Advanced Skills • 2014-2015 • New York

In this first module we will be delving into deepening affective somatic experience beyond a focus on emotion. We will explore the question, “How do we empathize with a feeling that has not been expressed?”

We will experience how to deepen the patient’s and our own Seven Channels of Experience (energetic, sensation, emotional, imaginal, visual, auditory, movement) to bypass defense and move into a broader band, bottom-up core affect. We will experience together through lively exchanges and vivid videotaped clips how to expand our connection to our own channels. We will see, hear, sense, move into, energetically track, open and amplify our imaginal channel to “find” and “bridge to” the channels our patient already occupies. We will learn how to select for and deepen this practice of whole body attunement. In your experiential practice sessions you will discover how you bring your own gifts and former defensively excluded blocks to bear fresh, real and healing fruit.

The focus of the module will be advanced defense work, learning to restructure mechanisms such as denial, splitting, projection, and dissociation. Specific techniques will be reviewed such as: transforming resistance, regulating anxiety and other inhibitory forces; separating anxiety and defense from expressive core affective phenomena; encouraging a new and corrective experience; utilizing the therapy relationship and relational interventions to access underlying healing resources and their associated adaptive action tendencies, restructuring defenses.

Complex attachment trauma can sever and/or inhibit the formation of deep and lasting bonds between self and other, self and self, self and emotion. In this module, we will explore, in depth, the explicit use of relational interventions to build safety and containment, dyadic regulation of intense traumatic affects of fear, shame, and overwhelm, as well as reconnection to healing emotion via processing of core affect – all in the context of patients with severe trauma histories and dissociative disorders. We will also view these cases through the lens of intra-relational interventions, which place dual emphasis on internal attachment relationships formed through affective interchanges between distinct parts of the self, and on the intrinsic healing power of new emotional experiences. Parallel relational processes unfolding simultaneously within the external dyad (i.e., therapist/client) and internal dyads (i.e., client/dissociated ego-states) facilitates and accelerates the internalization of secure attachment dynamics.

“Pathogenic affects,” overwhelming states of distress, shame, guilt, anxiety and existential loneliness will be the focus. Learn to help patients to manage their emotions and gain important insight into the nature of their suffering. Learn to detect where such unwanted, overwhelming experiences can provide “compost” for the transformation process. Interventions involving somatic grounding, explicit relational engagement and empathic reflection and intra-relational (ego state) work with resonance and compassion will be demonstrated as skillful means for fostering self- building, self-regulation and integration.

Reflecting upon the experience of change for the better is in and of itself a transformational process that fosters resilience and flourishing. In this module, we will delve into AEDP’s State 3 (metaprocessing) and State 4 (core state) phenomenology to ensure that you have a clear and detailed roadmap for the unfolding and thorough processing of transformational phenomena as they emerge in the practice of AEDP. Didactic and video examples will provide you with a roadmap to help you both sharpen and expand your technique for both “Big M” and “Small m” meta-therapeutic processing in the service of helping you and your patients to thrive.