Tracking Clients Using the Triangle of Experience

Name: Tracking Clients Using the Triangle of Experience
Uploaded: 2026-03-09T03:38:38.000Z
Description: Deborah Korn explains how the Triangle of Experience helps therapists track emotions and defenses during trauma processing.

Deborah Korn explains how the Triangle of Experience helps therapists track emotions and defenses during trauma processing.

From the course

EMDR for Complex Trauma

The next map that I want to introduce you to is from AEDP, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, Diana Fosha's model. This is a model that really focuses in on attachment and affect. And there's a map within AEDP called the triangle of experience that basically just provides a roadmap for tracking your client moment to moment with regard to whether they are in a core affective state that's going to move, that's going to transform through processing or whether they have moved up into an anxious and defensive place where processing is not going to go anywhere. And so as you look at the triangle of experience at the bottom we have the core affective phenomenon. Sadness and grief, anger, longing, other attachment related affects, positive affects, surprise, joy, interest, excitement. When our client is at the bottom of the triangle, processing should be moving. Right? These are adaptive emotions that when we pay attention to them, when we lean into them, when we create enough safety, these emotions will process through to completion. However, when we're working with complex trauma survivors, there's all kinds of phobias, all kinds of fears that kick in once we start to approach emotion. Once we start to increase arousal in any way and before we know it our client is moving to the top of the triangle which we refer to as the defensive pole and at the top of the triangle you get red signal affects. You get anxiety, panic, fear, shame about what they're experiencing. So you will see anxiety in your client's body, Again their leg starts bouncing, they start pulling at their sleeve. You can tell that they're starting to get slightly dysregulated as they lean into the traumatic memory, as they lean into certain affective phenomenon. And before you know it, sometimes in a split second they've moved to the upper left side of the triangle to defensive action. They start to engage in certain behaviors that are all about thwarting the emotion, pushing it away, right? Disconnecting from the affect. They might shift from feeling sad to feeling angry. They might move away from anger by getting weepy and teary. They might start talking a lot. So it is helpful as you are engaged in reprocessing with clients to be able to track, am I at the bottom of the triangle? If I'm at the bottom of the triangle and we're doing okay, I can stay out of the way and the processing will move things forward. But if the client has gone up to the defensive pole, if they're getting anxious because they're getting overwhelmed, they're out of their window of tolerance, we need to intervene to bring them back down to their optimal arousal zone, back to the bottom of the triangle where the processing will move them forward.