PSYCHOLOGICAL FORUM for ISTDP/EDT THERAPISTS
Traversing The Emotional Distance in Therapeutic Communication
Learn more about the Verbal Communication during a 6-week Online Course
Applying pressure effectively is one of the hardest skills to master in ISTDP. It asks the therapist to manage their own emotions, track the patient's moment-to-moment shifts, and stay fully present — all at the same time. Yet despite its clinical importance, we still lack a clear theoretical foundation to explain how and why it works.
This course offers two practical frameworks to fill that gap.
The first draws on the Psychology of Language. The words we choose create emotional closeness or distance. By understanding how language moves between the abstract and the concrete, therapists can learn to bring patients closer to their emotional experience — and recognize when a patient's words, defenses, or body language are signaling a retreat from it.
The second draws on Interoception in Neuroscience — our ability to sense, process, and respond to signals from within our own bodies. This inner attunement is foundational to emotional awareness, for both therapist and patient. Research shows that stronger interoceptive capacity is linked to lower anxiety and depression, and greater overall well-being.
Together, these two frameworks offer a unified picture: effective pressure is an invitation to move from abstract thinking toward direct, felt contact with one's inner life. This course will show you how both frameworks illuminate and widen the application of the verbal and bodily mechanisms behind successful therapeutic outcomes in ISTDP.
Course Outline
The course is delivered entirely online. You will have access to all course materials via a personal digital account.
Weekly learning is supported through short videos and reflective prompts. Each Friday, we meet in a live webinar to discuss and deepen the material.
Course Material
The course is based on ISTDP literature and contemporary psychological research on language, interoception, relatedness, and constructive learning processes.
All required materials are included in the course. No additional literature needs to be purchased.
The Digital Platform of Psychological Forum
OUR SHARED PURPOSE
If you have questions, please feel free to mail me.
I have created this platform as a space for professional exchange in Intensive Short-Term I have created this platform as a space for professional exchange in ISTDP, where clinical experience is brought into dialogue with psychological research.
The community is intended for licensed healthcare professionals working clinically with ISTDP who are currently in core training or have completed it. This shared foundation helps support a focused and meaningful exchange.
Here, you are invited to engage in thoughtful discussion around therapeutic processes, challenges, and ongoing learning. You will also receive invitations to workshops, webinars, and events—some free of charge, others offered at a modest fee.
The intention is to foster a respectful and clinically grounded environment, where reflection, confidentiality, and professional standards are maintained.
You are warmly welcome to join.
COURSE CONTENT
TRAVERSING THE EMOTIONAL DISTANCE
Learn more about Therapeutic Communication
Course registration opens in May 11st
Fridays: Live webinar at 12-13.30 pm US EDT and 12-13.30 pm CET
Monday-Thursday: Supervised independent learning
Course start: 2026-08-21
Course end: 2026-09-25
Language: English
Access: All course materials will be accessible via your personal digital account until Dec 31st, 2026.
Pedagogical Outline
The pedagogical format is designed to support how therapists actually learn—through repeated application, reflection, and refinement in clinical practice. The course integrates:
clearly defined learning objectives
focused instructional input
and practice-oriented reflection linked to participants’ own clinical work
Participants will have access to a personal digital platform with short, focused learning units (video and written material) that can be engaged with flexibly.
Between modules, brief prompts will guide participants to:
apply specific interventions in their sessions
observe shifts in closeness, distance, and emotional activation
reflect on their own use of language and attention
All learning activities are designed to fit real-life constraints—such as clinical workload, family responsibilities, geographic dispersion, and time zones—while supporting continuous learning beyond scheduled group contact.
This course does not use video clips of clients. Instead, the focus is on developing the ability to observe, reflect, and apply theoretical and clinical frameworks in practice. This format is chosen to support deeper integration of learning and longer-term retention.
Course Description
Language in therapy does not merely describe inner experience—it actively shapes it. In ISTDP, verbal interventions continuously regulate the patient’s level of:
emotional closeness
anxiety
and defensive distance
Small shifts in wording can move a patient:
closer to or further away from emotional experience
into or out of defensive processes
toward or away from transference activation
This course makes these processes explicit and clinically usable. You will learn how to:
Recognize how language creates distance (e.g., abstraction, generalization, lack of agency)
Use specific wording to increase emotional closeness (e.g., present-moment focus, bodily anchoring, relational direction)
Track how your interventions shift the patient’s attention, affect, and anxiety regulation
Calibrate language moment-to-moment depending on the patient’s capacity and level of resistance
Particular emphasis is placed on:
moving from narrative to immediate experience
linking language to interoceptive awareness
and increasing precision in how feelings, impulses, and defenses are articulated
By making these linguistic mechanisms explicit, therapists can work more deliberately with the micro-processes that facilitate emotional breakthrough.
Course Organizer
Maria Sandgren
Reg psychologist, PhD psychology
Cert ISTDP therapist
Stockholm, Sweden
If you have questions, please feel free to mail me.
The Digital Platform of Psychological Forum
OUR SHARED PURPOSE
I have created this platform as a space for professional exchange in Intensive Short-Term I have created this platform as a space for professional exchange in ISTDP, where clinical experience is brought into dialogue with psychological research.
The community is intended for licensed healthcare professionals working clinically with ISTDP who are currently in core training or have completed it. This shared foundation helps support a focused and meaningful exchange.
Here, you are invited to engage in thoughtful discussion around therapeutic processes, challenges, and ongoing learning. You will also receive invitations to workshops, webinars, and events—some free of charge, others offered at a modest fee.
The intention is to foster a respectful and clinically grounded environment, where reflection, confidentiality, and professional standards are maintained.
You are warmly welcome to join.
The Newsletter
Join the newsletter to receive selected reflections on clinical work, learning processes, and current research in ISTDP/EDT, with a focus on emotions, relatedness, and related topics.
Subscribers also receive early access to courses and webinars, occasional priority offers, and invitations to a monthly free webinar on different facets of ISTDP clinical work.
You will receive 1–2 newsletters per month.
You are warmly welcome to sign up.
Course Registration
Traversing the Emotional Distance is a 6-week online course for healthcare professionals working with ISTDP/EDT.
Applying therapeutic pressure effectively is one of the most complex skills in ISTDP, requiring moment-to-moment attunement to both the patient’s emotional shifts and the therapist’s own internal responses. Yet the mechanisms behind how it works are rarely made explicit.
This course introduces two practical frameworks to deepen clinical precision: psychology of language and interoception. Psychology of language shows how wording shapes emotional closeness and distance, and how shifts between abstract and concrete communication can open or close access to feeling. Interoception refers to the ability to sense and interpret internal bodily states, a key foundation for emotional awareness in both therapist and patient.
Together, these frameworks clarify how therapeutic pressure supports movement from abstract thinking toward direct emotional contact, strengthening precision and effectiveness in ISTDP practice.
Course format and access
The course is delivered entirely online and designed to fit clinical workload and everyday life constraints. All materials are accessible via a personal digital account, and participants can study flexibly between weekly live sessions.
The course includes weekly live online meetings for integration, reflection, and clinical discussion.
Access to course materials is available until last of January 2026.
Dates
Start on Friday, August, 21st (live session: introduction, presentation, and lecture)
Live webinars each Friday until September, 25th
Traversing the Emotional Distance is a 6-week online course for healthcare professionals working with ISTDP/EDT.
Applying therapeutic pressure effectively is one of the most complex skills in ISTDP, …
Requirements
This course is designed for licensed healthcare professionals working clinically with ISTDP.
To participate, you should:
be a licensed healthcare professional (e.g., social worker, nurse, physician, psychologist)
be working clinically with ISTDP (at least part-time)
be currently in ISTDP core training or have completed it
Participants will be asked to provide documentation of their professional license and core training upon registration.
Please register and secure your place in the course.
Traversing the Emotional Distance
A 6-week Online Course for ISTDP/EDT practitioners
More Information & Invite to Free Webinar
Fill in your contact information and you will immediately receive a detailed schedule for the course.
You are also welcome to attend webinar about the basics foundation of verbal interventions scheduled in - NOT DECIDED YET, probably August on Friday, 7th at 12-13 pm CET, and 12-13 pm US EDT.
Course Organizer
Maria Sandgren
Reg psychologist, PhD psychology,
cert ISTDP therapist
Links
Homepage (therapy): Psychological Forum
Blog (not active): Psychology & ISTDP
Google Scholar: Scientific articles
A Perspective on Learning and Development
In both my clinical work and teaching, learning is grounded in shared attention. When attention is directed and shared, impressions become more nuanced and experience more available for reflection and integration.
In this sense, teaching and psychotherapy are not primarily about the transmission of information, but about creating the conditions in which perception, understanding, and skills can develop through direct experience and enable desired change.
About me
I am a licensed psychologist with a PhD in psychology, and I have been running a private practice since 1997. Alongside my clinical work, I have taught psychology as an assistant professor and senior lecturer at universities.
I am a certified practitioner in Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy. I completed my core training (2012–2015) with Allan Abbass and Jon Frederickson, and later advanced training (2021–2022) with Allan Abbass and Joel Town.
Over the years, I have integrated findings from research on learning, language, emotion, social interaction, and stress and trauma into my therapeutic work. This integration has shaped my particular interest in how attention, language, and bodily awareness influence emotional processing in psychotherapy.
My research background includes work in music and political psychology, focusing on personality, learning and development, values, and the psychological basis of political orientation. I am a co-author of a recent publication on an intervention study of choral singing, which examined cognitive changes in older adults using surveys, clinical testing, and neuroimaging.
Both my teaching and research have contributed to a broader perspective on human functioning—one that extends beyond a purely clinical model and informs how I approach psychotherapy and training.
I work in Swedish and English, and I also read and understand French and German. I live and practice in Stockholm, and I am originally from Umeå in northern Sweden.
Outside of my clinical and academic work, I am engaged in fine art photography and have published a photobook, where I explore psychological themes through visual expression. A major theme in my art is the concept of caring in private and work life. At present I am working on a photobook Broken Light depicting grief, how the self senses time and life changes after a personal loss. I seek to portray how my “self” remains a subjective constant through time — thinking, feeling, and acting in relation to the definitive loss. It is easy to flee, but in doing so, the depth and intimacy of what has been lost also vanish. The process of grief thus becomes a form of care for the shared life that was but is no longer.
(C) Maria Sandgren Psychological Forum Sweden 2026