There are many reasons we humans suffer and a lot of that suffering is unavoidable. It is impossible not to feel pain when we experience loss or illness or misfortune or Injustice. That being said, much of our suffering is internally sourced and a lot of that unnecessary suffering has to do with the shame or anxiety we feel in relation to some part of our inner experience.
While it might be adaptive to be afraid of real threats we face from the outer world, it is a shame to be afraid of ourselves. And the truth is, most of us are. We are afraid of, maybe even enemies with, some part of our own mind.
And what part of our mind is so often laced with fear or shame, our emotions. This is a big deal because when we are afraid to feel our feelings, whether that be our grief or anger or even our joy or sexual energy, there's a huge cost to that. This is why many therapies work with emotion.
Today I'd like to talk to you about one of these in particular called AEDP, because it perhaps leads the way in terms of supporting clients to regain access to the fullness of their emotional world. Through really careful, mindful and deep work, AEDP therapy helps us reclaim our capacity to emotionally connect to ourselves and others. When that shift occurs what follows is this unfolding change process that leads to greater wellness and connectedness and vitality.
So let's dive in. [Music] My name is DrTori Olds and in this video I will be giving an overview of AEDP which stands for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy and was developed by Diana Fosha. AEDP offers incredibly deep and heartfelt work but I want to actually start by pointing out that AEDP has a lot of academic grounding.
I don't only mean that it has research behind it, which it does, but even more powerfully, that it weaves together many strands of intellectual and scientific theory like attachment theory and interpersonal neurobiology, affective neuroscience, trauma theory, the science of transformation and neuroplasticity. There's a lot of intellectual rigor and history that went into the formation of AEDP. Now, perhaps because of that rigor, descriptions of AEDP are often quite academic with a lot of jargon, which is understandable given that it's a complex and sophisticated model.
But underneath all its complexity and sophistication, at its core, AEDP is simply about two humans coming together to share a true moment of meeting. Why is that such a profound statement? Because most the time when we sit across from another person we are not actually fully connecting, at least not from our deeper self.
In other words, the deepest, most honest, often most difficult parts of our experience are locked away. We small talk, we intellectualize, we joke around, we debate, we storytell, but rarely do we share what we are feeling. Now we don't need to share what we are feeling with everybody or in every context, but we do need at least some people in our life, even if just one person, who we feel emotionally known by.
And for many of us, the way we've been conditioned by our trauma or our society does not make it easy to show up in a way that we can be deeply known. Sometimes it can be difficult to even deeply know ourselves. Now there may be many reasons we struggle to connect to ourselves or others, but very often at the center of our difficulty lies our relationship to our feelings.
Why? Because emotion is central to the active connection actually beginning with our connection to ourself. Why do I link emotion to our ability to connect to ourselves?
Well, it's almost like emotion is the thing that helps us, almost forces us, to pay attention to ourselves and to the things that matter to us. In other words, to our needs, you know, desires, interests, our values. For instance, if we're in a situation where we're not getting a need met or even being harmed, or perhaps witnessing something that's not aligned with our values, it's emotion that will let us know and force us to do something about it.
The truth is, if we didn't have emotion it would be all too easy to ignore ourselves and our experience. Our emotions force us to show up, in a way. To confront the truths of our life and have some skin in the game.
When we allow our feelings to do their job they can serve as this amazing compass, so that we can continually move forward in creating not only a generally better life, but a life that will match our true self. However, emotions not only communicate to us, "hey, it's time to show up, this matters to me," they also communicate to others, "hey, it's time to show up, something matters to me. " Look we're meant to face challenges or opportunities together.
That's why we've evolved to really telegraph what we're feeling whether through crying or you know blushing or the tone of our voice. If we can track each other emotionally it helps us to know exactly when to connect and what to connect around. That's why being emotionally attuned is the best gift we can give another person.
It's like emotion weaves us into connection. When we're willing to show up and be curious about another person's emotional experience think about all we're learning. First, we are learning about the reality of their life, which seems important if we want to be on their team.
But also we're learning about the reality of who they are because we're getting a window into what matters to them. Now, it probably goes without saying that that kind of connection where we are sort of weaving our lives together, especially around things that matter to us, that that kind of connection would have likely helped our ancestors survive. In other words, it is for good reason we evolved to have our feelings and to want to share those feelings.
There's almost nothing better for our chance of surviving. Given that that is the case, our brain loves to be emotionally known. Now, different brains, on like a temperament level, might have different needs around how to come into that kind of connection, so I don't want to say anything like too cookie cutter, but in general, to be accurately known is the best news possible from the perspective of the brain.
Which is why it rewards us when we emotionally connect. Now, you might be someone who's had this experience, maybe you've had the chance to cry with someone or just feel really heard, and if so, you can probably attest to how amazing that feels. However, you might be thinking, "I've never had that experience and I'm pretty sure my brain hates emotion.
" Okay, so think of it like this. Picture emotion is like water. We don't really have to learn to like water, our brain just identifies it as something we need and it's just natural to drink it when we're thirsty.
However, what if every time we were offered water in the past it was poisoned. Well, then we might be conditioned to have a disgust or fear reaction or avoidance of water. But what kind of poison can enter into our experience of our emotions?
Well, memories of being punished or shamed or neglected in the face of our feelings. In other words, we can learn to expect or predict that if we allow ourselves to feel, 1. no one will notice or care.
2. if they do notice they might punish us or shame us in some way, right, it'll lead to rejection. We can also learn things like, "you know, if I let myself feel I won't be able to handle my feelings and will be overwhelmed by them" or even, "someone else won't be able to handle what I feel.
I might harm them if I'm too emotional. " For many of us, we expect those kinds of negative outcomes around emotion, because that is what we experienced. Even having our parents simply ignore our emotions is enough to produce great difficulty for us.
Why? Because right in the moment where we are confronting something hard or painful, the thing we're upset about, we now are secondarily having to confront something else that's hard or painful which is that no one seems to care. No one even noticed that I was upset.
Or if they did notice, they didn't come toward me in a helpful way. That kind of experience not only makes us feel alone but is often linked to a state of overwhelm. Now, in the research we call that insecure attachment because emotion isn't doing the job it is meant to do, which is to attach us to each other, and when emotion fails to be connecting but is rather distancing there are two core learnings that sort of get imprinted in our deeper brain.
1. emotion is bad. At the very least it's pointless, but probably is also going to, you know, take me somewhere very painful and overwhelming and 2.
that I am fundamentally alone. Now, AEDP works to heal both of those two important pieces. It's almost like taking the poison out of the water.
How, by giving us a new experience around emotion where it can do its job of fostering connection or attachment. While the ultimate goal is for the client to develop a secure attachment relationship with themself where they can notice and support themselves during emotional moments, that template of security is actually learned first through the relationship with the therapist. Where the therapist can model a new response and willingness to attune to and co-regulate our emotions.
So why might we expect an AEDP therapist to do what our parents were unable to do? Well, AEDP therapists work hard to develop what's called affective competence. In other words, skills around emotional awareness and attunement as well as their own strength and capacity to be present in the face of emotions, while holding a deep understanding around why doing so might be difficult for us.
In other words, an AEDP therapist comes prepared to help. Now, this is different than a lot of therapies we might be used to where the therapists just kind of passively listens, maybe reflects things back a bit, or is empathic, but really doesn't say too much. No, an AEDP therapist is actively engaged.
Why? Because they know they're asking their client to do something that is incredibly scary and honestly that without the right support will most certainly falter. The reason I say that is because when we've had negative experiences around our emotions, it's almost like the moment we touch into those emotions again, our whole brain starts to pulse with the expectation, "I'm about to be rejected, you know, I'm about to be overwhelmed.
" Such that, touching on emotion makes us feel a lot of anxiety. Or, if we've learned that emotions are weak or too much for others, we might feel a lot of shame. That kind of anxiety or shame you can think of as secondary emotions.
Secondary emotions are feelings about our feelings. If we return to the poisoned water metaphor, if our emotions have been laced with anxiety or shame, we will want to push them away. In AEDP we call that pushing away moving into our defenses.
Now this can all happen so quickly and unconsciously and with such energy behind it. This is why an AEDP therapist or really any therapist wanting to explore emotion can't just sit back. They need to do what in AEDP is called moment by moment tracking.
Moment by moment tracking looks like helping clients mindfully track their inner shifts, whether from defenses toward anxiety, toward emotion, maybe back towards some defenses, all of those inner shifts, exactly as they're happening in the moment. So the stance of the AEDP therapist is, "let's be conscious of what's actually happening so that we can actually help you. " If shame is triggered, this help might look like me as the therapist, you know, offering reassurance that I'm not judging your emotional experience or maybe even disclosing that I too have been through emotional difficulty.
Or if the client is feeling anxious, maybe together we could try to have some compassion and understanding around why this might feel so scary. Or use some mindfulness or even take a breath together. But again, it's let's take a breath together.
It isn't just let me teach you how to regulate your anxiety through a breathing technique and that's the whole therapy, we're done. No, it's let's regulate your anxiety together so we can see what happens next and what is likely to happen next? Well, if we're able to soften some of the shame or anxiety, sort of take care of those parts of us first, in a way it's almost like a little more security has entered into the system.
So now there's more trust and hope and that trust or hope will likely help us to feel safe enough to deepen into some of our more core emotions underneath. You know, our anger or grief or longing. We call those kinds of emotions core affect.
Core affect is just another word for what we are truly feeling underneath. Of course, identifying the emotions underneath is not the end of the story. Once core affect is accessed, the therapist continues to do moment by moment tracking, that way the client can still feel really joined and accompanied as the wave of emotion is moving through.
Now, this may be a very tender piece of work where the client is getting in touch with inner child places that need to cry, you know, and feel held. Or it may be more enlivening work where the client is accessing their anger and pictures you know what they would do if they were really free to fight back. But no matter the type of emotion, it is real alive and in the body.
This is deeper than catharsis. I prefer to think of it as completion. It's like when emotions are finally able to do what they were created to do, you know, to connect us to the truth of our life, and to each other, and to clarify what we need and motivate us to act on that need, I really picture it like an arc where we start off feeling some kind of deeper pain but as we move through it, as it sort of crescendos and then softens, where it takes us is somewhere so much better.
And when we notice how much better this new place is, it's like we've just defied every expectation of our unconscious mind. Our unconscious mind predicts that emotion will lead us to feel small or alone or overwhelmed, but instead we experience our emotions moving through in this really natural, doable, even rich and meaningful way. We predict our emotions will lead to rejection but instead we can see how they can serve as the very medium through which we feel more connected.
We expect that our emotions will be muddled or confusing, but instead we find that they help us arrive at greater clarity and empowerment. Diana Fosha says we want our clients to have a new experience and for that experience to be good. Now, that doesn't happen by magic.
It happens because the AEDP therapist does the opposite of what we unconsciously predict people will do. Instead of pulling away in the face of our emotions, the therapist steps in. Instead of being overwhelmed by our emotions, they are strong and able to stay present.
Instead of leaving us to be overwhelmed by our emotions, they pace the process and work to co-regulate the emotions with us. And as all that is happening, as we are able to feel our feelings in a way that feels right, and truthful, and empowering, then one by one, each fear of emotion that we have can be deeply undone. And through that process, what we are also, maybe even more profoundly undoing, is our aloneness.
Diana Fosha is really clear that at the heart of the AEDP model is the mission of undoing our clients aloneness. Now for a moment, I just want to let that statement breathe. The goal of AEDP is to undo our aloneness and what does that have to do with emotion?
Well because nothing makes us feel less alone than being emotionally known. To be emotionally known, sort of, breaks the illusion that aloneness is the only possibility. Now, throughout this talk I've been clearly linking our core loneliness to our fear of emotion, but in truth, it is not only our fear of emotion that can cause parts of our true self to be sequestered away, there are many other parts of our true self that can feel scary or bad as well.
I'm thinking here of our sexuality, or some part of our identity, or our neurodivergence, or maybe the questioning of our faith, there are many parts of our true self or true experience that can become buried. But even when it is those pieces that need attention, emotion can be a lovely path inward, because again, emotion is all about speaking the truth of our life. Let me begin to wrap up by quoting from my mother, who's an amazing therapist, who also does very deep, emotion focused work.
And she talks about finding the parts of us that have been sequestered away and working to rescue them. She tells her clients, "look, there are parts of you that are living behind a wall of shame. If you'd like, I could come up beside you, gather our courage and together we can go on a rescue mission.
Now what she's describing is not touchy feely, lightweight work, it's like a serious mission. It takes courage, takes a lot of technical skill and intelligence on the part of the therapist, as well as a deep commitment to maturity and care. It's kind of like, all hands on deck, you know, all the client's and the therapist's capacities need to pull in the same direction, so that something entirely new can emerge.
Why are all those capacities required? Because it's like going for the ultimate gold in a way, you know, the liberation of our true self. I say that because when the brain is no longer having to do all this work just to make sure we don't feel, it can just work.
It's freed up. It shifts from preoccupation with avoidance toward a stance of engagement and this shift leads not only to relief, but all sorts of other positive emotions and states, deep peace, deep love, including for ourselves, you know, strength, passion, aliveness, you know, real pleasure, and joy. The truth is, those are just natural states that emerge when the brain is no longer bogged down in fear.
And a beautiful insight of AEDP, and this is probably Fosha's truly original contribution, is that instead of feeling better being the end point of the work, in AEDP, it's just the beginning of another chapter. To use a metaphor, let's take everything I just described around the therapist supporting the client to finally grieve or move through their anger or truly express themselves, and let's imagine that process as this amazing exhale. Using that imagery, I'd say that what we found is that just after the out breath there's this natural and stunning in-breath.
And we want to linger with that moment because it's like our chance to breathe in life again. And actually, that piece of the work is what we will talk about in the next video. But before we close, I just want to say that therapy doesn't have to just be about learning to better regulate or control our inner world.
It can be about undoing the fears that drive all that chaos and or deadness in the first place, so that our mind no longer needs to be so regulated or controlled. When we can make that shift, this amazing mind emerges. The goal of AEDP goes far beyond simply no longer meeting a diagnosis, it goes all the way toward being able to experience what it can truly mean to be fully human.
The beauty, and meaning, and fulfillment that comes when we allow ourselves to finally be unabashedly alive. Thank you for watching. Thanks so much for watching.
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