September 2026, Vol. 16 (1)
Contents:
Letters from the Editors
“The Much That Asks for More”
Carrie Ruggieri, LMHC, Editor-in-Chief
“Entrancing and Kaleidoscopic”
Danny Yeung, MD, Senior Editor
“An Expanding Atlas”
Mary Androff, MD, Guest Editor
Articles
Transformative Dao of Waking Dreams: Dyadic Heartfelt Imagination, Active Inference, and the Flow Towards the Neuro-Archetypal Self
Danny Yeung
Emergent Imagery: Unconscious Processes, Play & the Co-Construction of Healing
Mary Androff & Eileen Russell
“Dry Psychedelics™”: Going Inward Without Going Alone: Reproducing the Depth of Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Through AEDP Without a Substance
Jason Trowbridge
Just Imagination: The Suspension of Disbelief and Other Portrayal Principles, Processes and Techniques
Matt Fried
Therapeutic Reimagining: Helping Clients to Access Their Transformational Creative Unconscious
Anthony Prendergast
From Story to Symbol: Established Imagery in Constrained Therapeutic Settings – Part 2
Kev Kokoska
Uncovering An Inner Moral Compass: The Confucian Four Beginnings (四端) in AEDP Healing
Abraham H. S. Lim
Letters from the Editors
“The Much That Asks for More”
By Carrie Ruggieri, LMHC, Editor-in-Chief
Imagine the therapist, notebook on lap, pen in hand, leaning in with an attentive, soft gaze, receiving with the “third ear” the client’s words, emotions, and somatic signals; noting their moments of alignment and misalignment; tracking patterns and threads of the narrative; attending to the experience of sitting together; noting emotions that arise within herself and what they may be signaling; feeling through empathic engagement; differentiating her own experience and reactions from the client’s experience.
On reflection, I marvel—what we do is amazing. I think of the innumerable threads of learning, experience, and cultivation. Threads sometimes entangled, sometimes running smoothly alongside one another, held within the structure of a weaver’s loom. These are the threads, but the handling of the threads is another matter. It requires tenderness and discernment, the ability to hold the entire process without knowing exactly what pattern will emerge, while trusting in the expertly crafted loom, the quality of the threads, and the capable hands.
After reading these imaginative, brilliant, and inspired articles by our author-therapists, I discovered that even this is not all. There is more.
Entrancing and Kaleidoscopic
By Danny Yeung, MD, Senior Editor
Imagine with me a kaleidoscope. As we gaze through the eyepiece into the light, we are met with a mesmerizing, ever-shifting configuration of spectacular forms and colours. This issue of Transformance, zooming in on the different aspects of imagination, features precisely that kaleidoscopic view as each page turns. Across diverse theoretical and clinical lenses, what unites the compelling visions in these papers is the healing power innate within the lived imaginal space.
Diving deeply into the wisdom portrayed throughout this collection evokes my interoceptive and felt sensible hunger for more: a yearning to explore further into the depths of this imaginal space. The inner chamber of this healing kaleidoscope points directly to what Henry Corbin termed the mundus imaginalis—an ontologically real, imaginal realm where AEDP clinical work activates the innate transformative potency residing within our clients’ and our own generative unconscious.
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An Expanding Atlas
By Mary Androff, MD, Guest Editor
Serving as guest editor for this Transformance Journal issue on the imagination has been an enriching experience of discovery. Carrie Ruggieri and Danny Yeung bring tremendous heart and rigor to their roles as editors, and their insightful and precise reflections on every article have inspired me. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to be in dialogue with this issue’s other authors (Abraham Lim, Anthony Pendergrast, Danny Yeung, Jason Trowbridge, Kev Kokoska and Matt Fried) and to more deeply engage with their fascinating work.
For many of our patients, the imaginal channel offers a portal to (as yet) unformulated experience. If we notice these entry points and collaboratively explore what emerges, the therapeutic dyad may traverse otherwise hidden terrains of experience. AEDP has always incorporated work with imagery, particularly through portrayals. This issue provides an expanded atlas for exploring the imagination, offering theoretical perspectives (from neurobiology, psychology, philosophy and spirituality) along with clinical wisdom that reveal new therapeutic landscapes. May you be enriched by your journey through this issue!
Articles
Transformative Dao of Waking Dreams: Dyadic Heartfelt Imagination, Active Inference, and the Flow Towards the Neuro-Archetypal Self
By Danny Yeung
Abstract
This article explores the clinical practice of Dyadic Heartfelt Imagination (DHFI) as a transformative way (Dao) for facilitating a neurophysiological, luminous waking dream state. Rooted in AEDP and informed by the Free Energy Principle, DHFI uses deep interoceptive awareness within a securely attached therapeutic container to systematically downregulate Default Mode Network rumination. By slowing nasal breathing and directing interoceptive attention to the heart and lower abdominal core, DHFI relaxes rigid, top-down prior beliefs. This hypothesized neurocomputational shift—from the default mode network (DMN)-associated rumination and rigid top-down beliefs toward more relaxed beliefs—mirrors the psychedelic REBUS model, allowing bottom-up viscerosensory and relational signals to update maladaptive generative models. Under the guidance of archetypes acting as neural hyper-priors, the patient’s system self-organizes. Ultimately, the article conceptualizes the Self as a teleological, strange attractor that effortlessly pulls the psyche toward a flow-like, homeodynamic, holistic integration.
About the Author
Danny Yeung, MD, CCFP, MDPAC(C), FCFP is Chair of International Development and Senior Faculty of the AEDP Institute, and is a trainer and supervisor of AEDP for post-graduate mental health professionals in Hong Kong, China, South Korea, United States and Canada. Danny is the author of The Instinct to Heal: Practicing Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, the first original AEDP book to be published in China, and The Rainbow After: Psychological Trauma and Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy with Victoria Cheung.
Emergent Imagery: Unconscious Processes, Play & the Co-Construction of Healing
By Mary Androff and Eileen Russell
Abstract
Since its inception AEDP has relied on the use of imagery, particularly through portrayals, in order to help process emotional experience to completion. This article explores the therapeutic potential of imagery through a more organic and less structured approach we call emergent imagery, promoting a broader exploration of imaginal experience in clinical practice.
A rich history surrounds the philosophical consideration of imagery and its use in healing, and recent research has started to expand our understanding of its scientific basis as well as its ability to facilitate therapeutic change. Current neurobiological findings suggest that imagery can access multiple brain networks and serves an important role in cognitive and affective functioning.
The exploration of imagery utilizes right brain mediated processes and often accelerates access to previously unformulated experience. In the context of relational safety, this therapeutic approach taps into the power of play and enables a rich dimension of intersubjectivity. The use of metatherapeutic processing, an essential AEDP tool, facilitates further reflection and integration of therapeutic experience. Case material, with transcribed excerpts from a videotaped psychotherapy session, illustrates the concepts discussed in this article.
About the Authors
Mary Androff, MD, is an adjunct faculty member of the AEDP Institute through which she teaches ES1 courses and seminars. She has a private psychotherapy and supervision practice in St. Paul, MN.
Eileen M. Russell, PhD, is a senior and founding faculty member of the AEDP Institute, has taught AEDP widely for decades, and is the author of Restoring Resilience: Discovering Your Clients’ Capacity for Healing (2015), a book for professional audiences about AEDP and resilience.
“Dry Psychedelics™”: Going Inward Without Going Alone: Reproducing the Depth of Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Through AEDP Without a Substance
By Jason Trowbridge
Abstract
Psychedelic-assisted therapies have demonstrated that extended, inward-focused therapeutic states can produce rapid and profound psychological change. This article presents a single clinical case exploring whether comparable depth is reachable through relational and somatic means alone.
Using a format grounded in AEDP and synthesized with a direct-entry approach to dissociative states drawn from other somatic trauma lineages, a client with a complex early history and an over-three-year treatment history with the author entered an extended, eyes-closed session targeting long-withdrawn, dissociated material.
Previously unconscious material, core aloneness, self-hatred, and grief surfaced fully during the session and were processed and transformed using AEDP’s four-state model. The client subsequently described the resolution of a self-destructive impulse, a change she attributed directly to this process.
While drawn from a single representative case, a similar clinical pattern has been observed among other carefully selected clients in the author’s practice. The article proposes the hypothesis that relationally and somatically sustained inward attention may be sufficient to evoke therapeutic processes often assumed to require pharmacological assistance and situates it against findings from MAPS’ Phase 3 trials of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. Limitations, including the single-case design and the absence of a standardized measure of comparability, are discussed.
About the Author
Jason Trowbridge, MA, MFT, is an AEDP Certified Therapist with over 30 years of clinical experience specializing in trauma and dissociation. He is MAPS-certified in psychedelic medicinal therapy and Polaris-trained in Ketamine therapy. He served on a task force formed in partnership with MAPS to develop an AEDP protocol for treating trauma with psychedelic medicine. He supervises AEDP trainees, contributes to AEDP research, and teaches workshops on trauma, dissociation, and psychedelics.
Just Imagination: The Suspension of Disbelief and Other Portrayal Principles, Processes and Techniques
By Matt Fried
Abstract
Portrayals are a dynamic tool for the AEDP therapist. With historical links to Gestalt other expressive therapies, portrayals give clients a way to co-create new and memorable imaginative experiences within the safety of the therapeutic relationship. These experiences can help undo problematic expectations about the possibilities of living and relating to others.
This article explains the underlying principles and practical techniques of portrayal work. Applicable skills and strategies will be offered to enhance the therapist’s effectiveness in setting conditions for, accompanying and closing a portrayal. Annotated transcripts for and anger portrayal and a reversal portrayal will be offered to illustrate the principles and techniques in practice.
About the Author
Matt Fried, PhD, MA, MFA, is a New York State licensed psychologist with a private practice in New York City and upstate New York. He works with individuals, groups, and couples and supervises therapists. He is a certified AEDP therapist and supervisor, a certified international trainer in Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor (PBSP), and a certified Feldenkrais practitioner. In addition to his professional articles, he’s published short stories, poetry, and a CD (Days of Hope) of his original music.
Therapeutic Reimagining: Helping Clients to Access Their Transformational Creative Unconscious
By Anthony Prendergast
Abstract
Therapeutic reimagining, which empowers individuals to create their own portrayals outside of the therapy room, is introduced. This experiential new process allows the transformational work to continue between sessions, accelerating clients’ progress.
The book I wrote about it, Reimagine Your Life: How to Change Your Past and Transform Your Future (2024), empowers those who can’t access or afford therapy to engage in an experiential life-changing process. A detailed first-person account of one client’s use of the technique is used to illustrate how simple, yet transformational, it can be.
By using counterfactual thinking, an alternate timeline of events can be created that allows healing without the need to revisit a traumatic memory “hot spot,” making it particularly suited to clients with highly aversive traumatic memories. This article provides clinical evidence to support this approach (Arntz, 2012), and a roadmap for how to do the process, “the four guiding principles,” is explained.
The process has been especially useful for “rewiring internal models of attachment” (Frederick, 2021) in individuals with dismissive avoidant attachment styles, who may be resistant to forming an attachment with a therapist.
About the Author
Anthony Prendergast, MSc, MBACP, is a trainer, supervisor, certified transactional analyst (CTA), and AEDP level 2 therapist. He has written a number of articles for the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy about pioneering therapeutic approaches that he developed. Anthony is the author of Reimagine Your Life: How to Change Your Past and Transform Your Future, which is available from Amazon.
From Story to Symbol: Established Imagery in Constrained Therapeutic Settings – Part 2
By Kev Kokoska
Abstract
Part 1 of this article introduced “established imagery” as a form of symbolic disclosure through which affect may remain available when autobiographical narration is constrained. Drawing from my clinical work with incarcerated men, I proposed that familiar, repeated images can function as durable emotional architectures: forms that preserve feeling by allowing it to remain communicable without requiring full narrative exposure. The clinical significance of such imagery lies not primarily in what it represents, but in what it has learned to hold. Under sufficiently safe relational conditions, these established forms may do more than preserve affect; they may become the medium through which affect begins to move.
Part 2 begins with that movement. Rather than further developing the phenomenology or definition of established imagery, the focus here is clinical and procedural: how might one recognize, enter, and work within an established image without prematurely converting it into autobiographical story? What happens when a familiar symbol begins to acquire sensation, affective charge, action tendency, and new possibility? And how can AEDP’s existing architecture support this process when the narrative channel remains limited?
This paper first locates symbolic disclosure more precisely within AEDP’s imaginal channel and considers several mechanisms through which imagery can support affective processing. It then turns to detailed clinical material, following an established image as it moves from familiar representation toward embodied experience and, eventually, transformation. The emphasis throughout is on moment-to-moment process: the therapist’s perception of the image, the client’s embodied response, and the dyadic conditions under which symbolic form becomes emotionally active.
About the Author
Kev Kokoska is a Canadian psychotherapist and PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. He is an AEDP-informed clinician whose work focuses on imaginal and affective processes in constrained therapeutic settings. He is currently a Fulbright Scholar focused on his work in prisons.
Uncovering An Inner Moral Compass: The Confucian Four Beginnings (四端) in AEDP Healing
By Abraham H. S. Lim
Abstract
This clinical–theoretical article examines a pivotal psychotherapy session with a 36-year-old Cantonese speaking man presenting with complex developmental trauma and disorganized attachment. Integrating AEDP’s four state transformational model with the classical Confucian framework of the Four Moral Beginnings and Seven Emotions (四端七情), the paper explores how AEDP’s transformational process can make experientially accessible an intrinsic moral orientation that becomes visible as defended self-states soften and Core State emerges.
Drawing on translated session vignettes, the therapist demonstrates how the client processed deep moral disgust, grief, and relational longing through explicit somatic portrayals. Following a profound corrective emotional experience, he entered Core State, exhibiting spontaneous narrative coherence and the organic emergence of all four Confucian virtues: Compassion (惻隱之心), Moral conscience (羞惡之心), Relational attunement (辭讓之心), and Ethical discernment (是非之心).
These capacities resonate with established Core State qualities—clarity, ease, vitality, self-compassion, coherent identity (Fosha, 2005, 2021), and transpersonal experience (Yeung, 2021)—and extend them by highlighting the moral-emotional dimensions that can arise through deep affective processing. These virtues did not result from cultural instruction or cognitive reframing; I propose that they express the client’s inherent moral-emotional capacity, unlocked through AEDP’s somatic/affect-first approach.
This practice-based reflection suggests that experiential dynamic therapy can facilitate cross-cultural moral-emotional integration, illuminating how innate moral sense may become accessible within a contemporary Chinese meaning making context.
About the Author
Abraham Heok Seng Lim, MASW, MDiv, AEDP certified therapist and supervisor candidate. He is a Hong Kong psychotherapist, Marriage & Family Therapist, and Christian Spiritual Director. With over 25 years of pastoral and clinical experience, he provides compassionate psychotherapy, spiritual direction, supervises counseling students, and teaches at Hong Kong seminaries.