Transforming emotional suffering into flourishing: metatherapeutic processing of positive affect as a trans-theoretical vehicle for change

Abstract

This paper explores core adaptive emotions, both negative and positive, and investigates their respective roles in the transformation of emotional suffering into flourishing. We do so through the lens of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), a mind/body, emotion-focused, healing-oriented model of psychotherapy that has articulated a four state phenomenology of the transformational process. Through such a transformational process, energy-consuming negative emotions are transformed into energy-enriching positive emotions, thus describing an arc that organically links the negative emotions of emotional suffering with the positive emotions of flourishing. AEDP achieves this through (i) amplifying the vitality affects that identify positive neuroplasticity through therapist transformance detection; (ii) experientially processing to completion the “gut-wrenching” emotions of trauma, and then, (iii) “turbocharging” the innate affects of healing to expand transformation through metatherapeutic processing, a technique for working with positive emotions to maximize their therapeutic impact. We conclude with thoughts on how metatherapeutic processing might be used by therapists of different orientations to systematically bring flourishing into psychotherapy sessions and on how AEDP’s descriptive phenomenology of affective states can function as a trans-theoretical vehicle of communication to further the exploration of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying change processes in psychotherapy.