Hilary Jacobs Hendel - Its Not Always Depression

AS THE DEVELOPER of AEDP (accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy), a healing-oriented transformational model of therapy, I picked up the manuscript of Its 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 peopleboth 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 lifes 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 werent 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 peoples 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 colleaguesfaculty members of the AEDP Institutewho 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 whats important to us and to those around us. In the pages ahead, as you get familiar with Hilary Jacobs Hendels 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 Hilarys 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.