Editor’s letter
Supervision Essentials for AEDP: Natasha C. N. Prenn and Diana Fosha
Making AEDP Supervision Relational and Experiential through Cultivating Receptive Affective Capacity:Karen Kranz, PhD., R. Psych.
How To Be an AEDP Supervisee: Molly Morgan, LCSW
Nurturing Professional Transformance through AEDP: Richard Harrison, PhD
Editor’s Letter
Gil Tunnell, PhD
It is with much pleasure and great excitement I introduce this issue of Transformance. It is devoted entirely to supervision in AEDP and celebrates the publication of the book, Supervision Essentials for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (2017) by Natasha Prenn and Diana Fosha. We are grateful to the publisher, the American Psychological Association, for granting us permission to print Chapter Two in its entirety. The book is a companion to Diana Fosha’s DVD, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) Supervision, available also from APA.
In addition to Chapter Two (Essential Skills), this issue contains articles on AEDP supervision by Karen Kranz, Richard Harrison, and Molly Morgan, all of whom are Approved AEDP Supervisors.
Karen Kranz provides a fascinating account of how a supervisee came to see, with the help of her supervisor, what was blocking her client was what was blocking herself. In the next session with the patient, the supervisee’s courage to be spontaneous and suddenly self-disclose her worry for the client leads to the client resonating and weeping. As many of us in learning AEDP probably said at some point, the supervisee said she wasn’t sure what to do next because she’d never done this before!
Yet she follows through, metaprocessing the wonderful breakthrough for the client (and for herself). The supervisee’s excitement about her own experiential learning, as well as the supervisor’s excitement about her learning, comes alive in these transcripts.
Richard Harrison sees supervision as a process of discovery via the Socratic method, which his transcripts illustrate beautifully. Like Kranz, he makes the point that although AEDP supervision follows the foundational concepts of AEDP therapy, supervision and therapy are distinctly different. AEDP supervision is about professional transformation; AEDP therapy is about personal transformation. Although a bit of personal transformation may occur in the supervisory process, it is not the primary focus. In that vein, Harrison explicates that affect in supervision is not treated the same way as affect in therapy, where it is deepened. Harrison argues for the balancing of the supervisee’s (a) learning the model didactically (a left-brain operation), and (b) experiencing the model (a right-brain operation). In that balancing act, he notes that supervision should be dyad-specific: Some supervisees need more help with right-brain experiencing, while others need left-brain understanding. Although AEDP accentuates the positive in our patients and in our supervisees, Harrison writes, “I want to be a truth talker who doesn’t pussyfoot around a problem by only addressing the positive.”
While all four authors – Prenn, Fosha, Kranz and Harrison – often make similar points, they use different language with different “slants.” The intended audience of Prenn, Fosha, Kranz and Harrison is primarily AEDP supervisors. In contrast, Molly Morgan speaks directly to new supervisees. Her article is shorter, written in the first person, and in a folksy style. Morgan gives hands-on, down-to-earth advice to new supervisees. I love Morgan’s sentence: “AEDP is fundamentally and theoretically grounded in being imperfectly human.” Here she makes her own original phrasing of a truth espoused by AEDP, which also echoes Harry Stack Sullivan’s famous quote a century ago, “All of us are much more human than otherwise.”
This issue has been a particularly fascinating one for me to edit. I think the rephrasing or recasting of similar concepts by all five authors is not only interesting, it is elucidatory: If you don’t grasp the concept one way, you will undoubtedly find another author putting it differently.
Finally, we will have a Transformance Talk on supervision the evening of September 12, 2017. I will moderate a discussion with Natasha and several panelists. The theme of the talk will be “Rigor Without Shame: How AEDP Maps, Schemas and Interventions Protect Supervisor and Supervisee from Shame.” “See you” there. Stay tuned for further details.
I trust you will enjoy this very special issue of Transformance: The AEDP Journal.
Supervision Essentials for AEDP
Natasha C. N. Prenn and Diana Fosha (from the APA’s Clinical Supervision Essentials series) Chapter Two: Essential Skills- Vol 7
THE ROLE OF THE RELATIONSHIP IS CENTRAL
Although it has been widely acknowledged that the relationship is crucial to supervision (Angus & Kagan, 2007; Budge& Wampold, 2015; Ellis & Ladany, 1997; Watkins, 2012; Watkins, Budge, & Callahan, 2015; Watkins & Milne, 2014), what is unique to AEDP therapy and supervision is how we work with relational experience. We make the experience of therelationship and relatedness explicit, and then we work with that experience both experientially (i.e., proceduralknowledge) and reflectively (i.e., declarative knowledge; Binder, 1993; Watkins, 2012). The use of the relationship is a particular skill set that we explicitly teach (Levenson, 1995). “What is your reaction to me right now?” “How are youexperiencing me now?” “What is your sense of me right now?” These are interventions that work well. One of AEDP’s major contributions to psychotherapy is unpacking the different ways in which we explicitly use the therapist’s— or the supervisor’s—self and experience
Making AEDP Supervision Relational and Experiential through Cultivating Receptive Affective Capacity: A Parallel Process Not So Parallel
Karen Kranz, PhD., R. Psych.
Abstract. Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP, Fosha, 2000) is a profoundly relational and a profoundly experiential model of therapy. Likewise, AEDP supervision needs to be relational and experiential. This paper describes a supervisor-supervisee relationship that emphasizes and makes explicit the intersubjective space created by the dyad and the in-the-moment and moment-by-moment experience of the supervisee in relationship with the supervisor, and the supervisee in relationship with her client. What was created by this supervisor-supervisee relationship was a depth of awareness of how what was occurring between the supervisee and her client paralleled what was occurring between the supervisor and supervisee.
How To Be an AEDP Supervisee: Get Ready To Be Transformed
Molly Morgan, LCSW: Certified AEDP Therapist and Supervisor
AEDP supervision is different from traditional psychotherapy supervision. AEDP is a model of radical change; learning it will change you radically. As I remember my early experiences as an AEDP supervisee, fresh from the inaugural 2010 Essential Skills course, I don’t think I fully understood what I was getting in to. Like many of you when I watched faculty videos, something inside of me dropped and opened. There was a click of recognition (Fosha, 2000, 2009): Yes! This feels exactly right! This is how healing happens and how people change.
But what exactly is it? What are they doing? It looked like so little and so much at the same time. How do I learn to do that? Triangles and charts to decipher and digest, and so many feelings swirling inside too. How do I balance left-brain learning of the four-state, three-state transformations map, the phenomenology and languaging, and also cultivate right-brain skills of slowing down, moment-to-moment tracking, deepening and building capacity to be with deep affective material? How do I learn to feel into the patient/therapist relationship, and then be brave enough to make it explicit? And when I ask my patient “How are we doing?” am I not erroneously and uncomfortably calling attention to me, the therapist? Is that intrusive? Will my patient hate me for asking, “What’s that like?” several dozen times a session? What do I do when my patient says she feels absolutely nothing in her body, and then asks, with disdain or annoyance, why exactly do I want to know?
Nurturing Professional Transformance through AEDP
Richard Harrison, PhD
Abstract. This paper identifies and demonstrates ways to incorporate foundational aspects and guiding principles of AEDP in supervision in order to nurture professional transformance in supervisees. These include (a) fostering and leveraging the supervisory relationship as an attachment relationship; (b) being a “Transformance Detective” in supervision; (c) using the triangle of experience in supervision to simultaneously track relational/affective experiences in the therapy and supervisory dyads; (d) working collaboratively to undo professional aloneness; (e) accessing Self-at-Best in order to go to the places of Self-at-Worst in a supervisee’s AEDP practice; (f) facilitating experiences of discovery through a balance of left-brain and right-brain learning modalities (e.g., interweaving experience and reflection in supervision); (g) embracing “good enough” development; and finally, (h) making supervision dyad specific by tailoring interventions to the attachment/relational strategies of each supervisee. The paper also addresses the crucial distinction between supervision and personal therapy. The former is about professional transformation, whereas the latter is about personal development and change. This overarching and guiding concept is particularly important in experiential approaches to supervision and informs how the AEDP supervisor works ethically with aspects of the supervisee’s personal life, history, and emergent affective experience, while keeping the focus on professional transformation. Transcribed excerpts from supervision with three AEDP therapists elucidate these tenets of AEDP incorporated and applied in supervision.