Going Deeper: A Conversation on AEDP, the Body, and Healing Attachment
If you’ve read our popular post, 5 Kinds of Somatic Therapies, you know that the world of body-centered healing is broad and profound.
5 min read
One of the modalities we highlighted is Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), a core component of our practice at Downtown Somatic Therapy .
To give you a deeper look into this transformative approach, our Clinical Director, Avi Klein, LCSW, recently sat down for a conversation at our Manhattan office with Downtown Somatic Therapy therapist Michael Lowney, LMSW, who practices AEDP extensively in his work. This is the first in an ongoing video series at Downtown Somatic Therapy highlighting different approaches, treatment issues and the clinicians who make up our team.
Watch the Full Interview
To learn more about the speed of emotional transformation in AEDP, what it's like to work in this way, and how it can help you heal your own relational wounds, watch the full video of Avi and Michael's conversation:
If this discussion sparked your curiosity, be sure to revisit our original article on the 5 Kinds of Somatic Therapies for a complete overview of body-centered healing modalities.
Key Takeaways from the Conversation on AEDP
Here are some of the topics Avi and Michael covered in their discussion:
1. Debunking One of the Biggest Misconceptions Surrounding Somatic Therapy
A common assumption is that somatic therapy must involve some sort of physical activity or physical touch. Michael clarifies that while some modalities do, AEDP is different and often looks very similar to traditional talk therapy, but moves slower and focuses on bringing mindful awareness to the body and emotional experience. It certainly involves awareness of your bodily experience, but "you're not doing a yoga class".
2. What is AEDP?
AEDP is a model that believes our core emotions (grief, anger, fear, joy, disgust, and excitement) are fundamentally healthy and can guide us toward growth and healing when fully processed. The model's founder, Diana Fosha, posits that emotional wounding often occurs in a state of "unbearable aloneness". As an AEDP therapist, Michael explains that the goal is to heal these attachment wounds by actively "undoing the aloneness in the session with the client" and helping them process these emotions in new, safer ways.
3. Explaining "Feeling Safe in Your Body"
This common phrase can be confusing. Michael explains that feeling safe is a very individual experience. For him, it means being physically relaxed while simultaneously feeling emotionally and intellectually flexible. It's the ability to be fully present in your body and with your emotions while interacting with others. This is what AEDP calls "feeling and dealing".
4. How is an AEDP Session Different from Talk Therapy?
While it may involve talking, AEDP is distinct from more traditional forms of therapy in a couple of critical ways:
Slowing Down and Tracking the Body: An AEDP therapist will often ask a client to slow down and describe the physical sensations they might be experiencing. This is called moment-to-moment tracking, which brings awareness to the body to access things that may not be accessible from just an intellectual place.
The Therapeutic Relationship: AEDP places great emphasis on being explicit about what is happening between the therapist and the client in the room. Therapists are encouraged to share how the client is impacting them and ask the client how they are experiencing the therapist. This radical transparency is a powerful tool for healing deeply embedded relational patterns.
5. The Link Between Body and Attachment
The interview also touches on how our relational patterns are "wired into us" from the very beginning of our lives. Tracking how the body reacts to certain situations or people is a useful tool in understanding our attachment patterns or styles. Avi gives the example of an avoidant attachment style showing up physically as avoiding eye contact, crossing arms, or sitting far away, which can then be explored in therapy to uncover the historical reasons for those protective habits.
Interview Transcript
Avi Klein: Well, Michael, thank you. Thank you for joining me. And so I wanted to talk to you because we have a piece up on our blog that is fairly popular about five different kinds of somatic therapies. And as someone who practices, one of them who practices AEDP a lot in your work, I wanted to talk to you about that. So I just wanted to start out with, in your perspective, from your perspective, what's the biggest misconception that people have about somatic therapy?
Michael Lowney: Yeah, I think that from doing consultations, the thing that I've noticed is that... people, a lot of people assume that somatic therapy has to involve some sort of like physical activity or physical touch, which some modalities might, but AEDP tends to look really similar to like what you would think a therapy session looks like. You're just talking to your therapist. There's this added element of bringing mindful awareness to the body, but you're not doing a yoga class, which I think is what a lot of people assume when they think of somatic therapy.
Avi Klein: That there's gonna be like a strong physical component. Yeah.
Michael Lowney: Yeah, you know, we're talking about your body a lot and we're thinking about your body and the signals that it's giving, but not necessarily getting up and moving around.
Avi Klein: Right, right. And yet on the other hand, we do spend a lot of time bringing the body into the work. And so I wanted to ask you, this is just sort of like a common phrase that people use all the time, but we use it in AEDP. What does feeling safe in your body actually mean for someone who has heard it, but doesn't know if they didn't know what that meant? How would you explain that?
Michael Lowney: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a big one. I mean, I think firstly, it's like a very individual feeling. It's something that we all kind of have to find for ourselves. This work is one way of kind of finding that for yourself. Like for me, I think of it— I think of it, first of all, as being physically relaxed, but at the same time, feeling emotionally and intellectually flexible. So one way of thinking of that kind of security is the ability to be fully present in your body and with your emotions while you're interacting with other people. So you're feeling and dealing, which is like an AEDP phrase. Because even when another person activates us and our bodies become dysregulated, which they do all the time, you have this sense of security of coming home to your body. You can come back to yourself and kind of stay present with what's going on. And it's hard. I mean, it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. I'm still practicing it. But that's kind how I think of feeling safe.
Avi Klein: I'm gonna throw you a curve ball because we didn't discuss this, but what do you think feeling unsafe, like how would someone know if they felt unsafe in their body if they weren't really, I know for me, I get a lot of clients who maybe haven't really thought about this before and they don't realize that they've sort of carried a chronic sense of unsafety in their body. Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you relate to that at all?
Michael Lowney: No. Hmm. Yeah, I think the thing that comes up for me is like... Well, again, I'll be personal, but like when I don't feel safe in my body, I'm very reactive. You know, like I'm reacting from that place and I'm not able to kind of use my whole facility to respond and interact. So I think that, you know, all these things happen to us, to everyone for a lot of different reasons. And we're sometimes reacting from those places rather than like the present experience.
Avi Klein: Right, so there's sort of like a continuum of flexibility and ease to deal with the moment as it comes versus like maybe a rigidity, reactivity. Yeah.
Michael Lowney: Yeah, yeah. And I think that, I mean, I think it can a lot of times show up as like physical tension, like feeling unsafe or like protective or like a shutdown as another way of people feeling unsafe.
Avi Klein: Yeah, agreed, agreed. So, you know, we both practice AEDP. It's a big part of how everyone practices here at Downtown Somatic Therapy. And it's both a simple and complex model. How if someone has it's also of the somatic therapies, I would say one that people have heard of less. So for someone who's never heard of it, how would you describe it in a simple way?
Michael Lowney: Yeah, this is actually kind of taken partly from the blog post because I really liked how they described it, but You know, AEDP therapists think of, or really believe that our core emotions, which grief, anger, fear, joy, disgust, excitement, are fundamentally healthy ones and they help guide us toward growth and transformation, healing when they're fully processed. And we get wounded in our relationships and we experience what Diana Fosha, who's the founder of AEDP, calls unbearable aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotion. So, as an AEDP therapist, we're working to heal these kind of attachment wounds by undoing the aloneness in the session with the client and helping them process these core emotions in new, safer, healthy ways.
Avi Klein: Mm-hmm. And what would you say is something that tends to surprise clients once they've started to do this work? Like, they bought in, and then once they do it, what's unexpected about it?
Michael Lowney: Yeah, I think what comes to mind for me, and it's also something that surprises me, even though I see it all the time, the speed at which the shifts can happen. Once an emotion that someone has been carrying around for a long time emerges and comes up and is processed, there's this space that's created almost immediately that gives people... like a new perspective or like compassion when there wasn't before for themselves. It- sometimes getting to that point takes a long time, but once it happens, it just kind of, it happens so quickly, which is always amazing to me.
Avi Klein: Yeah, it's sort of hard to convey from the outside, that there is an element that something feels transformative, and happens very quickly and rapidly. A lot of things can sort of shift over the course of a therapeutic hour. Yeah.
Michael Lowney: Yeah, yeah. The more I do it, you know, the more interesting it is to hear people say similar types of things when that happens, like the way that they describe what's happening in their body or just different words that come up with people that obviously don't know each other. It's like this like really human experience that is so cool to see over and over again.
Avi Klein: Yeah, I find like as a therapist, it's very affirming. People have similar experiences. There's something universal around moving through difficult emotions, coming out the other side, coming back to your sense of self. Yeah. So this one can be kind of hard to explain to people. I find sometimes when I talk about AEDP that people are like, well, that sort of sounds like...
Michael Lowney: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah.
Avi Klein: ...talk therapy. So, walk us through like what is, what's a typical session like and how is it different from say, talk therapy?
Michael Lowney: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think there's a couple big differences that I've noticed. The first one is that AEDP really aims to use what's happening in the present moment as a way to access these core emotions that we were talking about. And a really efficient and wonderful way to be present is to bring awareness to your body. So often you'll hear an AEDP therapist, you know, like ask a client to slow down as they're talking about emotional material, and ask them to describe physical sensations that might be happening, and then to track these emotions or these sensations as they shift and change. And what tends to happen is that things emerge that might not be as accessible from just an intellectual place. So I think that that would probably be the first difference, is that you might be telling a story and the therapist might interrupt you or ask you to pause and connect to your body. And then, yeah, go ahead.
Avi Klein: Yeah, I just want to highlight, there's both like a slowness, you know, in terms of like, it's not conversational, you go much more slowly through what's happening and sort of paying attention to things that might be in the background, like our emotional experience, our physical experience, we bring them to the forefront. But then what happens is things shift very quickly when you do that.
Michael Lowney: Yeah. Right, right. Yeah, it's just a different, like looking at it from a different angle almost. And yeah, I think the other big one that I think about that's different, if you're used to like a more traditional type of therapeutic setting is the therapist-client relationship. AEDP therapists like... are really encouraged to be explicit about what's happening interpersonally in the room between the therapist and the client, sharing how the client is impacting them, asking the client to share how the therapist is impacting them. And this can be such a powerful tool to get in touch with these deeply embedded stories and relational patterns that we all have, which not all therapies include that element.
Avi Klein: I say, yeah, I think it's pretty, especially among like somatic therapies, I think it might be pretty distinct. It's not the only one, but I think AEDP might place the most emphasis on the relationship between the therapist and the client. For someone who hasn't experienced that before, and they might be a little confused by that, what is good about that? What's good about knowing how your therapist is feeling?
Michael Lowney: Hmm. Well, I think... well, the umbrella thought is like healing happens in relationship. That's something that AEDP believes. I believe that as well. But for that to happen, you have to feel safe. You have to feel like trusting of the other person. So, this checking in, I guess, or kind of tracking what is going on in the relationship. How are you experiencing me? Like, this is how I'm experiencing you. I think it can be really beneficial in building that trust, maybe even more quickly than if you didn't do that.
Avi Klein: That's true. And, you know, it reminds me, it is a common complaint that you hear from, I hear from clients sometimes, like, you don't really know what your therapist is thinking. And that can be sort of stressful or we can project all kinds of judgments onto our therapist. And so to know in a more transparent way that they care, that they're having a reaction to us can actually be, it's helpful. It's like it's in the service of therapy.
Michael Lowney: Yeah. Yeah. Right, and there's so much to be learned about how you receive that care or don't receive that care.
Avi Klein: Yes, totally, you're absolutely right. It's a whole other piece of work to pay attention to. Well, you mentioned something about tracking while you were talking about that. So I wanted to ask you, I think all somatic therapists spend a lot of time paying attention to their clients' bodies, their body language, what's happening. So when you're with a client and you're taking them in, how do you know that something is shifting for them? That, you know, we talked earlier about feeling grounded versus not feeling grounded, feeling safe in your body, not feeling safe. So how do you, what are you looking for? How do you track that?
Michael Lowney: Yeah, AEDP calls it moment to moment tracking. They put a big emphasis on this. So kind of what you were just saying, that the therapist is really attempting to stay attuned to even really micro movements and fluctuations in the body. Big ones too, but you know, little things that might happen. And I guess I'm thinking of it as like our nervous system creates a variety of different physical reactions when our bodies feel a sense of danger or threat. And so you're kind of looking for signs of this. You can expand on this, I'm sure. But I'm thinking for the most part, we either shut down or we get more activated when we feel uncomfortable or new emotion comes in that doesn't feel safe. So you know, you're looking for signs of that kind of dysregulation, tension in the face or the body, like a furrowed brow, maybe a lack of eye contact. Also the tone of someone's voice, the speed at which they're talking. Those are all kind of like examples of signals that you might track and then share maybe with the client to see what comes up.
Avi Klein: Yeah, I think that's right and I think part of, you know... part of what's happening in therapy is building ongoing awareness of our bodies are telling us information that may not be conscious for us. When starting with the therapist paying attention, we learn to pay attention and then we start to become more flexible. We can, together with the therapist learn ways to become more regulated. We can start to do it on our own. I think that's part of what it's in service of. Yeah.
Michael Lowney: Yeah, for sure.
Avi Klein: Okay, I'm going to skip ahead a little bit. So you work, one of the things that we really focus on here that AEDP in part is known for is not just working with the body, but working with attachment or attachment histories. So I guess I'd be curious to hear how those two work together, how that fosters healing in a client to focus on both attachment and the body. And if you have an example, that would be great.
Michael Lowney: Yeah, I mean, it's really connected to a lot of the things that we've been talking about, I think. Like, We're very social beings as humans, and so our nervous systems are constantly reacting and interacting with everyone around us. So those like... reactions or relational patterns are really wired into us from the very beginning of our lives. So this kind of work, tracking how your body reacts to certain situations or people can be a really useful tool in understanding our attachment patterns or styles. So I think I'm trying to think of like a more specific example. I mean, a little bit of what we were talking about with like the therapist client relationship, maybe asking a client, you know, how they're taking us in and, or if we notice that they're... recoiling or have a reaction to something we're saying or doing and seeing if that is something that's going on actually in the present moment or if that's related to something in their relational history and then if it is spending some time with that like what does that sensation remind you of and where does that take you ? A way to kind of bring some physical awareness to how our nervous system reacts to different relationships.
Avi Klein: Yeah, you're making me think of, so we're talking about attachment and they're different, you know, we've got secure, avoidant, anxious are maybe like the three big ones and I can think of a client with a more avoidant style and in their body, you know that might look like avoiding eye contact. It might look like their arms around themselves like turned away. You know, I tend to notice my clients with a more avoidant style tend to sit as far away from me as possible, you know, because their body it's not conscious but that in their body...
Michael Lowney: Yeah.
Avi Klein: ...there's a sort of just a habit of avoiding contact like that and that there's something uncomfortable. And that's something that when we bring attention to it, the bigger and more historical reasons for why they've learned to hold their body in that way, those can start to come to the forefront.
Michael Lowney: Yeah, that makes me think this is a little bit of a tangent, but I just had this moment with a client who I would maybe think of as more avoidant and he does cross his arms a lot. And, I was trying to think of a way to, bring it up to him that might be useful. And I actually, I think I might've stolen this from another AEDP tape, but I, I was like, I've noticed that you cross your arms a lot and, you know, I've thought of it as a way of kind of like shutting me out before, but I'm actually seeing it as a way of you really protecting yourself and like kind of holding yourself and soothing yourself and saying it in that way, he had never thought of it that way. He didn't really know he was doing it, but he had never thought of it in that way. And it opened up this whole space for us to talk about his attachment style and like how he's taken care of himself for his whole life. And I think if I would have said it in a different way, it might have pushed him away more, but it kind of brought us closer together, which was really cool.
Avi Klein: Yeah. Totally. It's like, and again, if we ignore what's happening in the body and we just have a conversation with someone, then this whole piece could be missed too. Well, let me, my last question for you, which is, I don't think anyone becomes a therapist without it, meaning something personal to them and, especially choosing to work in, this particular way, what would you say is the most personally rewarding part of this...
Michael Lowney: Yeah, yeah.
Avi Klein: ...for you?
Michael Lowney: Hmm. Yeah, I think that, I think the biggest challenge and reward in working in this way is that AEDP really asks the therapists to really show up as authentically as themselves as possible. And, you know, I think of therapy... So much of being a therapist is creating a space where other people can get in touch with their own authentic experience. So it feels really important, like an important challenge to model that authenticity and try to encourage vulnerability and deeper exploration in our clients. And I've just spent, I think I've spent so much of my life in other careers and really just like as a person in the world trying to find more ways to be present and authentically myself. More present in my relationships, definitely in my work, but also with myself. And this kind of like embodied presence is what I'm practicing every time I sit down as a therapist. So it really aligns with like a more like umbrella goal of mine as a person.
Avi Klein: Hmm. That's lovely. That's lovely. Awesome. Well, thank you. Thanks so much, Michael.
Michael Lowney: Of course.
For further reading, check out Beyond Words: AEDP and the Authentic Therapeutic Connection