Transformational synergies: Experiential-relational psychotherapeutic interventions can accelerate the healing of attachment trauma

MDMA creates optimal brain chemistry to enhance the felt experience of safety, openness, compassion, relatedness, and receptivity. Adding to this non-ordinary state of consciousness a psychotherapy model that works explicitly and experientially with such states can capitalize on amplified neuroplasticity, thereby accelerating the trajectory of healing attachment trauma. Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) features relational interventions that can optimize the qualities of MDMA: deep therapeutic presence and engagement, undoing states of traumatic aloneness, entrained states of resonance, tracking moment-to-moment relational experience between client and therapist, as well as interventions tailored to specific attachment styles. AEDP’s relational interventions co-create safety and trust, restructure attachment, build enhanced tolerance for intimacy and relational presence, providing clients with corrective attachment experiences. This presentation showcases AEDP’s relational- experiential interventions in videotaped therapy sessions of a client with a complex trauma history. I explore how well-documented effects of MDMA — fear reduction, trust and intimacy- building, empathy and compassion-enhancing, and avoidance-reducing qualities — would enhance AEDP treatment, as well as how AEDP treatment could amplify and broaden the healing effects of MDMA.