Ben wrote the chapter Portrayals in Work with Emotion: Processing Core Affective Experience and Bringing it to Completion in the book Undoing Aloneness and Transforming Suffering into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0. In this chapter, Ben outlines how to use the imagination to help clients access, heighten, and process their emotions to completion and to have reparative, feared or longed-for experiences through the use of portrayals. The chapter introduces the different kinds of portrayals utilized in AEDP and presents a case example of using a portrayal to process emotion to completion and then reunite with a younger self to help provide what was needed in the “there and then” and maximize healing change.

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.