Expanding the Ordinary to Extraordinary: A Review of Eileen Russell’s book, Restoring Resilience

The Talk: Listen and watch Eileen Russell and her editor / interviewer Gil Tunnell – both Sr. Faculty at AEDP – plus members of the AEDP community in this Transformance Talk to learn about Ms. Russell’s highly regarded book, Restoring Resilience.

From Tunnel’s review:

Eileen Russell’s new book Restoring Resilience: Discovering your clients’ capacity for healing (New York: W. W. Norton., 2015) is a major contribution to the psychotherapy literature. It is the best professional book I have read in a long time.

Rich in new, jargon-free theory and filled with clinical vignettes that illustrate working with different forms of resilience … Russell is clear from the start that she is not talking about the everyday, ordinary notion of “resilience,” but rather a multi-faceted concept that manifests itself in different ways at each stage and state of the therapeutic process.

More than demonstrating what resilience looks like in its various facets, Russell describes numerous clinical interventions that can be used to nurture it. In my view, this is why the book is so important: The author goes beyond helping the reader identify resilience in all its forms, but provides explicit clinical interventions appropriate for cultivating each form. For example, in early treatment, she writes that it is insufficient simply for the clinician to note the patient’s resilience privately or even share their thoughts on the patient’s resilience with the patient. Instead, Russell invites therapists to get curious about resilience, become more adept in spotting it, get the patient curious about it, and, together with the patient, mine it and bring it into the light. …

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.