Developed by Dr. Diana Fosha, the author of the The Transforming Power of Affect, AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) is an ever-emergent model, ever-growing through the ongoing contributions of the AEDP faculty and the members of the AEDP community.
Crisis and suffering provide opportunities to awaken extraordinary capacities that otherwise might lie dormant, unknown and untapped. AEDP is about experientially making the most of these opportunities for both healing and transformation. Key to its therapeutic action is the undoing of aloneness and thus, the establishment of the therapeutic relationship experienced as both safe haven, and secure base. Once that’s established, we work with emotional experience, working experientially toward healing trauma and suffering, and toward expanding emergent positive transformational experiences.
Our Mission
The AEDP Institute is devoted to providing a forum for an emergent community of clinicians. We seek to co-create environments — clinical, intellectual, collegial — of shared values. Ours is a community of safety and security from which boundless exploration takes place.
There is no better way to capture the ethos of AEDP than to say this: we try to help our patients—and ourselves—become stronger at the broken places. By working with trauma, loss, and the painful consequences of the limitations of human relatedness, we discover places that have always been strong, places that were never broken.
How AEDP Works
AEDP seeks to clinically make neuroplasticity happen. Championing our innate healing capacities, AEDP has roots in and resonances with many disciplines — among them interpersonal neurobiology, attachment theory, emotion theory and affective neuroscience, body-focused approaches, and last but not least, transformational studies.
Through undoing of aloneness, and through the in-depth processing of difficult emotional and relational experiences, as well as new transformational experiences, the AEDP clinician fosters the emergence of new and healing experiences for the client, and with them resources, resilience and a renewed zest for life.