A403 Accessing the Higher Self: From Suffering to Flourishing

Explore how to access a client's capacities for self-reflection, resilience, deeper awareness, and what has been deemed the "higher self": love, wisdom, flow, compassion and generosity. We'll examine meta-therapeutic techniques that go beyond treating psychological ills, symptoms, and disorders to enable clients to achieve mastery of their own change process. Working with transcripts of actual therapy sessions, we will see how, rather than being a separate realm of therapy, tapping into positive affects and emotions: 1) are part of the transformational process in any effective psychotherapy, and 2) are actual somatic markers of the change process. We'll focus on specific methods for accessing clients' core strengths that can be integrated into your practice, whatever your theoretical model.

Meet The Instructor

Diana Fosha, Ph.D., is the developer of AEDP (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 and of papers on experiential process in dynamic psychotherapy. She teaches and is in private practice in New York City.

Course Contents

Session 1: Positive affects and positive dyadic interaction • Resilience, flourishing, and the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion

Session 2: Meta-therapeutic processing and the transformational affects • Techniques to extend the work of treating psychological ills, symptoms, and disorders • The phenomenology of the transformational affects

Session 3: The tremulous affects associated with the crisis of healing change and the emergence of the radiant self

Session 4: The healing affects and the process of affirming recognition • The emergence of love, tenderness, and gratitude toward the other • Feeling moved within the self

Session 5: The mastery affects and core state • The emergence and consolidation of joy, hope, gratitude, and confidence in the goodness of the self

Session 6: Dealing with therapists' difficulties receiving clients' recognition and gratitude • Why we struggle so much • How to get better at taking in good stuff

Learning Objectives

1. Identify the somatic markers indicating transformational opportunities
2. Describe meta-therapeutic processing techniques that deepen mastery of the change process.
3. Discuss the countertransference issues for therapists when they receive clients' gratitude and love.

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