into the
room initially felt uncertain. Gradually, I experienced how genuine openness creates safety. Concepts I once
understood intellectually became embodied realities as I witnessed subtle shifts unfold. I learned to slow down,
notice glimmers of transformance, and trust the balance between doing and being.
Serving as an assistant in trainings deepened my sense of belonging. Over time, AEDP became not only a
therapeutic model but my clinical home. I am deeply grateful to my supervisors, Ben Medley and Kaori Stram,
who believed in my capacity from beginning to end. Their steady trust allowed me to feel truly seen. Being
believed in strengthened something within me that continues to guide my work. I am equally grateful to my
AEDP colleagues in Japan and around the world, whose shared learning and heartfelt friendship have sustained
and encouraged me, especially during moments when the journey felt long or uncertain.
Recently, the first Japanese-language Immersion was held in Japan̶a meaningful step in the growth of our
community. In a culture that deeply values harmony (“wa”), often at the expense of authentic expression, AEDP
offers a vision of harmony grounded in emotional truth and connection. As I move forward, I hope to contribute
to the continued cultivation of a compassionate, experiential AEDP community in Japan.”
Please join me in celebrating Yuka’s acheivement. You can contact her at ymukai@co-progress.jp
Congratulations, Yuka!!!
With excitement,Ben–
Ben Medley LCSW-R