Deliberate Practice in Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy

By Natasha C. N. Prenn, Dr. Hanna Levenson PhD, Alexandre Vaz

Deliberate practice exercises help trainees achieve competence in essential accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy skills and apply them in a variety of contexts while honing their own personal style.

These exercises present role-playing scenarios in which two trainees act as a client and a therapist, switching back and forth under the guidance of a supervisor. The therapist improvises appropriate and authentic responses to client statements organized into three difficulty levels--beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

Each of the first 12 exercises focuses on a single skill to help clients access core emotions, process past traumas, and build secure attachments. The skills include moment-to-moment tracking, validating and reframing anxieties and defenses, and initiating portrayals (i.e., speaking to an imagined other or self). Two comprehensive exercises follow in which trainees integrate these skills into a single session.

Step-by-step instructions guide participants through the exercises, identify criteria for mastering the skills, and explain how to monitor and adjust difficulty. Guidelines to help trainers and trainees get the most out of training are also provided.

To demonstrate how deliberate practice can be fully integrated into a professional curriculum, this series features exercises developed and refined within the clinical training curriculum at the Sentio online/hybrid marriage and family therapy (MFT) therapist training program in California, which is where we started developing this series. These exercises, which have been tested at clinical training sites around the world, are used to enhance clinical outcomes within the first hybrid MFT program approved by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences to fully integrate deliberate practice into its entire curriculum. By integrating these models into its hybrid MFT program in California, Sentio University demonstrates that therapist training graduate programs can use deliberate practice to bridge the gap between theory and clinical mastery through repetitive, feedback-informed practice to support the development of modern, outcome-focused clinicians.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1433842904
• ISBN13: 9781433842900
• Release Date: June 2025
• Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 1.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 8.5" x 10.9"