Transformance Journal: Volume 7

Editor’s Letter and Introduction to Volume 7 – The Supervision Issue

By Gil Tunnell, PhD

 It is with much pleasure and great excitement I introduce this issue of Transformance.  It is devoted entirely to supervision in AEDP and celebrates the publication of the book, Supervision Essentials for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (2017) by Natasha Prenn and Diana Fosha.   We are grateful to the publisher, the American Psychological Association, for granting us permission to print Chapter Two in its entirety.  The book is a companion to Diana Fosha’s DVD, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) Supervision, available also from APA.

In addition to Chapter Two (Essential Skills), this issue contains articles on AEDP supervision by Karen Kranz, Richard Harrison, and Molly Morgan, all of whom are Approved AEDP Supervisors. (Read More…)

This chapter outlines the skills we use to translate theory into clinical practice. We start with the role of the relationship and the stance of the supervisor in the relationship. Then we guide you through what we teach and how we teach it—including the essential skills of accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) and the language of interventions—highlighting experiential techniques imported directly into supervision from AEDP.

THE ROLE OF THE RELATIONSHIP IS CENTRAL

Although it has been widely acknowledged that the relationship is crucial to supervision (Angus & Kagan, 2007; Budge& Wampold, 2015; Ellis & Ladany, 1997; Watkins, 2012; Watkins, Budge, & Callahan, 2015; Watkins & Milne, 2014), what is unique to AEDP therapy and supervision is how we work with relational experience. We make the experience of therelationship and relatedness explicit, and then we work with that experience both experientially (i.e., proceduralknowledge) and reflectively (i.e., declarative knowledge; Binder, 1993; Watkins, 2012). The use of the relationship is a particular skill set that we explicitly teach (Levenson, 1995). “What is your reaction to me right now?” “How are youexperiencing me now?” “What is your sense of me right now?” These are interventions that work well. One of AEDP’smajor contributions to psychotherapy is unpacking the different ways in which we explicitly use the therapist’s— or thesupervisor’s—self and experience. (Read More…)

Making AEDP Supervision Relational and Experiential through

Cultivating Receptive Affective Capacity:

A Parallel Process Not So Parallel

 Karen Kranz, Ph. D., R. Psych.

 Abstract.  Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP, Fosha, 2000) is a profoundly relational and a profoundly experiential model of therapy. Likewise, AEDP supervision needs to be relational and experiential. This paper describes a supervisor-supervisee relationship that emphasizes and makes explicit the intersubjective space created by the dyad and the in-the-moment and moment-by-moment experience of the supervisee in relationship with the supervisor, and the supervisee in relationship with her client. What was created by this supervisor-supervisee relationship was a depth of awareness of how what was occurring between the supervisee and her client paralleled what was occurring between the supervisor and supervisee. (Read More…)

How To Be an AEDP Supervisee:
Get Ready To Be Transformed

Molly Morgan, LCSW

Certified AEDP Therapist and Supervisor

AEDP supervision is different from traditional psychotherapy supervision.   AEDP is a model of radical change; learning it will change you radically.  As I remember my early experiences as an AEDP supervisee, fresh from the inaugural 2010 Essential Skills course, I don’t think I fully understood what I was getting in to.  Like many of you when I watched faculty videos, something inside of me dropped and opened. There was a click of recognition (Fosha, 2000, 2009):  Yes! This feels exactly right! This is how healing happens and how people change.  

But what exactly is it? What are they doing? It looked like so little and so much at the same time. How do I learn to do that?  Triangles and charts to decipher and digest, and so many feelings swirling inside too. How do I balance left-brain learning of the four-state, three-state transformations map, the phenomenology and languaging, and also cultivate right-brain skills of slowing down, moment-to-moment tracking, deepening and building capacity to be with deep affective material?  How do I learn to feel into the patient/therapist relationship, and then be brave enough to make it explicit? And when I ask my patient “How are we doing?” am I not erroneously and uncomfortably calling attention to me, the therapist? Is that intrusive? Will my patient hate me for asking, “What’s that like?” several dozen times a session? What do I do when my patient says she feels absolutely nothing in her body, and then asks, with disdain or annoyance, why exactly do I want to know? (Read More…)

Richard Harrison, PhD

Abstract.  This paper identifies and demonstrates ways to incorporate foundational aspects and guiding principles of AEDP in supervision in order to nurture professional transformance in supervisees. These include (a) fostering and leveraging the supervisory relationship as an attachment relationship; (b) being a “Transformance Detective” in supervision; (c) using the triangle of experience in supervision to simultaneously track relational/affective experiences in the therapy and supervisory dyads; (d) working collaboratively to undo professional aloneness; (e) accessing Self-at-Best in order to go to the places of Self-at-Worst in a supervisee’s AEDP practice; (f) facilitating experiences of discovery through a balance of left-brain and right-brain learning modalities (e.g., interweaving experience and reflection in supervision); (g) embracing “good enough” development; and finally, (h) making supervision dyad specific by tailoring interventions to the attachment/relational strategies of each supervisee. The paper also addresses the crucial distinction between supervision and personal therapy. (Read More…)