It's Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self PDF
Preview It's Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self
Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Foreword Part 1: Getting to Know the Change Triangle What This Book Will Do for You The Story of Me The Change Triangle Basics How Comfortable Are You with Emotions? Part 2: Releasing Core Emotions Fran’s Panic, Anxiety, and Grief You Can Change at Any Age: Neuroscience and Neuroplasticity Experiment: Slowing Down Part 3: Identifying Trauma Sara’s Depression and Navigating Conflict We Are All a Little Traumatized: Small t and Big T Trauma We Are Wired for Connection: The Science of Attachment Experiment: Giving Yourself Compassion Experiment: Self-Parenting Part 4: Core Emotions Bonnie’s Rage Everything You Need to Know About Your Core Emotions Experiment: Noticing Internal Experiences Experiment: Finding Your Core Emotions Part 5: Inhibitory Emotions Spencer’s Social Anxiety Working with Anxiety, Shame, and Guilt Experiment: Calming Anxiety Experiment: Shaming Messages Experiment: The Shoulds You Encounter Daily Experiment: Guilty Feelings The Healing Emotions of Joy, Gratitude, and Pride in the Self Experiment: Joy, Gratitude, and Pride in the Self Part 6: Defenses Mario’s Story: Moving Through Trauma to Peace Defenses Experiment: Noticing Your Defenses Part 7: The Openhearted State Sara Redux: The Authentic Self and Openhearted State The Self, the Openhearted State, and the C’s Experiment: Finding Your C’s Experiment: Plotting Yourself on the Change Triangle Experiment: Working the Change Triangle Final Words Dedication Acknowledgments Resources Appendix A Appendix B Bibliography Notes About the Author AS THE DEVELOPER of AEDP (accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy), a healing-oriented transformational model of therapy, I picked up the manuscript of It’s Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. On one hand, excitement: Here was the potential for my work to take a quantum leap in its ability to help people change. Not only, as has happened to date, by affecting how therapists practice, and thus having an impact on the clients they see. But now, here, with this book, by going directly to the people, and sharing some “trade secrets.” By making the ideas of AEDP more accessible, this book has the potential to benefit many more people—both those in therapy (with all different kinds of therapists) and those not in therapy at all. The prospect was exhilarating. At the same time, I felt trepidation. Here was my life’s work to date in a self-help book: Would it do AEDP justice? Or would the essence of AEDP somehow get watered down? Would the complex ideas of AEDP be turned into superficial fortune-cookie wisdom that would trivialize the years of work spent in developing a rigorous, healing-oriented transformational therapy? And if that weren’t enough cause for anxiety, Hilary was a colleague I felt connected to. Would I find myself in the awkward position of not liking what she wrote? Or, with people’s understanding of AEDP now out of my hands, would I have to live with an account of it that felt wrong or off? I already felt some significant safety. Not only did I know Hilary Jacobs Hendel as a person of substance and a wonderful clinician to boot, I had also been truly wowed by two pieces she wrote for The New York Times about AEDP practice: those short, simple articles had showcased her enviable gift of capturing essence while writing simply and accessibly. As I began reading the manuscript, my breathing started to settle. My body relaxed and my mind became engaged. What I was reading was apt and accurate. I breathed a sigh of relief! It was going to be okay. As I kept reading, chapter after chapter, story after story, I felt moved. AEDP had a life of its own, separate from me. I had already experienced that with the contributions of my colleagues—faculty members of the AEDP Institute —who have extended the scope of AEDP through their work. However, here was a member of the next generation, someone trained by my colleagues, who had made the work her own and was now transmitting it not only to her clients, but through this book, to the public at large. I felt a lump in my throat, and an uplifted feeling in my chest. The intergenerational transmission was on. You might have noticed the italicized words in the preceding paragraphs. They are all words describing either emotional feelings or bodily sensations associated with emotions. Emotion and bodily sensations often reveal us to ourselves. They contain biological wisdom and communicate what’s important to us and to those around us. In the pages ahead, as you get familiar with Hilary Jacobs Hendel’s book, you will learn to treasure the richness of emotions and what powerful guides they can be, pointing us toward doing what we need to do to heal old wounds and feel more effective and happy in our lives. Hilary does a wonderful job of teaching about emotions and the defenses behind which they hide. In her cases, she documents the toll that not being in touch with our adaptive emotions takes on us, and the benefits and advantages that well- processed emotions offer us. Those italicized words were crucial entry points into different aspects of my experience, all relevant to the task at hand. We have a saying in AEDP: Make the implicit explicit and make the explicit experiential. In this foreword, I will make the implicit explicit and tell you about the basic AEDP principles that come to life in Hilary’s clinical work. I hope to tell you enough about AEDP that you can understand the principles that underlie what you are about to experience. So here goes making the implicit explicit with respect to some fundamental AEDP principles. Healing from the Get-Go: Transformance as the Drive to Heal The first core idea that animates AEDP is that healing is not just a desired outcome of treatment; it is a potential that is there from the start. We are wired to heal, to right ourselves, to grow and transform. This is not just a metaphor, a way of speaking. It is what neuroplasticity is about. When we feel safe, or safe enough, the drive to heal comes to the fore. Unlike most therapies that focus on psychopathology, AEDP doesn’t focus on what’s wrong: it focuses on what’s right. AEDP therapists are always on the lookout for this drive to heal, for which we have a special name: transformance. This is how I describe transformance, the motivating force of therapy: People have a fundamental need for transformation. We are wired for growth and healing. And we are wired for self-righting, and resuming impeded growth. We have a need for the expansion and liberation of the self, the letting down of defensive barriers, and the dismantling of the false self. We are shaped by a deep desire to be known, seen, and recognized, as we strive to come into contact with parts of ourselves that are frozen.1 What’s beautiful, as well as convenient, is that the phenomena of healing are invariably accompanied by vitality and energy, which have clear somatic affective markers. These markers help us track and they help us see the manifestations of transformance and the strivings toward healing and well-being. And when we recognize those strivings in people, they feel seen. Transformance and its positive somatic affective markers of energy and vitality are a direct translation of positive neuroplasticity in therapeutic action: it is what allows rewiring to take place. Privileging the Positive, the Adaptive, and That Which Feels Right and True While we are on the lookout for evidence of healing even amid despair and fear, we are also carefully attending to and working with what is positive, what is adaptive, and that which feels right and true. “Positive” in AEDP has a very special meaning. It certainly includes positive emotions, like joy and gratitude and happiness. However—and I cannot emphasize this enough—the way we define “positive” in AEDP encompasses those as well as anything that feels right and true to the individual. This is crucial to grasp, for we are often afraid of feeling our emotions because we don’t want to feel pain. As you will read in the pages that follow, when we finally get past the protective barriers we built when we were children and we actually feel our genuine emotions, even when those emotions are grief or anger, we certainly feel relief. But we don’t feel only relief; we feel something that we, and our bodies, have needed to feel for a long time. Similar to breathing a sigh of relief when a crooked picture is righted, when we finally feel the emotions that are true to our situation, it feels right. And we feel good. Undoing Aloneness Aloneness—unwilled and unwanted aloneness—in the face of overwhelming emotions is at the epicenter of AEDP’s understanding of how emotional suffering and subsequent emotional difficulties develop. The implications of this understanding are clear: “being with”—i.e., being with a trusted other with whom we feel safe and known—is fundamental to healing and to being able to process our emotions in a healthy way. When we do not feel alone, when we feel accompanied, our nervous systems get upgraded. With help, we become better able to both feel and deal. Thus, a primary aim of the AEDP therapist is to undo the client’s aloneness and be with the client on their healing journey. As a result of what we know about attachment theory2 and about how the autonomic nervous system works,3 most experiential therapists seek to activate the social engagement system and establish safety and connection. Going further and taking a page from attachment research documenting how parents who raise resilient children behave, AEDP therapists lead with empathy, care, concern, validation, and authentic emotional presence. It is this that allows the work with emotions to be effective. As the saying goes, not only are two heads better than one; so are two psyches and so are two hearts. What’s too overwhelming to deal with alone becomes much more manageable when we’re in it together with a caring other. Undoing aloneness is the sine qua non of AEDP therapy: it underlies all the work with emotions that Hilary’s work exemplifies so beautifully.
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