“Journeying From Shame to Serenity I” with Danny Yeung
This video is taken from part of an AEDP West presentation given on 1/30/2011
“Journeying From Shame to Serenity I” with Danny Yeung
This video is taken from part of an AEDP West presentation given on 1/30/2011
A patient arrives for her appointment, angst-ridden, full of despair and diffuse pain. She is ashamed and feels weak for not being able to pick herself up by the bootstraps and cope. The AEDP therapist invites fuller disclosure of her feelings, emphasizing her perseverance and courage for sharing them. The patient looks up surprised, a new light in her eyes, as she holds the gaze of her therapist, drinking in permission, understanding, new self-perception. Then, as the therapist gently leads the dyad deeper into the pool of pain and grief and aloneness inside, always maintaining a shared, tolerable edge to the emotional experience, the patient sobs deeply. In the wake of this wave of emotion, they explore the patient’s sense of relief, self-compassion, lightness, gratitude. She leaves feeling transformed, freer, cared for and full of hope.
In AEDP reflexive defenses originating deep in the brain of the patient are brought to conscious awareness. Long-standing blocks and walls against felt experience soften into states of emotional flow that lead to relief and heightened clarity and freedom to initiate corrective action in the lived life of the patient. The AEDP therapist advocates and encourages the clear formation of the patient’s corrective impulses, often in the form of imagery of how to apply new behavior in the patient’s current life or in revisiting past situations of helpless aloneness, overt trauma or deprivation. Like a volcano whose eruption creates new land in the ocean, the patient’s unconscious surprises and recognizes itself in AEDP, so the patient’s agency and inner authority take hold and gain freedom to live in new and remarkably stable and resilient ways.