AEDP psychotherapy is an empirically supported model that gives patients corrective emotional and relational experiences that mobilize changes in the brain – American Psychological Association (APA)
Developed by Dr. Diana Fosha, the author of the The Transforming Power of Affect and editor of Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0, AEDP is an ever-emergent model, ever-growing through the ongoing contributions of the AEDP faculty and the members of the AEDP community.
Crisis and suffering provide opportunities to awaken extraordinary capacities that otherwise might lie dormant, unknown and untapped. AEDP psychotherapy is about experientially making the most of these opportunities for both healing and transformation. Key to its therapeutic action is the undoing of aloneness and thus, the co-creation of a therapeutic relationship experienced as both safe haven and secure base. Once that’s established, we work with emotional experience, working experientially toward healing trauma and suffering, and toward expanding emergent positive transformational experiences.
Empirical Support
AEDP has empirical support for its effectiveness for a variety of psychological issues and problems including depression, general psychological distress, interpersonal problems, negative thoughts, and emotion dysregulation. It enhances positive psychological functioning such as self-esteem, self-compassion, and wellbeing. Please go here for a list of AEDP research publications.
Our Mission
The AEDP Institute is devoted to providing a forum for an emergent community of clinicians. We seek to co-create environments — clinical, intellectual, collegial — of shared values. We seek ours to be a community of co-created safety and security from which the boundless exploration that is our aim can take place.
There is no better way to capture the ethos of AEDP than to say this: we try to help our patients—and ourselves—become stronger at the broken places. By working with trauma, loss, and the painful consequences of the limitations of human relatedness, we discover places that have always been strong, places that were never broken.
Through undoing of aloneness, and through the in-depth processing of difficult emotional and relational experiences, as well as new transformational experiences, the AEDP clinician fosters the emergence of new and healing experiences for the client, and with them resources, resilience and a renewed zest for life.