Essential Skills Course Learning Objectives

Module 1: Healing from the Get-Go, Undoing Aloneness & the Clinical Roadmap for the AEDP Transformation Journey

Participants will be able to:

  • Describe how transformance, a central construct in AEDP psychotherapy, drives positive change.
  • Describe the AEDP 4-State Transformational Model and cite each of the 4 states. 
  • Describe the concept of ‘undoing aloneness’ and how it gets put into practice in the relational co-creation of safety.
  • State the vitality affects of transformative change which occurs during therapy.
  • Role-play “meta-therapeutic” processing from a client’s perspective.
  • Demonstrate moment-to-moment tracking.

Module 2: Attachment & Relational Work: Undoing Aloneness in Clinical Action

Participants will be able to:

  • Describe how attachment history informs emotional experience and sense of self. 
  • Apply the Self-Other-Emotion Triangle, as a framework for guiding relational interventions.
  • Target their relational interventions to correspond to where the client is on the Self-Other-Emotion Triangle.
  • Role-play how to embody the AEDP stance of explicit care and compassion for the client. 
  • Name and identify receptive affective experiences and the blocks, i.e., defenses against them.
  • Tailor interventions to attachment styles.

Module 3: State 1: Working with Defense and Anxiety

Participants will be able to:

  • Describe the AEDP Triangle of Experience.
  • Describe and name different types of defenses.
  • Describe Cost/benefit analysis of defenses and their consequences.
  • Apply interventions to soften and bypass defenses.
  • Describe AEDP Self-at-Best versions of the triangle.
  • Name multiple AEDP interventions to reduce anxiety.
  • Role-play intervention strategies for reducing defenses and anxiety.

Module 4:  State 2 Work: the Processing of Core Affective Experience

Participants will be able to:

  • Name the different kinds of core affective experiences and  different kind of experiential processing that can be used to work with them.
  • Utilize moment-to-moment tracking, a foundational AEDP skill, to assess the client’s experience State 2 therapeutic interventions, and their effectiveness.
  • Describe and process a core affective experience to completion, or to a corrective emotional experience.
  • Define the technique of “portrayal” and describe its clinical uses in facilitating the processing of affective experiences to completion.
  • Name 3 different types of portrayals used to process core affective experience.

Module 5: The Processing of Transformational Experience & The Integration of Transformation into Self State 3 & State 4 Work

Participants will be able to:

  • Apply the 4 state map of AEDP as a framework for processing the full range of affects
  • Track the process of affective experience across the 4 State map of AEDP.
  • Target their interventions to correspond to where the client is on the 4 State map of AEDP.
  • List 6 transformational affects in AEDP that lead to transformative change to maximize patient’s healing.
  • Utilize Metaprocessing, ie. the process of reflecting on positive therapeutic experiences, as a primary focus of facilitating and integrating emergent, adaptive therapeutic changes. 
  • Demonstrate how to help a client develop a new working model of secure attachment and relational capacity.
  • Demonstrate how a therapist’s mindful, authentic open-hearted embrace of a patient’s gratitude facilitates transformance. 
  • Describe how to facilitate state transformations.
  • Describe how transformance is the overarching motivational force driving positive change.
  • Utilize moment-to-moment tracking to assess the client’s experience of the effectiveness of AEDP therapeutic interventions.
  • Participants will role-play how to promote client’s safety, how to use tracking, how to regulate anxiety, how to metaprocess, and how to apply state specific interventions. 
  • Participants will role-play how to assess markers of transformation in the client, how to express affirmation, how to bypass defenses, and how to embody the AEDP stance of explicit care and compassion for the client.