The dyadic regulation of affect

Accelerated Experiential-Dynamic Psychotherapy integrates experiential, relational, and psychodynamic elements. Deep authentic affective experience and its regulation through coordinated emotional interchanges between patient and therapist are viewed as key transformational agents. When maintaining attachment with caregivers necessitates excluding particular affects, a patient's capacity to regulate emotion becomes compromised. Being in an emotionally alive therapeutic relationship enables patients to better tolerate and communicate affective states; doing so, in turn, fosters security, openness, and intimacy in their other relationships. A clinical vignette will illustrate how using the therapist's affect, and focusing on the patient's experience of it, contributes to the repair of affect regulatory difficulties.