176: Healing Trauma and Attachment Injuries through Intimacy: AEDP with Diana Fosha

Have you ever felt stuck, within yourself or within your relationship? Have you felt the effects of depression or anxiety as a result? You may know that intimacy is important - but today we’re going to show you how intimacy can help you heal your traumas and attachment injuries - so that you can get unstuck. This week, our guest is Diana Fosha, PhD, the developer of AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy), a healing-based, transformation-oriented model of psychotherapeutic treatment. Diana Fosha is the Founder and Director of the AEDP Institute, and the author of The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change. Diana shares how she creates intimacy in a therapeutic setting and how that intimacy and safety helps clients make huge transformations in terms of their experience of their own lives.
As always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Please join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it!
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Resources:
Visit Diana Fosha’s website to learn more about her work.
Pick up your copy of Diana Fosha’s book, The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change
FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide - perfect help for handling conflict and shifting the codependent patterns in your relationship
Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Your Relationship (ALSO FREE)
Visit www.neilsattin.com/fosha to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Diana Fosha.
Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out
Transcript:
Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. You know, intimacy is a powerful thing, super powerful. It brings us together with our partners and enables us to achieve more than we would be able to on our own. And yet sometimes we get stuck and things don't flow quite so well. And that could be a stuck-ness that happens in our relatedness, in our relationship with our partner, or it could be more like an inner stuck-ness, where you feel like you're not being quite as effective as you'd want to be in your life, or you feel the effects of depression or anxiety; the kinds of things that hold you back where you know that you might not be shining your brightest.
Neil Sattin: And yet intimacy has this amazing transformative power in how it gives us access to these deeper parts of ourselves. And I'm bringing this up because today's guest is a master of creating intimacy in a therapeutic setting, in a way that helps clients make huge changes in terms of their experience of their own lives. The name of her therapeutic modality is AEDP, or Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy. Now that sounds like a mouthful. It is a mouthful, but what you are going to discover in today's episode is just how simple it can be to effect profound transformation, all through harnessing who we innately are as humans, as feeling creatures.
Neil Sattin: And I know we're called homo sapiens, we are people who know, but I believe that it's also important to acknowledge how we feel and that our feelings, as many illustrious people before me have noted, are part of what has allowed us to adapt to our world in ways that are beneficial to our survival and also to our enjoyment of life and living. So today's guest is none other than Dr. Diana Fosha who, along with being the creator of AEDP is also the author of The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change. And her modality uses attachment science, interpersonal neurobiology, to help therapists, again, create amazing changes, or facilitate amazing changes in their clients. And I think there's also a lot that's useful just for us to learn here about how we operate as people, that we can take into our lives and into our relationships in order to enhance our experience. And we're even going to talk about that process of enhancing our experience in today's conversation. So I think that's it from me, along with just mentioning that if you want a detailed transcript of today's conversation you can visit neilsattin.com/fosha, F-O-S-H-A, which is Diana's last name. Or as always you can text the word "Passion" to the number 33444 and follow the instructions. I think that's it, so Diana Fosha, thank you so much for being here with us today on Relationship Alive.
Diana Fosha: Such a...

[@Lore-M-Ipsum-yew]

The necessity of prioritizing Safety and Attunement in the therapist/client relationship, this explains the failure of every therapeutic interaction I have ever had. Not one time have I ever felt seen, felt heard, or felt that the therapist was really present with me. So many books stress the need of the therapist as being the secure base for earned secure attachment. I didn't believe it was close to being possible. What sane therapist would make themselves vulnerable enough to wade into that cesspool of dysregulation and dysfunction with their clients? Diana makes me believe it might be a possibility.

[@Serabeena]

Lore M. Ipsum You might need to see an actual trauma therapist who, in the design of their training, is to ensure the secure base before moving on to the next step... and that if ever the Base becomes insecure, they revert back to that first step of creating the security again before continuing. Just a thought if you've not had success of being heard in the past. To me, AEDP is same as Freudian theory of mirroring by a psychiatrist but with a wild west twist. The A and D part of AEDP ("accelerated" and "dynamic") is the mirroring of the client--acting as a psychiatrist would (however without the controls and training of one) yet then also sharing their own experience of how they feeling while working with you, also still known as boundary violation if done incorrectly; slipping up on this is VERY easy to do. Beware of the quick fix of AEDP which can feel more like "tough love", without the love if done incorrectly. This tightrope works for some but not all, therapist and client alike.

[@tybowesformerlygoat-x7760]

Spot on.

[@Lore-M-Ipsum-yew]

NOTE: There is a break in this interview at the 40:18 mark which picks up again at 41:23.