H. Jacquie Ye-Perman, Ph.D.
IA & NY State Licensed Psychologist,
AEDP™ Institute Adjunct Faculty,
Certified AEDP Therapist & Supervisor
Offers tele-healthy sessions (psychotherapy via secure online platform) throughout Iowa, New York, and Florida.
Contact me for a free 15-minutes consultation, or other inquiries:
Email: drhjperman@gmail.com, Phone: 641-812-2990
Welcome to my website!
I currently reside in Grinnell, Iowa, offering individual and couples therapy, as well as clinical supervision and training for both English-speaking and Chinese-speaking communities. Grew up in China, I completed my professional education in Canada and the U.S. My past twenty years of working experience consist of working with diverse clients in settings such as college counseling centers, hospitals, community crisis centers, and most recently private practice. Being trained in various therapeutic approaches, in the past twelve years I have focused on the practice of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Therapy (AEDP), which showed me not only change is possible, but also how to facilitate change, step by step.
The practice of psychotherapy is a professionally gratifying and personally healing journey for me. Everyday I feel honored to accompany my fellow human beings, undo their aloneness in the moment of darkness, pain, and loss, and help them find strength and resources towards the light at the end of the tunnel. As I witness their resilience and healing, and their path from surviving to thriving, I am often deeply moved and invigorated.
Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with my family, reading history books, traveling around the world to experience nature and different cultures.
Our ‘true self’ emerges by fully experiencing and processing our emotions in the presence of a ‘true other’.— Diana Fosha, PHD
Individual Therapy
AEDP psychotherapy is about change. I work with clients who feel overwhelmed by crisis, worries and fears, clients who are weighted down by chronic pain, grief and aloneness, clients who are disoriented by transitions and multiple stressors, and clients who lost trust in themselves and others during period of trauma. I understand that when they reach out to me, they are leaning into a sense of hope, hope for change, no matter how small the glimmer seems.
My work is around identifying their hope and motivation, gathering their resources (the therapy space being one), so the clients can work towards the change they are longing for. A big part of this process is to help the clients to find the direction through reconnecting with their body and emotions, which speak the importance truth about who they are and what they need. It is also to remove the barriers, including external obstacles and prejudice, old coping mechanisms that no longer work, and old ways of approaching the world that limits them receiving from love and support.
Different from the practice of some traditional talk therapies, my work as an AEDP therapist has a lot to do with understanding and co-regulating individuals’ emotional brain and nervous system. Often clients asked why they rationally know one thing, yet they often choose the other, sometimes doing so without “thinking”. This is because our emotional brain has its own pathway to impact our behaviors. Only when we trace those pathways, find out about how they were imprinted in our early childhood, and during critical moments such as trauma, we can “decode” the impacts and help our nervous system to access safety and wellness through possible new and more balanced alternative ways.
AEDP also recognizes that the experience of unwanted and unbearable aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotions is by itself traumatizing, and often the cause of psychopathology. Such experiences pose massive challenges to our nervous system, lead to flight-fight-freeze reactions both during and long after the event. Therefore, I understand that hyper-vigilance and disconnection from our bod/emotions and intimate others, can stem from the instincts of self-protection. In such cases, building a new sense of safety, both internally and externally/interpersonally with therapist is the first and the key step towards change and healing.
My work also largely focus on what feels alive and important for my clients in the present moment, because change happens in here and now. I make space for clients’ good feelings, when things feel right to them, when they have a sense of achievement in our work and in their life, as joy and sense of calmness point us towards direction of personal wellness and emotional truth, offer us energy and fuel for further growth. Throughout this process, I serve as a companion, guide, and advocate, supporting my clients to move towards the life in which they feel confident, fulfilled, and connected.
Together we can work on:
- Understanding your bodily and emotional reactions, managing stress and chronic health concerns, improving emotion regulation
- Reducing symptoms of anxiety, depression, disordered eating, obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors
- Healing from trauma (including early childhood trauma and stress from specific trauma events)
- Building healthy and satisfying relationships
- Navigating life transitions and cross-cultural adjustment
- Addressing negative experiences and their impacts associated with being discriminated based on one’s cultural identities and social positions, for instance: physical and mental disability, ethnic and cultural minorities, foreign nationals, and LGBTQ.
Self-care Tools:
Mindfulness & Stress Reduction:
I find mindfulness a useful tool for cognitive management and emotion regulation, and to address specific issues such as stress and sleep difficulties. Mindfulness practice in combination with other self-care tools, such as psychotherapy, yoga, Tai-Chi, group music making/singing/dancing, medication, can achieve the best effects.
– Book: Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
– Book (audio available): The Art of Mindful Living: How to Bring Love, Compassion, and Inner Peace into Your Daily Life by Thich Nhat Hanh
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread;
remade all the time, made new.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
Couples Therapy
In the fast changing world, it is increasingly challenging for us to maintain a healthy loving relationship, yet not less beneficial than our parents’ generations.
Marriage researcher John Gottman demonstrated in his study, that even successful marriages couples disagree with 70% of the issues, what matters is how they talk about their disagreement. Indeed, whether we can handle our differences with openness and respect, communicate our emotional needs effectively, hold on to ourselves during moments of stress and also stay connected with on our partner, actively repair when we cause hurt and disappointment, those factors often predict the success of the marriage.
The good news is, all these can be learned. Although I had witnessed plenty of examples of failed marriages in my early life, I have learned first from my training and then witnessed in my work and personal life, that building a lasting love bond is a possible and concrete learning process.
Trained primarily by EFT for Couples and AEDP for couples, I work on understanding the positions of both partners and their deep longings underneath those positions. I help them to effectively communicate their emotional needs in the way that can be heard and responded by their partner. I understand that the lack of emotional safety can come from many sources inside the relationship and outside the relationship, including from past trauma. Ultimately I help couples to reconnect with each other and re-new their love, in a place that honors their marriage and also whom they are as individuals.
I work with both same-sex and opposite sex couples.
Self-help resources:
Book: The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships, John Gottman, Ph.D.
Book (audio available): Loving Like You Mean It: Use the Power of Emotional Mindfulness to Transform Your Relationships, Ronald J. Frederick, PhD.
Supervision/Consultation
As a certified AEDP supervisor, I provide individual and group consultation for therapists who are interested in growing their clinical skills, particularly related to, but not limited to the practice of AEDP therapy approach.
My approach of supervision/consultation is directed by AEDP supervision approach and centered around the consultee’s interests of growth. I work on providing perspectives around interventions that can be more effective and ”AEDP” as well as interventions that is already effective and “AEDP”, with the goals of both amplifying consultee’s strength and their clinical awareness, and adding new perspective/tools to their work. I also assist consultee to explore the factors of cultural influences and minority identities that would impact the sense of connection and power dynamic in their therapist-client dyads.
I currently provide AEDP supervision group for BIPOC therapists, AEDP Supervision Group with Special Interests on Trans-generational Trauma and AEDP Supervision Group with Special Interests on Working with Emotions in the Context of Asian Cultures
Training & Recent Projects
I have taught various courses on AEDP, including Immersion, Essential Skills, Core-training courses in the U.S., China, and online. I also present my AEDP work at international conferences and wrote about it. Please refer to this link for my information in relation to the AEDP Institute: https://aedpinstitute.org/faculty/h-jacquie-ye-perman-phd/
Book translation: To help the learning of my trainees in China, I co-translated with Yong Xu, M.D. the book “the Transforming Power of Affects: A Model for Accelerated Change” by Diana Fosha. Ph.D. It is published by People’s University of China Press and its Chinese version is 情感的转化力量：AEDP的疗愈之路.
The book included a chapter I wrote based on my clinical work with a Chinese client: Ye-Perman, H. J. (2024). 和一位来自中国的来访者的疗愈工作：石头终于落地的感觉（The Healing Work With A Client From China: The feeling of the rock finally landed).
I also published a paper recently on my work in relation to trans-generational trauma healing and working with Asian clients titled Transformation of trans-generational trauma：A cross-cultural study” on Transformance Journal.