ATTACHMENT SECURITY
Healthy relational handling of emotions associated with attachment experiences, based on flexible strategies, results in rich affective and relational experiences (i.e., “feeling and dealing while relating”). The securely attached child is able to experience the emotions evoked by both separation and reunion and is not overwhelmed by them; they enhance the strength of the attachment bond, which in turn leads to increased capacity to process intense emotions, both of which contribute to enhanced resilience.
Citation
Fosha, D. (2000). The Transforming Power of Affect: A model for accelerated change. New York: Basic Books.
CORE AFFECTIVE EXPERIENCE
Core affective experiences are emotional experiences that are wired in, somatic, fundamentally adaptive if processed to completion, and universal. Core affective phenomena, when accessed, activate deep transformational processes. The visceral experience of core affect involves a state transformation. In this altered state, deep therapeutic work can be accomplished as the patient gains access previously warded off memories and experiences. Experiencing deep emotion viscerally within the therapeutic relationship helps the patient master a vital psychological process with profound implications for well-being. Core affective experiences include but are not limited to: the categorical emotions of sadness, anger, fear, joy and disgust; coordinated relational experiences; ego states and their associated emotions; attachment strivings; somatic ‘drop-down’ states; and authentic self states.
– Categorical Emotions: Anger, sadness, fear, joy, disgust
– Coordinated relational experiences: Attachment, receptive affective experience, shared
pleasure/coordination, recognition, intersubjective delight
– Intra-relational work with ego states: Self to self resonance, compassion, wholeness
Citation
Fosha, D. (2000). The transforming power of affect: A model for accelerated
change. New York: Basic Books.
Fosha, D. (2021). How AEDP™ works. In D. Fosha (Ed.) Undoing aloneness and the
transformation of suffering into flourishing: AEDP 2.0. (Chapter 1, pp. 27-53) APA
Press.
Medley, B. (2021). Portrayals in work with emotion in AEDP: Processing core
affective experience and bringing it to completion. In D. Fosha (Ed.) Undoing
aloneness and the transformation of suffering into flourishing: AEDP 2.0. (Chapter 8,
pp. 217-240). APA Press.
CORE EMOTION
The categorical emotions, or core emotions, include sadness, fear, anger, joy, excitement and disgust.
Citation
Fosha, D. (2000). The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change. New York: Basic Books
Citation
Medley, B. (2021). Portrayals in work with emotion in AEDP: Processing core affective experience and bringing it to completion. In D. Fosha (Ed.) Undoing aloneness and the transformation of suffering into flourishing: AEDP 2.0. (Chapter 8, pp. 217-240). APA Press.
CORE STATE
Core state refers to an altered condition, one marked by openness and contact. With it, the individual is deeply in touch with essential aspects of their own self and relational experience, which themselves are considered varieties of core affective experience and become potentially mutative.
Citation
Fosha, D. (2005). Emotion, true self, true other, core state: toward a clinical theory of affective change process. Psychoanalytic Review, 92 (4), 513-552.
CORE STATE AND INTEGRATION OF TRANSFORMATION INTO SELF
Integrative interventions for solidifying and expanding transformation in State 4, i.e., core state, and helping patients develop a cohesive and coherent autobiographical narrative associated with security of attachment and resilience in the face of trauma
Citation: Lamagna, 2021; Yeung, 2021
MEMORY RECONSOLIDATION
Juxtaposing the good, new, here-and-now experience with the old, there-and-then experience.
METATHERAPEUTIC PROCESSES
The patient’s experience of therapeutic processes
Citation
Fosha (2000) The Transforming Power of Affect
METATHERAPEUTIC PROCESSING
When successful therapeutic experiences themselves become the focus of therapeutic inquiry and work, it becomes possible to deepen and broaden the treatment’s effectiveness. The systematic exploration of phenomena associated with therapeutic change—through exploring the patient’s experience of having a therapeutic experience—activates metatherapeutic processes associated with characteristic affects of transformation.
Citation
Fosha, D. (2000). Metatherapeutic processes and the affects of transformation: Affirmation and the healing affects. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 10, 71-97.
Fosha, D. & Thoma, N. (2020). Metatherapeutic processing supports the emergence of flourishing in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, 57 (3), 323-339. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000289
POSITIVE AFFECTIVE EXPERIENCE
Embodied work with rewarding feelings associated with resilience, authenticity and transformation (Notsu et al., 2022)
SAFETY
The feeling of safety, fostered by the bond with a trusted companion, counteracts fear (alarm/anxiety), promotes exploration and risk-taking, and fosters a full affective experience. If there is no feeling of safety, anxiety, the mother of all psychopathology, takes hold. Anxiety is a reaction to the nonavailability or nonresponsiveness of the caregiver and is rooted in the feeling of being alone in the face of psychic danger. Defenses arise to reestablish safety where the attachment relationship has failed to do so.
Citation
Fosha, D. (2000). The transforming power of affect: A model for accelerated change. New York: Basic Books.
STATE 1, 2, 3 & 4
State 1: Transformance
Glimmers of resilience, health, strength; manifestations of the drive to heal
State 1: Stress, Distress, and Symptoms
Defenses; dysregulated affects; inhibiting affects (e. g., anxiety,shame)
State 2: The Processing of Emotional Experience
Categorical emotions; attachment experiences; coordinated relational experiences;
receptive affective experiences; somatic “drop-down” states; intersubjective
experiences of pleasure; authentic self states; embodied ego states and their
associated emotions; core needs; attachment strivings.
State 3: “The metatherapeutic processing of transformational experience”
State 3 is devoted to the metatherapeutic processing of what has just occurred in the progression from states 1 to 2 as well as the transitional states. This metatherapeutic processing evokes its own set of transformational affects and is the focus of State 3.[65] Transformational affects of State 3 include mastery affects (pride, joy), healing affects (gratitude, feeling moved), the mourning of the self, for one’s suffering and for what was lost to oneself in the trauma, and tremulous affects associated with the somatic experience of a change process, especially if it feels sudden.
State 4: Core state: “integration, the truth sense
The AEDP healing sequence is completed with the metatherapeutic processing of the positive emotions that naturally arise following a completion of emotion processing. The result is often a state of clarity and well-being.[47] Core state is characterized by the client reporting a feeling of calm, vitality, a sense of wellbeing, compassion toward self and others, an expanded perspective, and wisdom.[66] Core state involves a coherent reorganized self-narrative. The ability to construct a “coherent and cohesive” self-narrative is shown to be highly correlated with secure attachment status in adulthood and with emotional resilience.[67] The re-organized self-narrative is evidence to the therapist that a corrective emotional experience has occurred.
Fosha, D. (2006). “Quantum Transformation in Trauma and Treatment: Traversing the crisis of healing change”. Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session. 62 (5): 569–583. doi:10.1002/jclp.20245. PMID 16523489.
Fosha, D. Metatherapeutic Processes and the Affects of Transformation: Affirmation and the Healing Affects. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration 10, 71–97 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009422511959
Yeung, D. (2021). “What Went Right? What Happens in the Brain During AEDP’s Metatherapeutic Processing” In D. Fosha (Ed.) Undoing aloneness and the transformation of suffering into flourishing: AEDP 2.0. (Chapter 13). APA Press.
Fosha, D. & Thoma, N. (2020). Metatherapeutic processing supports the emergence of flourishing in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, 57 (3), 323-339. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000289
Iwakabe, S., & Conceicao, N. (2016). Metatherapeutic processing as a change-based therapeutic immediacy task: Building an initial process model using a task-analytic research strategy. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 26 (3), 230-247.
Russell, E., & Fosha, D. (2008). Transformational affects and core state in AEDP: The emergence and consolidation of joy, hope, gratitude, and confidence in (the solid goodness of) the self. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 18(2), 167–190. https://doi.org/10.1037/1053-0479.18.2.167
THERAPEUTIC COURAGE
The concept of therapeutic courage is considered to be an essential therapist variable and is now at a stage of accumulating empirical support.
Citation
Goto, A., Iwakabe, S., & Heim, N. (2022). Therapeutic courage in novice therapists in Japan: A qualitative study. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 32(3), 243–256. https://doi.org/10.1037/int0000260
Fosha (2000). The emotional atmosphere of psychotherapy is characterized by the fact that the patient feels safe and the therapist is being brave because their risk-taking enhances the patient’s sense of safety. Geller (2014) defines therapeutic courage as the psychological processes that move a person in the direction of voluntary “deciding” to face and confront dangers, risks, and hardships in order to protect someone and to achieve personally valued goals.
TRANSFORMANCE
Transformance, a central construct in AEDP psychotherapy, is the overarching motivational force driving positive change. Transformance is the clinical parallel of positive neuroplasticity in neuroscience.
Citation
Fosha, D. (2021). “We are organized to be better than fine:” Building the transformational theory of AEDP. In D. Fosha (Ed.) Undoing aloneness and the transformation of suffering into flourishing: AEDP 2.0. (Chapter 14, pp. 377-400). APA Press.
TRANSFORMATIONAL AFFECTS
The focus on the experience of healing transformation evokes one or more of the
six types of phenomenologically distinct transformance affects (see Figure 1) identified
to date:
- the post breakthrough affects, i.e., feeling relief, as well as feeling lighter,
clearer, stronger, after an intense emotional experience processed to completion; - the mastery affects, i.e., pride and joy, that come to the fore when fear and shame
respectively are transformed; - emotional pain, the transformational affect associated with the process of mourning-the-self;
- the healing affects, i.e., gratitude and tenderness toward the other, and feeling moved within oneself in response to affirming recognition of the self and its transformation, as well as of the role of the other in the process;
- the tremulous affects, i.e., fear/excitement, startle/surprise, curiosity/interest, and a feeling of positive vulnerability, associated with traversing the crisis of healing change ; and finally,
- the healing vortex, i.e., oscillating and vibrating sensations, associated with how the
body proper processes quantum transformation (Fosha, 2006).
Citation: Transformance, Recognition of Self by Self, and Effective Action
Diana Fosha, Ph.D.
In K. J. Schneider (Ed.) Existential-Integrative Psychotherapy: Guideposts
to the Core of Practice, pp. 290-320. New York: Routledge, 2008.
TRIANGLE OF EXPERIENCE
We have the Triangle of Experience. Derived from a long history of short-term psychodynamic therapy models, it graphically depicts what happens when anxiety-provoking core affective phenomena get activated in the patient. As such, it lays bare the coding of one’s internal working models by illuminating learned patterns of responding that were developed early in life in an environment that was inimical to genuine relating and to the experiencing and/or
expression of genuine emotion, and that continue to govern the patient’s nervous
system and subsequent behavior.
The Triangle of Experience schematically represents how emotional experience
comes to be structured (see Figure 2, Appendix). At the bottom of the Triangle of
Experience, we have two categories of core affective experience: (i) On the right half,
we find the intrinsically adaptive core affective experiences, which are inherently.
transforming: i.e., they have adaptive resources wired within them, waiting for the
release in auspicious circumstances. (ii) At the left half of the bottom of the Triangle
of Experience, we find the maladaptive affective experiences, which are not
transforming: to the contrary, they need transforming, for otherwise, they will have
deleterious consequences for the individual. At the bottom of the triangle are both
types of core affective experiences. When the emotion is overwhelming, anxiety and
other inhibitory affects increase, which then trigger defenses. Anxiety and other
inhibitory affects and the defenses are represented at the top of the triangle.
In order “to facilitate affective experience, the therapist must be quick to recognize
defenses, anxiety and repeating patterns. She must also be quick to recognize
genuine emotions.” (Fosha, 2000, p. 103). That’s precisely what the Triangle of
Experience helps us to do. By identifying and graphically separating out the main
aspects of one’s emotional experience (defenses, inhibitory affects, and core
affective phenomena) and then illustrating how they relate to one another (how the
emergence of core affect gives rise to inhibitory affects that now prompt defensive
responding), the Triangle of Experience enables the therapist to understand what is
happening for the patient in any given moment.
Once the in-session locale on the Triangle of Experience is determined, the therapist
can then assess how best to respond. For instance, if we are in the land of relational
defenses (the “D” corner of the triangle), we can ask ourselves what needs to happen
to render them unnecessary so the patient can safely open up to the new experience
with the therapist and the associated affective phenomena? If we’re in the realm of
red-signal, inhibitory affects (the “A” corner), what do we need to do to help regulate
and calm them so that receptive affective capacity can be increased and emotional
experiencing can be allowed to come to the fore? And, if we are in the presence of
adaptive attachment strivings and associated core affective experiences (the “E”
corner), what do we need to do to foster, regulate, and process them through to
completion?
Citations:
Fosha, D. (2021). How AEDP™ works. In D. Fosha (Ed.) Undoing aloneness and the
transformation of suffering into flourishing: AEDP 2.0. (Chapter 1, pp. 27-53) APA
Press.
Pando-Mars, K. (2021). Using AEDP’s representational schemas to orient the
therapist’s attunement and engagement. In D. Fosha (Ed.) Undoing aloneness and
the transformation of suffering into flourishing: AEDP 2.0. (Chapter 6, pp. 159-186).
APA Press.
Frederick, R. (2021). Neuroplasticity in action: Rewiring internal working models of
attachment. In D. Fosha (Ed.) Undoing aloneness and the transformation of suffering
into flourishing: AEDP 2.0. (Chapter 7, pp. 189-216). APA Press.