Dear AEDP community,
I am delighted to announce that Sara Lesser is now certified as an AEDP therapist.
I have had the joy of knowing Sara as part of the AEDP SF Bay Area community since 2012. Her balance of both left and right brain immediately stood out to me. As her supervisor in more recent years, her mastery of AEDP and her ability to find what was needed most in the moment with each client stood out. She has clearly spent years allowing AEDP to flow through her, to the point it feels seamless in her work. In particular, her ability to join with her clients and delight in them, with deep authenticity, stands out to me as a true strength of hers. She is able to be real with people in a way that disarms their defenses and creates strong therapeutic alliances. But what I love most are the moments I get to witness Sara and her clients laughing, delighting and expanding in States 3 and 4.
Sara loves diving into the challenge of moment by moment tracking and matching theory to practice. We delighted in spending whole sessions trying to really understand what exactly was happening in certain moments of her tape, and her transcripts showed her dedication to this process.
Many of you may already know Sara as an assistant. She has been assisting in AEDP courses for over 10 years. For those of you who may not know her, here is what Sara writes of her journey:
From the beginning of learning to be a therapist, I regularly asked “what creates sustained change and healing in clients?” The quest for the answer kept me searching, until I found AEDP.
I first attended immersion in 2012 In Vancouver. I sat in the room crying, having a transformational experience of feeling seen and a sense of rightness. I was blown away by having Diana describe, demonstrate and then break down AEDP into actionable interventions, allowing me to imagine and giving me permission to expand my natural ways of working. Finding out that there was a model I could learn, that privileged transformance over pathology and believed in the self- righting capacity inside of all of us, spoke to my own beliefs about humanity. As a person who is deeply committed to social justice, I love that this model believes in the client’s agency and capacity for healing, regardless of their trauma or circumstances.
I am very grateful to the many years of amazing experiences I have had learning AEDP. Thank you to all the incredible colleagues, faculty and supervisors for your accompaniment, brilliance, laughter, and profound care. I could not have gotten here without you!
AEDP has changed my life for the better, both personally and professionally. I love this model for the way it allows me to be my best self and it invites the type of sustained change in clients, that I always knew I wanted to be able to help people experience, but I didn’t know how before I learned AEDP.
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Sara’s first reviewer writes of her work:
It is obvious from both of the recorded sessions that Sara has been steeped in AEDP for many years. Both her grasp of theory, demonstrated in the (beautifully executed) transcripts, and the recorded sessions, show that those years have been well spent, deepening and honing her AEDP skills and stance.
I felt so glad for both Sara’s clients; the “new” one and the long term one, to have the benefit of a relationship with a therapist so wholly present and steady.
Her second reviewer adds:
Even as the reviewer, I felt myself entering into Sara Lesser’s dyadic joy in her work, and my own profound experiences of gratitude and warmth. Sara’s subtlety, while yielding a clear and explicit relational “knowing”, is what felt most “right” and deeply moving for me in her AEDP work. The dyadic resonance she creates for both her early and long-term clients is beautiful to witness. Its tough to find words to describe the power of her gentle, intelligent, thoroughly authentic grace in leading and following— over and over again— using many of our tried and true Affective Change Mechanisms, to bring both clients into remarkable healing spirals of transformation from long-held traumatic pain.
If you would like to join me in congratulating Sara her email is saralesser@sbcglobal.net.
Brava Sara!
With much warmth and great excitement for both you and our community,
Sara’s Directory Listing- Here
Jenn
Jennifer Edlin, MFT
Senior Faculty, AEDP Institute
510-239-3932
www.JenniferEdlin.com