A312 The Challenge of Engagement: A Moment-to-Moment Approach to Experiential Therapy

A therapeutic consensus is emerging that moment-to-moment experiential work is the treatment of choice for a range of issues involving trauma and attachment disorders. But the practical question remains of how best to navigate the emotional challenges of this kind of highly charged clinical work. This course will examine what recent advances in neuroscience, attachment theory, and trauma studies can tell us about what brings about transformation in experiential therapy. On the nuts-and-bolts clinical level, you'll learn how close attention to dyadic affect regulation, emotional resonance, mirroring, gaze-to-gaze communication, and affirming recognition is central to experiential work. You'll come away from this course with a deeper appreciation of what it means to be "present" in therapy, what healing looks and feels like, and how to turn feeling lost in the immediacy of your interactions with certain clients into opportunities for transformation.

Meet The Instructor

Diana Fosha, Ph.D., is the developer of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy and the director of the AEDP Institute. She's the author of The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change. She teaches and is in private practice in New York City.

Course Contents

Session 1: The Map • Evidence from attachment theory, trauma studies, emotion theory, affective neuroscience and developmental studies of the infant-caregiver dyadic interaction • Implications for clinical work • Role of positive emotions in the process of change

Session 2: Tools and Skills: Schemas and Specific Interventions • Schemas: The triangle of experience, the 3 States and the 2 State Transformations of AEDP • Specific interventions • Relational, restructuring, experiential/affective and reflective/integrative

Session 3: The Journey - Phase 1 • Creating the right environment for moment-to-moment work • Establishing a safe attachment relationship • Dyadic resonance • Attunement disruption and repair

Session 4: The Journey - Phase 2 • The moment and its aftermath • Moment to-moment tracking of bodily based emotional experience • Processing experiences to completion

Session 5: The Journey - Phase 3 • Moments of transformation: Integration, reflection, consolidation, subjective truth • "Metaprocessing" of therapeutic experiences • How to translate these into enduring positive change in the patient's outside of the session life.

Session 6: Navigating Difficult Moments with Patients • When the clinician feels lost and stuck • How to be in the moment • What things stand in our way and what to do about it • Therapists' reticence to be attachment figures to their patients

Learning Objectives

1. Apply latest advances in attachment theory and neuroscience to create interventions for clients.
2. Identify the phase of emotional processing the client is at using somatic markers
3. Describe 3 techniques to change your own emotional bodily reactions during sessions
4. Create interventions to deepen and expand breakthrough moments

Search all CE courses

Search all Audio courses