The roots of our depression, anxiety, anger, loneliness, compulsion, and relationship problems are very often to be found in our inability or unwillingness to fully express and experience our emotions or the experience of those emotions in such a way that we feel isolated and alone in our suffering.  Our dominant cultural narrative shames the expression of emotions.  In order to avoid that shame, we try to suppress the experience of our emotions and distance ourselves from them.  Rather than experiencing the full range of human emotions we end up experiencing and expressing shame, anxiety, depression, compulsion, and anger as defensive emotions that do not express our true selves.  This false self that is expressed is metaphysically impoverished, isolated, and defensive.  AEDP works to free the patient to be in touch with and willing to express our true selves and to experience being deeply seen, unconditionally accepted, and yes... even profoundly loved by an attuned and engaged other in the person of the psychotherapist.

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For some, this process will involve work around the shame that prevents us from expressing our true selves.  Many times this shame has an origin in the unintentional slights and seemingly insignificant failures of our well meaning caregivers.  Other times, our shame is rooted in our inability or unwillingness to comply with the implicit messages we receive from our culture, the sub-cultures to which we belong, and our institutions of religion about who we "should" be and how we "should" act.  

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For many of us, this process may involve work around what in psychotherapy is called "big 'T' trauma".  Perhaps we were invaded or abandoned:  our boundaries were violated when we were young by someone we should have been able to trust, we were abandoned in some way, we experienced violence, betrayal, or neglect.  These things matter and they leave a lasting impact on how we view and treat ourselves and how we relate to others.  AEDP is specifically designed to work with these types of traumatic experiences to bring healing from the inside out.  Through the psychotherapeutic process the power of these experiences to define us is dissolved when the wounded parts of us are touched by compassion and deep acceptance.  James Finely says, "The tyranny of suffering lasts only as long as it takes for compassion to show up on the scene."