ACCELERATED EXPERIENTIAL DYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY (AEDP)

Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) is an experiential, emotionally focused, relational, psychodynamic psychotherapy that integrates findings from: 

• Affective neuroscience
• Attachment theory
• Emotion theory
• Somatic focusing
• Trauma studies 
• Transformational studies 
• Developmental studies of dyadic interaction

AEDP defines psychopathology as a “long-term reliance on defenses against genuine affective experience” (Fosha, 2000, p. 87). AEDP holds that our problems reflect our best efforts to adapt in a maladaptive earlier environment, one that left us alone in the face of emotions too overwhelming to feel, regulate, or process. Ideally, affects (the experience of emotional states, as well as the expression) develop in a dyadic relationship between self and other, where they can be reflected and thereby resonate, evolve, acquire meaning, and become a source of information and vitality. When the environment fails to provide this support—and especially if a person experiences criticism, dismissal, or abandonment in response—the person develops defenses, including:

• Intra-psychic defenses, such as repression, denial, or minimization;
• Defenses that seek to manipulate reality, such as externalization, projection, introjection, somatization; 
• Defenses that affect the organization of the self (such as dissociation); and 
• Barriers that operate relationally. 

These defenses are accompanied by affects such as shame, guilt, fear, and anxiety, which block us from experiencing “core affective experiences”--i.e., the natural, adaptive emotional responses that are present when the blocking affects and defenses are not (Fosha, 2000).   

According to AEDP, the goals of therapy are to first undo the client’s sense of aloneness and then to use the therapeutic dyad to help the client experientially access and, with the therapist, regulate and process experiences previously too difficult to contend with alone. The goal of treatment is to viscerally experience emotions previously feared to be unbearable in the context of an emotionally engaged relationship with a trusted other, and processing these emotions until their hold is released. 

Fosha, D. (2000). The transforming power of affect: A model for accelerated change. Basic Books.