DAY 1: SATURDAY FEBRUARY 6, 2010

9:15-10:00 SATURDAY KEYNOTE: Diana Fosha, Ph.D.

The Birth of Transformance: Transformational Theory and AEDP's Healing-Based Clinical Practice

We are wired for growth, healing, and self-righting, and for resuming impeded growth. Until recently, focused on pathology, our field lacked concepts to capture the innate thrust toward transformation residing within us all. Diana Fosha's keynote will introduce the notion of transformance as the motivational counterpoint to resistance. She will show how AEDP's aim that "the patient should have an experience and that that experience should be good" is inextricably intertwined with transformance, and how both are cornerstones of a theory committed to illuminating the process through which suffering can morph into flourishing in an accelerated time frame.

10:00-11:15 Benjamin Lipton, LCSW

Attachment as a Transformative Process in AEDP: Walking the Walk

While many models speak of the significance of attachment theory and research for clinical work, AEDP views attachment as a transformational experience in itself and introduces innovations in stance and technique that harness the resilience of secure attachment to potentiate deep and lasting psychological change. This presentation will use clinical videotape to demonstrate the moment-to-moment, experiential work of processing attachment security in the therapy dyad as a powerful, new, healing experience that catalyzes resilience in the here-and-now and serves as a platform for healing past relational trauma.

11:45-1:00 Candyce Ossefort-Russell, LPC

Faith in the Night: Swimming Through Trauma to Healing

Patients working through trauma may tap into intense grief, rage, despair, or terror, and therapists need to possess affective competence to remain present with these enormous emotions. Via videotape of experiential, dyadic processing of a patient's deeply traumatized state, followed by the positive affect that emerges in the wake of such processing, this presentation highlights the way therapists' exploration of their own dark places can lead to trust in the therapeutic process that deeply grounds the transformations we seek to facilitate.

2:15-3:30 Steven Shapiro, Ph.D.

Working with Treatment-Resistant Personality Disorders: Immobility Transformed

Early attachment trauma has severe sequelae, often resulting in life-long psychiatric symptoms, acting out behavior, self-destructive patterns, and interpersonal problems. Many so affected resist or avoid treatment, terrified that reliving painful memories will be re-traumatizing, which it can be. And yet, bypassing the traumatic past does not allow for its healing. Using clinical videotape, this presentation will demonstrate how to release healing resources bound up in the trauma response by engaging bodily processes that should have happened, not merely reliving what did happen, thus providing a deep corrective emotional experience.

4:00-5:30 DAY 1 CONCURRENT WORKSHOPS

Workshop A: SueAnne Piliero, Ph.D.

Transforming Self & Other Representations through an Attachment-Based Therapeutic Stance: Two Cases, Two Pathways

This workshop will demonstrate how an attachment-based therapeutic stance becomes the intervention in restructuring inner representations of self and others. We will work with two complex trauma patients. While both embody maladaptive versions of self and other, the therapeutic stance and the transformations that occur with each case are markedly different. Through witnessing interventions that "go beyond mirroring" and aim to facilitate deep affect and its self-righting potential, we will explore the nature of the self/other transformations that occur, and learn how they can be systematically brought about.

Workshop B: Eileen Russell, Ph.D.

Let This Mind Be In You: Noticing, Feeling & Listening to the Pulse of Change

Catalyzing healing is predicated on recognizing its heralds, be they communicated with the right or left brain. Learning to listen to, feel, and notice the propulsive force of change that underlies both resilience and transformance is the first task of this workshop. Understanding how our own social engagement system participates in pivotal "moments of meeting" that beget secure attachment and the affectively engaged exploration of the self from this new, more resilient vantage point is the second. Learn all of this through moment-to-moment tracking of one session.

Workshop C: Natasha Prenn, LCSW

"What do I say and how do I say it? And now what do I do?": Learning the Experiential Language and Protocol of AEDP

This workshop teaches the experiential language of AEDP and offers a user-friendly AEDP protocol with specific interventions for each phase of the work. As clinicians make the shift from the language of the left-brain and thinking to the right-brain and the body, there is a very real gap between the theory and practice of an experiential treatment. This workshop will fill that gap and give you an immediately applicable clinical language and a framework for the experiential interventions you may already be using.

Workshop D: Kari Gleiser, Ph.D.

Working with Complex Trauma and Dissociative Disorders: From Fragmentation to Harmonic Integration

This workshop will extend basic AEDP principles to working with complex trauma and dissociative disorders. We will examine key, transformative sessions in the treatment of two DID patients to illustrate how (a) dyadic and intrapsychic attachment, and (b) experiencing and processing of deep emotion, are fundamental processes in facilitating spontaneous and discrete episodes of psychic integration

DAY 2: SUNDAY FBRUARY 7, 2010

9:10-10:40 SUNDAY KEYNOTE: Stephen Porges, Ph.D.

Mutually Transformative Processes and Symbiotic Regulation: A Polyvagal Perspective of the Adaptive Benefits of Social Interactions and Safe Attachments

Humans evolved as highly social and necessarily mutually dependent. Yet, when overwhelmed by stress and threat, our autonomic nervous systems adaptively dictate more primordial strategies. Stephen Porges will explore the profound clinical implications of his Polyvagal Theory. From a polyvagal perspective, therapeutic interventions that target the capacity to sense safety and engage in dyadic regulation of physiological state can be effective in treating psychological disorders that result from chronic reliance on older stress responses. Positive clinical outcomes require the expansion of the patient's biobehavioral capacity for symbiotic regulation achieved through recruiting our most evolved adaptive neural circuit - the social engagement system.

11:10-12:30 Panel Discussion: Stephen Porges, Diana Fosha, Eileen Russell, Jerry Lamagna, and Danny Yeung

The Process of Emotional Change: What It Looks Like and How It Works

With the illustration of the phenomenology of transformative moments in therapy as their shared context, the members of the panel will engage in a bidirectional dialogue between physiological and psychological perspectives on key features of change mechanisms, taking into account the explosion of information documenting undreamed-of plasticity of brain, body, and nervous system. Implications for therapeutic stance and technique will be explored.

1:45-3:00 Ron Frederick, Ph.D.

Finding, Mourning, and Celebrating the Self: The Way of Emotional Mindfulness

Who are we if we're unable to access, accept, and make good use of our deepest emotions? This presentation will explore the transformative power of awakening and attending to one's present moment emotional experience and the naturally occurring change processes that are fostered through therapeutic engagement, affective attunement, and dyadic regulation. The healing role of positive emotions will also be illustrated.

3:30-4:45 Diana Fosha, Ph.D.

Energy for Life: Recognition, Vitality, Delight, Truth, and the Emergent Phenomenology of Transformational Experience

Vitality and energy are the fuel of life. This presentation will delineate how the experiential processing of stress-based, painful, even traumatic emotional experiences with an emotionally engaged 'true other' naturally culminates in flourishing, i.e., deeply positive experiences of aliveness, joy, clarity, agency, and compassion. Furthermore, the experiential focus on the actual experience of transformation activates a non-finite transformational spiral, with each transition somatically marked by observable and learnable positive transformational affects. Constriction and withdrawal can thus be motivationally reversed, and the re-orientation toward zestful engagement robustly supported.