Core Training in Swedish, Stockholm, Sweden 2020 – 2021

Starting in February 2020, certified AEDP-supervisors Anna Christina Sundgren and Annika Medbo will offer the first AEDP Core training in Swedish, in Stockholm, Sweden. This Core training will be designed particularly for Swedish therapists. There will be five meeting units on Fridays and Saturdays, from February 2020 until January 2021.

Core training offers participants who are in AEDP-training to deepen their understanding of the theory, to cultivate their practice of the model, and an opportunity to watch and experience experientially based therapeutic work together with other devoted AEDP-therapists.

The size of this group is limited to 10 participants in order to create a safe and sound supportive group for experiential and reflective learning. Participants will bring their own videos, which can be felt as a vulnerable disclosure. At the same time it´s a precious source for everyone’s learning. The group safety should allow risk-taking for all. We see the group as a resource and a basis for learning and integrating AEDP.

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Each two day training will include:

  1. Two hours of didactic teaching, including the teachers showing their own clinical videos to demonstrate, bring life to and integrate theory, each occasion on a special theme.
  2. Clinical supervision segments where each group member will present their own videotaped sessions and receive individual supervision from the teachers in a group setting. This has the purpose of maximizing learning by offering all group members an experience of learning, both individually from the teachers, and from each other in a supporting and accepting atmosphere, where all members contribute.
  3. Development and training of the therapist’s professional presence. Therapeutic presence and dyadic mindfulness means having the aim to fully mirror and embody your engagement with the client. We will also create a space for the participants to reflect how to adapt and integrate AEDP in a Swedish cultural context, and how to cultivate the participants own authentic style both verbally and para-verbally.

Learning Goals

  • Deepening and integrating participants´ understanding of AEDP theory, grasp the AEDP-language and terminology. Understand and embody the ethos of AEDP, and learn from watching each participant´s individual clinical practice.
  • Developing and training the capacity to follow, lead and deepen experientially. Learning moment-to-moment tracking, and how to do it in a regulating, holding manner. Trauma and resilience exist side by side and we train to notice every marker, amplify every glimmer of “transformance”(Fosha, 2009), the biologically, innate, motivating striving towards healing in every one of us.
  • To discern those affects that transform an experience, from affects that need to be transformed
  • To work with defenses and understand the phenomenology of pathogenic affect.
  • Developing and training one´s own therapeutic presence and para-verbal capacity; how to use our own somatic tracking in our work with clients and how our bodies can be both an important source of information and a resource for healing in the therapeutic process.
  • Stretching our own receptive affective capacity in the service of both ourselves and our clients.

Training Structure and Dates

Five units, Fridays and Saturdays 9-18 from February, 2020 to February 2021. (16 h per unit).

2020: Feb 14-15, May 8-9, Sept 11-12, Nov 20-21

2021: Jan 22-23.

Both teachers will be present. Every day starts with two hours of didactics and theory integrated with one teacher showing her own video. Then each member will have at least one hour of individual supervision in group setting.

Working in pairs will allow us teachers to be more mindful of everyone´s experience, being able to keep all group members in mind and heart through the unit. One of us will take notes and share a write-up with each member of the group after each unit, in order to stay connected with us and with their learning process, both with what is achieved and what are their growing edges*. 

(*Thanks to Jeanne Newhouse.)

Contact and Application

Anna Christina Sundgren: animare@animare.nu, or Annika Medbo: annika@medbo.se 

Last date for application is December 15th, 2019

About the Teachers

We met when we both started our Psychotherapy Diploma training at the Stockholm Academy for Psychotherapy Training (SAPU) in 2002. We were in the same supervision group during 3 years of training, and then continued having peer supervision for many years thereafter. When licensed, we started supervising an Infant Observation project for therapists in training at SAPU. We formed a team, and inspired by Attachment Studies, AEDP and Diana´s book and videos, we developed the method further: “How does the encounter with a capable and vulnerable preverbal child affect the therapist´s own experience, capacity to be present, and the connection to his/her inner child and professional self?” This was our framing of the question that we explored with our students, while gathering in small groups after their individual infant observations. Both of us felt convinced of how important it is for the therapeutic relationship, to have an  experience of the nonverbal level in each encounter and to make it explicit and integrated! 

We presented our method at SEPI-conferences in Chicago and Barcelona. Then in 2013 we went to New York to join AEDP Immersion Course. This was the real start of our individual AEDP– journeys. We are now very much looking forward to this opportunity to work together, teach and learn, based on both our different and similar experiences of AEDP!

 

Annika Medbo – Certified AEDP Supervisor

I am a certified AEDP supervisor, a licensed psychotherapist and supervisor and I have a private practice in Stockholm. 

In terms of my training, I’m trained in body-oriented Psychotherapy and have worked the past 15 years in different psychiatric settings. 

My early work with patients with severe psychosomatic problems sparked my keen interest in nonverbal communication. What captured my interest were the “calls” for connection and the glimmers of core self that could be seen or sensed beyond symptoms, diagnosis and defenses. 

In AEDP I found words for what I implicitly had been searching for and a new professional and personal journey began. My AEDP journey has on many levels formed a new foundation for my work. In addition to detecting transformance strivings, the most important aspects of AEDP that deeply influence my work are; the respectful viewing of defenses as survival strategies and the sensitivity for and protecting of human vulnerability.

In this AEDP core training my intention is to give you a safe enough space to find your words in theory and practice, to find your own unique Self and your own way of doing AEDP, and to find your Swedish version of the AEDP language. As SueAnne Piliero says, the AEDP therapist IS the intervention. I want to provide a space that, in balance with the deepening of your understanding of the theory, invites you to lean into your right brain one more step, to be in the not knowing for a while, long enough to deepen the experience of the nonverbal communication that sometimes can be the most important tool to help a patient taking the next step towards healing and growth.

I welcome you warmly on this journey….and to shaping your AEDP clinical self in your own unique way.

I feel it’s my mission to share this aspect of AEDP with AEDPers.

 

Anna Christina Sundgren – Certified AEDP-Supervisor

I am a Licesnsed Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Certified AEDP Supervisor. I have worked as a therapist in private practice for 20 years. I do AEDP-therapy, I supervise and I teach. My early work with young drug addicts and violent men convinced me that there is a resilient, intact true Self in all of us, waiting for the right circumstances to be seen, known and transformed.

Like so many others I found a home in AEDP. My Jungian background was a perfect match with AEDP, both focusing on resources, healing and transformation before psychopathology. My body oriented meditation and mindfulness retreats have got a new flavour from AEDP, and those skills are also great resources in my AEDP-work. Today I feel I can be more active, real, embodied, and authentic in my therapeutic relationships, I want to be a “True Other”, promoting transformance, change and growth. In my clinical practice today, I´m also challenged to deepen my knowledge and skills how to transform pathogenic affects.

I teach and present AEDP at workshops in Sweden and abroad, I supervise individuals and groups, and I have assisted at Immersion courses, ES1 and ES2 courses. I participate in an AEDP research project. I was supervised by Kari Gleiser, Yuko Hanakawa, and Diana Fosha.

I have many years of experience of teaching and working with groups, both as a process oriented teacher, and as a supervisor for therapists, social workers and health professionals.

As a supervisor I give importance to the same phenomena as in therapies. I honor my supervisees´ needs to feel seen, their strivings to grow and explore; a secure base is essential for cultivating curiosity and stretching one´s affective capacity. Right brain language needs our attention and I want to facilitate my supervisees’ focusing on all resources we can use in service of ourselves and our patients; somatic/visceral, sensational and emotional. Using attachment based ”AEDP-language” and showing how to set “neuroplasticity in action” feels so natural in promoting positive change and transformation.

I wish you a warm welcome to our Core Training and I will do my best to promote growth and flourishing of every participant’s professional Self!