AEDP® Essential Skills Overview

Essential Skills deepens your AEDP journey, offering experiential learning for therapists ready to integrate AEDP more fully into their practice. Essential Skills (ES1) is a deeply responsive and immersive training experience that brings AEDP to life in a dynamic, real-time way. Unlike passive learning, ES1 is designed to be interactive and experiential, allowing you to engage directly with AEDP concepts through live demonstrations, video analysis, and hands-on practice.

What makes ES1 truly unique is its adaptability to the needs of the group. Faculty members respond in the moment to questions, clinical challenges, and emerging themes, ensuring that the learning experience is not just structured but also alive, relevant, and tailored to participants. The course is not just about absorbing information—it’s about actively experiencing and applying AEDP’s healing principles in a supportive, real-world setting.

By working with faculty and peers in a highly engaged environment, you’ll refine your skills in a way that feels real, personal, and immediately applicable to your work with clients.

What to Expect

The AEDP Essential Skills course provides practical tools for applying AEDP, alongside an in-depth exploration of its core theory. Through a blend of left and right-brained teaching, participants gain a clear understanding of clinical interventions and develop a felt sense of how to “do” AEDP. The course focuses on building concrete skills that deepen therapists’ knowledge and enhance their ability to facilitate client healing and transformation.

Hallmarks of Training

Faculty, experiential assistants (in full courses) and clinical video. These are the hallmarks of AEDP training. In AEDP, we pride ourselves in how thoroughly and deeply we seek to both undo professional aloneness and engage in rigorous clinical teaching. Our faculty are excellent as academics, clinicians and teachers.

Routine for each Module

Essential Skills consists of 5 modules, each taught over two days (four half-day sessions). During the first and third days AEDP skills are introduced with their theoretical foundations and then with illustrations by way of clinical videotapes. The second and fourth days are spent almost entirely in small group experiential work.

Prerequisites

Must have completed Immersion. This course is a prerequisite for the Advanced Skills training. While it counts toward certification, you don’t need to be pursuing certification to attend.