AEDP Therapy in Surrey, BC
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AEDP, or Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, is an attachment based, emotion focused approach to counselling offered at Sojourn Counselling and Neurofeedback in Cloverdale, Surrey and online across British Columbia.
Many people arrive at counselling having already thought hard about their difficulties. They can explain where the anxiety comes from, or why a relationship keeps going the same way. What they have not been able to do is feel any different.
AEDP works at that level. Rather than analyzing a problem from the outside, your counsellor helps you slow down and notice what is happening in your body and your emotions right now, in the room, with someone who is paying close attention and on your side. The aim is not to relive what hurt you. It is to have an experience of not being alone with it, and to let feelings that were once too much to carry move through to completion.
AEDP was developed by Dr. Diana Fosha in New York and first described in her 2000 book The Transforming Power of Affect. It draws on attachment theory, emotion research and affective neuroscience, and it has an active community of practitioners across the Lower Mainland.
What Is AEDP Therapy
Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy is a form of therapy that helps people process painful emotion safely, in the presence of an attuned therapist, so that the experience becomes a source of resilience rather than something to avoid. Each word in the name points to something specific about how it works.
Experiential means the work happens in the present moment. Instead of talking about sadness, you are invited to notice where it sits, what it wants to do, and what happens when you stay with it for a few seconds longer than usual, with support.
Dynamic refers to the psychodynamic roots of the model: the recognition that we learn early in life which feelings are welcome and which are not, and that we build protective habits around the ones that were not. Those habits, which AEDP calls defenses, made sense once. In adulthood they often keep us stuck.
Accelerated is the word people most often misread. It does not mean rushed, and it does not promise a fixed number of sessions. It describes the observation that when someone feels safe enough to fully experience an emotion with another person, change can happen more directly than it does through insight alone.
Undoing aloneness
The central idea in AEDP is that suffering becomes unbearable when we are alone with it. Many of the difficulties people bring to counselling trace back to moments, often early, when a feeling was too big and no one was there to help hold it. The feeling itself was not the problem. Having to face it alone was.
An AEDP counsellor works actively to undo that aloneness. That means being warm and present rather than neutral, saying what they notice, and staying emotionally engaged as you move through difficult material. For some people that is the most unfamiliar part of the approach, and also the part that matters most.
Transformance
AEDP also holds a specific view of people: that alongside whatever has gone wrong, there is an innate drive toward healing and growth that Fosha calls transformance. Your counsellor pays attention to the moments when that drive shows itself, however small, and helps you notice and build on them rather than moving straight past them to the next problem.
How Does AEDP Work
AEDP describes a process of change that moves through four states, from distress and self protection toward core emotion, and then through the experience of change itself into a calm, clear place the model calls core state. Sessions are not scripted, and no one moves through this in a straight line. But knowing the shape of it helps many clients understand what their counsellor is paying attention to.
State one: safety and the softening of defenses
Early work focuses on building enough safety that you can begin to notice what is happening inside you. Your counsellor helps you become aware of the ways you protect yourself, such as changing the subject, going numb, staying in your head, or minimizing, and treats those protections with respect rather than trying to strip them away. Anxiety and shame often show up here, and they are worked with directly.
State two: processing core emotion
Underneath the protective layer are core emotions such as grief, anger, fear, joy and longing. In AEDP these are experienced somatically and moved through to completion, in waves, with the counsellor closely accompanying you. The emphasis is on regulation and dosing. You are never asked to go further or faster than you can stay present for. When a core emotion is processed all the way through, it typically brings with it a natural next move, such as setting a boundary, letting go, or reaching for connection.
State three: metaprocessing the experience of change
This is the part of AEDP that is most distinctive. After something shifts, your counsellor invites you to notice what it is like to have had that experience. Clients often describe relief, tenderness toward themselves, gratitude, sadness for what they went through, or a sense of having done something hard. Focusing on these feelings is not a debrief. In the AEDP model it is a second round of transformation in its own right, and the reason many people leave sessions feeling steadier rather than raw.
State four: core state
Core state is the calm, clear and open feeling that often follows a full cycle of this work. From here people can often see their situation more truthfully, put words to what happened, and understand their own story with more compassion. This is where the deeper narrative work of AEDP tends to happen, after the emotional work rather than instead of it.
What Happens in an AEDP Session
An AEDP session is a conversation that keeps returning to what you are experiencing right now, with a counsellor who is actively warm, curious and involved. Your first appointment starts the way most counselling does: what brought you here, what you are hoping for, and some of your history. Even in that first session, though, your counsellor is likely to slow things down at moments and ask what you notice as you speak.
Over time a session may include:
- noticing sensations, images and impulses as they come up, not just thoughts
- staying with a feeling a little longer than usual, with your counsellor alongside you
- your counsellor sharing what they see in you, and what they feel as they listen
- checking what it is like to be seen, heard or supported in that moment
- pausing when something shifts, to take in what changed and how that feels
- making sense of your history from a calmer, clearer place
You do not need to retell your trauma in detail for AEDP to be useful. Much of the work is about what happens in you now when memories or feelings arise, and about having a different experience of them this time.
What the counsellor’s role feels like
People who have had more reserved forms of therapy sometimes notice the difference immediately. An AEDP counsellor does not sit back and reflect from a distance. They lean in, they show that they are moved, and they let you know when they see your strength or your pain. This is deliberate. The relationship is understood to be part of the treatment, not just the setting for it.
What Can AEDP Help With
AEDP is most often used for difficulties that have an emotional or relational root: trauma, attachment wounds, anxiety, depression, shame, grief and patterns that repeat in relationships. Because it works with how you process emotion rather than with a single diagnosis, it can be a fit for people whose concerns do not sort neatly into one category.
At Sojourn, AEDP informed work is commonly part of counselling for:
- attachment trauma and difficulty trusting or depending on others
- complex trauma and the after effects of a difficult childhood, alongside childhood trauma counselling
- anxiety that seems to come from nowhere or that thinking cannot talk down
- depression, numbness and feeling cut off from yourself
- shame, harsh self criticism and a sense of being fundamentally not enough
- grief and loss, including losses that were never fully felt
- relationship patterns that keep repeating despite your best efforts
- feeling stuck after other counselling that helped you understand but not change
For trauma with clear, discrete memories, your counsellor may also suggest EMDR therapy, either instead of or alongside AEDP. The two are often combined, with AEDP supporting the relational safety and emotional processing that make memory work go better.
Is AEDP Right for Me
AEDP tends to fit people who sense that their difficulties live in their emotions and relationships rather than only in their thinking, and who are willing to be accompanied closely while they feel things. You do not need to be comfortable with emotion to start. Learning to tolerate feeling, at a pace you can manage, is much of the work.
It may be a particularly good fit if you:
- understand your patterns well but still feel stuck in them
- tend to intellectualize, minimize or go numb when things get hard
- grew up in a home where certain feelings were not safe to show
- find it hard to let people in, or find yourself managing everyone else’s feelings
- want a warm, engaged counsellor rather than a neutral one
When another approach may fit better
AEDP is not a first step for everyone. If you are in an acute crisis, actively using substances in a way that is hard to control, or experiencing psychosis or severe instability, the priority is stabilization and safety, and your counsellor will talk with you about what that should look like first. Some people prefer a more structured, skills based approach such as CBT or DBT, or a goal focused model such as Solution Focused Therapy, and that preference matters. A good first session will help you and your counsellor decide together.
If you are in immediate danger or thinking about ending your life, please call 911 or 9-8-8, the Suicide Crisis Helpline, which is available across Canada 24 hours a day. Sojourn is not an emergency service.
How AEDP Compares to EMDR, EFT, IFS and Somatic Therapy
AEDP shares its emphasis on emotion, attachment and the body with several other approaches used at Sojourn, and the differences are mostly about where the focus lands and how the counsellor works. Many clinicians integrate more than one of them, and a session rarely belongs to only one model.
AEDP and EMDR
EMDR is a structured protocol that targets specific distressing memories using bilateral stimulation, and it has the strongest research base of any approach for post traumatic stress. AEDP is less protocol driven and works more with the emotional and relational experience of the present moment. In practice they are complementary: AEDP can help someone build the safety and emotional capacity to do EMDR well, and EMDR can help resolve particular memories that keep intruding.
AEDP and Emotionally Focused Therapy
Emotionally Focused Therapy, developed by Dr. Sue Johnson, grew up alongside AEDP and shares its attachment foundation and its focus on softer, underlying emotion. EFT is best known as a couples model, though Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy applies the same ideas to one person. AEDP is an individual model from the start, and its distinctive contribution is metaprocessing: deliberately working with the experience of change after it happens.
AEDP and Internal Family Systems
Internal Family Systems understands the mind as made up of parts, and much of the work involves getting to know protective parts and the wounded parts they guard. AEDP uses different language but a related map: defenses protect core emotion. Counsellors familiar with both will often move between them depending on what helps a particular client access what is underneath.
AEDP and somatic therapy
AEDP is itself a body aware approach, and it overlaps considerably with somatic therapy. The difference is emphasis. Somatic approaches centre the nervous system and physical sensation; AEDP centres emotion and the relationship, using the body as the main way to track both.
Is AEDP Evidence Based
AEDP has published outcome research showing large improvements that held over a year of follow up, but it has not yet been tested in a randomized controlled trial, and it is fair to say so plainly.
The main study, led by Dr. Shigeru Iwakabe and published in the American Psychological Association journal Psychotherapy in 2020, followed adults receiving 16 sessions of AEDP from therapists in a practice research network across several countries, including Canada. Clients reported large reductions in distress and depression and improvements in emotion regulation, self compassion and relationships, with most showing clinically reliable change. A 2022 follow up in the same journal found those gains were maintained at six and twelve months.
Those studies did not include a comparison group, so they cannot show that AEDP works better than other therapies. A separate 2025 meta analysis of the broader family of experiential dynamic therapies, covering 57 randomized trials, found meaningful benefits compared with no treatment and results comparable to other active treatments at follow up. AEDP belongs to that family, though the review did not evaluate it separately.
What this means for you: AEDP is a research supported approach with a coherent theory and encouraging outcomes, practised by a clinician who will review progress with you honestly. It is not a guaranteed result, and no counsellor should present it as one.
Sources: Iwakabe S. et al. (2020), Psychotherapy 57(4), doi 10.1037/pst0000344; Iwakabe S. et al. (2022), Psychotherapy, doi 10.1037/pst0000441; Lilliengren P. et al. (2025), Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 32(3), doi 10.1002/cpp.70086; Fosha D. (Ed.) (2021), Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0, American Psychological Association.
Counsellors at Sojourn Who Use AEDP
At Sojourn, AEDP is practised as part of an integrative, emotion focused approach rather than as a stand alone protocol, and we say so on this page because you can check any counsellor’s profile in one click. The AEDP Institute offers a formal training pathway, from a five day Immersion course through Essential Skills and supervised practice to certification. Very few therapists in British Columbia hold full certification. We describe each counsellor’s relationship to the model accurately below.
Jonathan Wieser, MA MFT, RCC ACS, RMFT
Jonathan is the clinic’s founder, a Registered Clinical Counsellor since 2010, an Approved Clinical Supervisor and a Registered Marriage and Family Therapist. His work is relational, experiential and process oriented, grounded in attachment theory and the Emotionally Focused Therapy externship, and he integrates AEDP principles, including present moment tracking of emotion in the body, the active undoing of aloneness and metaprocessing of change, into his individual work with trauma, anxiety and relationship patterns. He also provides EMDR and neurofeedback, and will talk with you about combining approaches when that fits.
View Jonathan’s availability and book online.
Sarah Ball, Masters level intern counsellor
Sarah is completing a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy and works under clinical supervision at Sojourn. Her approach is emotion focused, trauma informed and grounded in attachment theory, and she draws on AEDP, Emotionally Focused Therapy, somatic work, sand tray and systemic family therapy. Sarah sees individuals and couples through our low cost counselling program at $60 per session, with the first session free, which makes her a good option if cost has been holding you back.
View Sarah’s availability and book online.
If you are not sure who to book with, use the Find a Counsellor tool, browse all Sojourn counsellors, or contact us and we will help you find a good fit.
AEDP Counselling in Surrey and Online Across BC
Sojourn Counselling and Neurofeedback is located in Cloverdale, at Unit 211, 17696 65A Avenue, Surrey, BC, a short drive from Langley, White Rock and South Surrey, with free parking on site. Counsellors on our team also offer secure online counselling to clients anywhere in British Columbia, and AEDP translates well to video because so much of the work is about what you notice in yourself as you speak.
Fees and coverage
Sessions with a Registered Clinical Counsellor are $160 to $175 for 50 minutes. Intern sessions are $60, with the first session free. Many extended health plans reimburse RCC counselling, and we can direct bill through TELUS eClaims for a small service fee. Full details are on our fees and insurance page, and our guides on whether an RCC is covered by insurance in BC and how much a counsellor costs in Surrey answer the most common questions.
Why choose a Registered Clinical Counsellor for AEDP
Counselling is not a regulated profession in British Columbia, which means anyone can use the title. The RCC designation from the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors requires a master’s degree, supervised clinical hours, ongoing professional development and a code of ethics, and it is what most insurers look for. If that is new to you, what a Registered Clinical Counsellor is and whether counsellors are regulated in BC are worth five minutes before you book anywhere. At Sojourn, interns work under the supervision of an RCC who is also an Approved Clinical Supervisor.
Frequently Asked Questions About AEDP
What does AEDP stand for?
AEDP stands for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy. It was developed by Dr. Diana Fosha and is an attachment based, emotion focused approach that helps people process difficult feelings safely with an actively supportive therapist.
Is AEDP a type of trauma therapy?
Yes, AEDP was developed with trauma and attachment wounds in mind, though it is also used for anxiety, depression, grief, shame and relationship patterns. It does not require you to retell traumatic events in detail; the focus is on what happens in you now and on having a different, supported experience of those feelings.
How many AEDP sessions will I need?
There is no set number. The published research used a 16 session format, but real world counselling varies with what you are working on and what you want. Your counsellor will review progress with you openly so that continuing is a decision rather than a default.
What is the difference between AEDP and EMDR?
EMDR is a structured protocol that targets specific distressing memories using bilateral stimulation and has strong evidence for PTSD. AEDP works more with present moment emotion and the therapeutic relationship, and is less protocol driven. They are often used together, and Sojourn offers both.
Will I have to relive my trauma in AEDP?
No. AEDP is about being accompanied while you feel, at a pace you can stay present for, not about re-experiencing events. Your counsellor tracks your capacity closely and slows down or shifts focus whenever that is what you need.
Is AEDP evidence based?
AEDP has peer reviewed outcome research, published in the APA journal Psychotherapy in 2020 and 2022, showing large improvements that were maintained over twelve months. It has not yet been tested in a randomized controlled trial, so it is best described as research supported rather than proven superior to other approaches.
Can AEDP be done online?
Yes. AEDP is routinely practised by video, and the AEDP Institute delivers its own training online. Sojourn offers secure online counselling to clients anywhere in British Columbia.
What is metaprocessing in AEDP?
Metaprocessing means pausing after something shifts in a session to notice what it is like to have had that experience. In AEDP this is treated as a second round of change rather than a debrief, and it is one of the reasons many clients leave sessions feeling steadier rather than raw.
Are Sojourn counsellors certified in AEDP?
No. Jonathan Wieser integrates AEDP principles into an experiential, attachment based practice, and intern counsellor Sarah Ball draws on AEDP within an emotion focused approach. Full certification through the AEDP Institute is held by very few therapists in British Columbia, and we describe each counsellor’s training accurately rather than overstating it.
Is AEDP covered by extended health insurance in BC?
Coverage depends on the credential of your counsellor, not the approach used. Most extended health plans in BC reimburse sessions with a Registered Clinical Counsellor. Sessions with an intern are not usually covered, which is part of why they are offered at a reduced rate.
Book an AEDP Counselling Session in Surrey
If what you have read here fits, the next step is a first appointment where you and your counsellor decide together whether this approach is right for you. Book with Jonathan, book a low cost session with Sarah, or let us help you choose. You can also call 778-381-5868 or email info@sojourncounselling.com.