AEDP Therapy in NYC: Experiential, Emotion-Focused Healing

AEDP is a therapy designed for healing, not just for coping. It is an experiential, emotion-focused, attachment-based approach to deep emotional pain, and it rests on something we now know from both neuroscience and clinical experience: emotions that once felt too overwhelming to face on your own can soften and transform when you no longer have to face them alone. Whether you are working through trauma, long-standing emotional pain, loneliness, or the quiet sense that something inside you has been waiting a long time to be felt, AEDP offers a way through that takes both your pain and your innate capacity for healing seriously.

What Is AEDP Therapy?

AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) was developed by Dr. Diana Fosha and is grounded in attachment theory, affective neuroscience, emotion theory, body-focused approaches, and the science of transformational change. At its center is a clinical insight that has reshaped how many of us think about emotional healing: it is the aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotion, more than the emotion itself, that does the lasting damage.

So in AEDP, the therapeutic relationship is not a backdrop to the work. It is the work. Together, we build what AEDP calls a safe haven and a secure base, a relationship steady enough that you no longer have to manage difficult feelings by yourself. From inside that relationship, the emotions that have been hard to face, including grief, fear, shame, longing, and anger, can be moved through and transformed rather than only managed or suppressed. This is what the model describes as the undoing of aloneness, and it is the heart of the work.

AEDP also assumes something hopeful about you. It calls this transformance: an innate drive in every person toward healing, growth, and the fullest expression of who you are, even when it has gone quiet under years of survival. Much of AEDP is about creating the conditions in which transformance can come forward again. The aim is not only to relieve suffering but to support the kind of flourishing that comes when suffering is transformed into vitality, connection, and a renewed sense of self.

AEDP is a transdiagnostic approach. Research has shown it to be effective for trauma, depression, emotion dysregulation, painful interpersonal patterns, and chronic experiential avoidance, and to enhance positive functioning such as self-compassion, well-being, and self-esteem. It is practiced by thousands of clinicians worldwide and is supported by ongoing empirical research.

Who AEDP Therapy Is For

AEDP tends to be a strong fit for adults who are ready for emotional work, and who want a therapy that meets them inside what they feel, not only around it. People often arrive at AEDP when they recognize something like the following in themselves:

A desire to be deeply emotionally met in therapy, in a way that goes beyond being heard or understood.
A readiness to actually feel what has been there, with a sense that lasting change is going to require something deeper than insight alone.
Long-standing emotional pain that has been carried mostly in private, often without anyone realizing how heavy it has been.
A particular kind of loneliness that does not lift even when surrounded by others, and a quiet longing to be truly seen.
Difficult emotions, such as grief, shame, fear, anger, or numbness, that have been hard to face or hard to feel through, and a wish to no longer be alone with them.

If any of this resonates, AEDP may offer the kind of work you have been hoping for.

AEDP and Trauma

AEDP is a powerful approach for working with the emotional aftermath of trauma, and especially with attachment trauma, the kind that grows out of relationships in which you were not consistently seen, soothed, or felt with. When trauma originated in the absence of attuned connection, it often heals most deeply through the experience of attuned connection now. The AEDP Institute describes this in terms of corrective emotional and relational experiences that mobilize positive change in the brain through neuroplasticity.

Within our work, this looks like turning toward the emotions that trauma left behind, the grief that had no witness, the fear that had no one to turn to, the longing that had to be hidden, and meeting them together. Felt and met within a safe relationship, these emotions can move through and transform, rather than remaining frozen. AEDP works well alongside other trauma-focused approaches, including EMDR and somatic methods, when an integrative approach is what serves you best.

AEDP Therapy for Chinese & Asian American Adults

For many Chinese and Asian American adults, the emotional life is the part of the self that received the least care growing up. Feelings were often treated as a distraction from what really mattered, getting things done, performing well, taking care of the family, surviving hardship. Many of us grew up in homes where problems got solved but feelings did not get held, where a parent’s instinct in the face of our pain was to fix, to redirect, or to tell us to be strong, rather than to slow down and feel with us.

Over time, this can leave a quiet kind of disconnection. You may know what you think more easily than what you feel. You may notice your body only when it hurts. You may have learned to manage everything on your own because nobody really came toward your emotions, so eventually you stopped going there yourself. This is not anyone’s fault. It is what so many of us inherited.

AEDP is, in many ways, the opposite of what so many of us grew up with. It is therapy that slows down, turns toward what you feel, and stays with it together. As a bilingual AEDP therapist working in both English and 中文, I help you reconnect with the emotional life that was set aside long ago, and through that reconnection, with your body, your aliveness, and the parts of yourself that have been waiting to be felt all along.

What to Expect in AEDP Sessions With Me

AEDP sessions feel different from more analytical or talk-focused therapy. Here is what the experience tends to feel like with me.

We slow down and turn toward what you feel

Rather than spending sessions describing what happened in your week from a distance, we slow down and notice what is alive in your body and your heart right now. What is moving as you tell me this? What is here, just under the surface? These present-moment shifts are where the work actually happens.

You are not alone in it

I am emotionally present with you, not a neutral observer. When you turn toward something painful, I turn toward it with you. The emotions that once felt unbearable to feel alone tend to become workable, even moving, when they are felt together.

We make room for healing emotions, not only painful ones

In AEDP, relief, gratitude, joy, tenderness, pride, the feelings that arise as something painful begins to shift, are treated as part of the healing, not as a footnote. We make space to notice and savor these moments. They are how new patterns get laid down inside you.

Insight follows experience

Understanding still matters, but in AEDP it tends to arrive after the experience, not before. We feel something through, and its meaning becomes clear from the inside out. The understanding that comes this way tends to be felt rather than only thought, and it tends to stay.

My AEDP Training

I am a Level 2 AEDP therapist, having completed both the Immersion course and the Essential Skills training at the AEDP Institute, the formal training pathway established by Dr. Diana Fosha. AEDP is a core part of how I work, integrated alongside other experiential, attachment-based, and trauma-focused approaches.

Logistics

Sessions. Sessions are 45 minutes, typically held weekly. Some clients meet twice a week for deeper work.

In-person and online. I see clients both at my office in Manhattan and online over Zoom, available to clients located anywhere in New York State.

Fees and insurance. The fee is $175 per session. I am an out-of-network (OON) provider and do not bill insurance directly. I can provide a monthly superbill that you can submit to your insurance for possible reimbursement, with the amount varying by plan.

Sliding scale. A limited number of sliding scale spots are available. If cost feels like a barrier, please bring it up during our consultation. I’d rather have an honest conversation than have it quietly stand in the way.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is AEDP different from other kinds of therapy I may have tried?

AEDP is experiential and emotion-focused, meaning the work happens through feeling and moving through emotions in the present moment, inside a relationship where you are not alone in what you feel. Many clients describe AEDP sessions as emotionally immediate and deeply met, in a way that reaches places talk-based reflection sometimes does not. AEDP also draws on attachment theory and affective neuroscience, which shape both how the work unfolds and how change is understood to happen.

I am not very in touch with my emotions. Can AEDP still work for me?

Yes. AEDP doesn’t require you to arrive already in touch with your feelings. Part of the work, especially early on, is gently helping you find your way back to an emotional life that may have been set aside long ago. We move at a pace that respects where you are, including with you having mixed feelings about feeling at all.

Is AEDP only for trauma?

No. AEDP is powerful for trauma, especially attachment trauma, but it is also a deeply effective approach for emotional pain that does not fit neatly into a trauma label: long-standing loneliness, grief, shame, disconnection from yourself, the lingering effects of an emotionally absent or critical family.

Will I have to cry every session?

There is no AEDP rule that says you must cry, or feel intensely, in any given session. What we do is stay close to what is real for you in the moment. Sometimes that is tears. Sometimes it is anger, longing, or even unexpected warmth or relief. The work is not about performing emotions; it is about being honest about what is here.

Can I do AEDP in Mandarin?

Yes. I work in both English and 中文, and many emotions live more naturally in one language than the other. Whichever language helps you say and feel what is most true is welcome here.

Begin When You’re Ready

If something in you is asking to finally not be alone with what you carry, that is reason enough to reach out. A free consultation is a low-pressure way to see how it feels to talk with me before deciding anything.