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.
Our Work
The AEDP Institute offers training, supervision, and certification as well as workshops, seminars and online resources for advancing the practice and growth of AEDP. The Institute provides forums where clinicians share ideas and experiences, ask questions, learn from one another, raise issues and integrate new ideas into a model of thinking and clinical practice that is dynamic and continually evolving.
Developed by Dr. Diana Fosha, author of The Transforming Power of Affect, it has roots in and resonances with many disciplines—among them attachment theory, affective neuroscience, body-focused approaches, and transformational studies.
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.
Crisis and suffering provide opportunities to awaken extraordinary capacities that otherwise might lie dormant, unknown and untapped. AEDP, as a therapeutic approach, is about making the most of these opportunities for healing and transformation. Key to this experiential enterprise is the establishment of the therapeutic relationship as a safe, secure base.
Through the in-depth processing of difficult emotional and relational experiences, the AEDP clinician fosters the emergence of new and healing experiences for the client. Read more about how AEDP works.
Our Ethos—to Exist in Each Other’s Hearts and Minds
This spirit of openness and connection informs all the activities—clinical, intellectual, and community-building—of AEDP Institute and its members. As the network of AEDP practitioners, teachers, and supervisors grows nationally and worldwide, this shared ethos helps us remain healthy and vibrant. In particular, we are committed to nurturing and promoting
- a healing orientation
- engagement
- connection
- shared passion
- openness of heart
- openness of mind
- rigor guided by phenomenological precision
- safe and informed therapist risk-taking
- emergence
We Value Openness to Divergence and Commitment to Exploration
We grow — in ourselves, our practice, our theory and our community — by staying open to new ways of thinking and working. We welcome challenges from each other from new developments in theory and practice. By reveling in our resonances and embracing our differences, we foster the emergence of phenomena which are the stuff of professional, personal and organizational growth.