We are hardwired to connect with one another, and we connect through our emotions. Our brains, bodies, and minds are inseparable from the emotions that animate them. Normal human development relies on the cultivation of relationships with others to form and nurture the self-regulatory circuits that enable emotion to enrich, rather than enslave, our lives. And just as emotionally traumatic events can tear apart the fabric of family and psyche, the emotions can become powerful catalysts for the transformations that are at the heart of the healing process. In this book, the latest addition to the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, leading neuroscientists, developmental psychologists, therapy researchers, and clinicians illuminate how to regulate emotion in a healthy way. A variety of emotions, both positive and negative, are examined in detail, drawing on both research and clinical observations. The role of emotion in bodily regulation, dyadic connection, marital communication, play, well-being, health, creativity, and social engagement is explored. The Healing Power of Emotion offers fresh, exciting, original, and groundbreaking work from the leading figures studying and working with emotion today. Contributors include: Jaak Panksepp, Stephen W. Porges, Colwyn Trevarthen, Ed Tronick, Allan N. Schore, Daniel J. Siegel, Diana Fosha, Pat Ogden, Marion F. Solomon, Susan Johnson, and Dan Hughes.

Eileen Russell offers therapists a model for drawing on their clients' innate strengths to get the most out of therapy. Without minimizing pathology, she explains what is meant by resilience in a clinical context, how to work with it, how to cultivate it, and why using it is an effective approach to healing.

The first model of accelerated psychodynamic therapy to make the theoretical why as important as the formula for how, Fosha's original technique for catalyzing change mandates explicit empathy and radical engagement by the therapist to elicit and harness the patient's own healing affects. Its wide-open window on contemporary relational and attachment theory ushers in a safe, emotionally intense, experience-based pathway for processing previously unbearable feelings. This is a rich fusion of intellectual rigor, clinical passion, and practical moment-by-moment interventions.

This book updates clinical guidance and theory for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), an approach that gives patients corrective emotional and relational experiences that mobilize changes in the brain. Practitioners of AEDP understand psychopathology as a byproduct of internal working models, borne out of insecure attachment experiences, that now thwart adaptive functioning in adulthood. The goal of AEDP is to be therapeutically present with patients and their pain and to guide them to have a new experience—a good experience—thus rewiring memory and capacity to reflect. Updates to the AEDP approach (moving it into its second iteration, or "2.0") leverage emerging findings from the field of affective neuroscience to enhance individuals' healing and transformation. The authors demonstrate the power of relational work by sharing excerpts and analysis of clinical session transcripts. In each chapter, they engage different aspects of the AEDP model to show how emotional suffering can be transformed into adaptive connection, even for individuals with histories of neglect, abuse, and complex trauma.  

Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) is based on the concept of transformation. AEDP therapists utilize insights from attachment theory and research demonstrating the brain's power to reorganize itself and develop new pathways through neuroplasticity. AEDP clinicians help clients unearth, explore, and process core feelings in order to transform anxiety and defensiveness into long-lasting, positive change. In this comprehensive guide, AEDP leaders Natasha Prenn and Diana Fosha offer a model of clinical supervision that is based on the AEDP approach. AEDP supervisors seek to create dynamic change within the supervisee, so that trainees understand on a visceral level the process they aim to facilitate in therapy with clients. Through close observation of videotaped sessions, AEDP supervisors model a strong focus on here-and-now interactions characterized by affective resonance, and empathy. The goal is to offer trainees an embodied experience to mirror their growing intellectual understanding of how change occurs in AEDP. The book also includes vignettes from Dr. Fosha's supervisory sessions with a real trainee, as shown in the DVD Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) Supervision, also available from APA Books.