Making Good Use of Suffering: Intra-relational Work with Pathogenic Affects

The Talk: Jerry Lamagna and members of the AEDP community learn about his important article and have a chance to participate in a Q&A with members of the AEDP community.

From the Abstract to Lamagna’s Transformance Journal article, Making Good Use of Suffering: Intra-relational Work with Pathogenic Affects:

“The unbearable psychic pain of pathogenic affect presents a formidable challenge to AEDP-trained therapists. As an experiential re-iteration of abandonment in the face of overwhelming distress, it sometimes renders patients incapable of engaging interpersonally, thus limiting the effectiveness of dyadic regulation. Because of the overwhelming distress and the dysregulation that results, pathogenic affect is generally seen as a clinically undesirable state that blocks therapeutic change.  In this paper, the author suggests an intra-personal approach to working with pathogenic affect …”

Transformance: The AEDP Journal is the official journal of the AEDP Institute. Transformance has been published yearly since it’s inaugral  September 2010 and has published yearly since. It represented a quantum leap into a new era for a groundbreaking model of therapy that was introduced only 10 years earlier by Diana Fosha’s influential book, The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change. The publication also provided a much needed platform for disseminating the ever evolving advances, applications, and inspirations for the rapidly growing and highly productive AEDP community.   A quick scan of the titles will reveal the vast array of topics and the tremendous fount of clinical material, in the form of session transcripts, demonstrating the application of AEDP to clinical issues such as, eating disorders, sexual abuse, work with couples, addiction, racial trauma; methodological refinements such as, adjustments to attachment style, cultivating therapeutic presence; and innovation benefitting the general field of psychotherapy such as, harnessing termination as component of the healing process and the creation of an empirically validated model of short-term AEDP.  Additionally, Transformance has featured articles on cutting edge applications of neuroscience research as well as commentary on books and movies.