Essential Skills • 2013-2014 • West Coast

Our 2013-14 Essential Skills Course will be held in San Francisco and begins in September.  AEDP Essential Skills, aimed at practitioners, will be practical. Our aim is to teach, in both left-brained and right-brained ways, skill sets, concrete and specific. Different skill sets will be introduced, explained, illustrated and practiced each weekend, so that participants will emerge with both an understanding and a felt sense of how to practice AEDP.

Meet Course Leader, Karen Pando-Mars, MFT

Karen is a Senior Faculty member of the AEDP Institute. She will teach the first weekend with Diana Fosha, PhD and then be joined by a stellar group of AEDP Institute Faculty for the final four weekends.

Course Dates and Faculty

Weekend 1: September 20th-22nd
How to Engage Healing and Transformance from the Get-Go: “Working Directly with Moment-to-Moment Experience”
Guest Faculty: Diana Fosha, PhD
In AEDP treatment, the emphasis on healing brings us to identify moments of transformance and change-for-the-better from the get go. Being in such a way as to engage the patient’s self-at-best for the arduous journey ahead is one of the most important foundations to establish this first weekend. We will be fostering an experiential focus to find those “GEMS” – Global Emotional Moments – somatically marked by positive affect to set your practice of AEDP in motion.

Weekend 2: November 15th-17th
The Power of We: Working Explicitly and Experientially with Attachment in AEDP
Guest Faculty: Anne Cooper
Cultivating a secure attachment with our patients from the very beginning is fundamental in our work as AEDP therapists. While many models of psychotherapy utilize attachment theory implicitly in their work, AEDP makes the relationship front and center, using it directly to create the connection and safety necessary for transformational work. In this module, we will learn the varieties of ways to harness secure attachment with our patients, both explicitly and experientially, as well as utilizing the experience of attachment, in and of itself, for transformation.

Weekend 3: January 10th-12th
Top-of-the-Triangle Work in AEDP
Guest Faculty: Ron Frederick
Helping clients move from State One to State Two can often be the most challenging aspect of our work. This module will focus on how to work with defenses and inhibitory affects to promote a core affective experience. You’ll learn how to use the Triangle of Experience to make sense of clinical of phenomena and guide your choice of interventions.

Weekend 4: February 21st-23rd
How to Work with Emotion in AEDP: Emotion, Channels of Experiences and Processing to Completion
Guest Faculty: David Mars
Processing affective experience to completion is very powerful as it promotes transformation in one’s self and one’s relationships. This module focuses on deepening and amplifying somatic experience to open the way to state shifts in AEDP. Specific skills and how-to step-by-step invite, deepen, regulate and move through emotional material and affect that arises in different channels of experience will be demonstrated and practiced.

Weekend 5: April 25th-April 27th
Working with Transformational Experience in AEDP
Guest Faculty: SueAnne Piliero
Metaprocessing transformational experience is the hallmark of AEDP therapy, and one of its greatest contributions to the field of psychotherapy. In this module, we will focus on how “staying with” and processing core affective experience is a way to broaden and deepen therapeutic change processes, as it not only helps with integrating new awareness and experiences, but actually helps to build a person’s capacity to engage in new behaviors that promote a deepening of resilience and health.

Course Format

The course will be held over 5 three-day weekends according to the following schedule:  Fridays, 1 pm – 7 pm; Saturdays from 9 am – 5 pm; Sundays from 9 am – 2 pm. The basic skill sets necessary to practice AEDP will be introduced each weekend, with theoretical foundations and with videotapes, followed by live demonstrations and group experiential exercises in the afternoons.

Theory, Videotapes and Experiential Learning

Participants will learn the AEDP clinical roadmap, decision tree, protocol, and the right-brain language of experiential treatment. The training will include didactic material, clinical videotapes of actual sessions, experiential exercises, and small and large group processing.

Essential skills will be experientially explored and didactically demonstrated so that participants will develop both a (right brain mediated) felt sense as well as a (left brain mediated) understanding of them:

  • the entrainment of transformance and healing forces within the self
  • how to translate social engagement neuroscience to clinical work
  • how to engender secure attachment from the get-go, and thereafter
  • how to work with patients who do not take to AEDP
  • promoting right brain experience: gaze, contact, tone, lexicon
  • how to work with resistance to right-brain experience
  • self-at-best/self-at-worst
  • moment-to-moment tracking
  • the four state and three-state transformations of the transformational process
  • working with defenses: bypassing defenses, defense restructuring
  • undoing unbearable aloneness
  • pressuring with empathy
  • dyadic affect regulation: attunement, disruption, repair
  • phenomenology of affective experiences, transformational markers
  • metaprocessing: how AEDP interventions register inside the patient
  • metatherapeutic processing of transformational experience
  • the healing-oriented phenomenology of AEDP: categorical emotions, healing affects, receptive affective experiences
  • the integration of right-brain and left-brain experience to unleash cascading transformations, and solidify therapeutic gains

Course Readings

Continuing Education Credits

This program is eligible for 82.50 hours of continuing education credit through our co-sponsor R. Cassidy Seminars.  To view the CE accreditation statement click here.  CE Credits are included in the course fee.

This course has reached capacity and registration is now closed. 

Registration Closed

Cancellation & Refund Policy

A one-year financial commitment is required.  View our cancellation/refund policy.

Questions: Contact the AEDP Administrator.