August 26 - November 25, 2025
Nuance and Attunement in the IFS Model
Presented by Stephanie Mitchell
Advanced Training in IFS
“This course has really enriched my ability to be within the IFS framework with a much more relational lens and with clients whose highly-protected systems have made required a more finessed and subtle use of the model. It has been almost seven years since first getting trained, and this course with its recorded demos, transcripts and explication of the interactions using IFS concepts has been invaluable to leveling me up as a clinician. “
– William
“This was such a rich course, which really helped me to get in touch with the ‘subtle’ agenda my parts can still hold in being with clients. Stephanie really taught me to become aware of those more subtle agenda’s and to rrrreally slow down. Thanks so much!”
– Anna Thomas
“I want to take this class many more times! It deeply resonates in my veins and I want it to sink in deeper and deeper. Shame is a verb keeps reverberating in my system.”
– Cara Jones
“Engaging with the IFS Healers program has been a transformative experience. I deeply appreciate the profound depth of the material. It’s truly made me feel more confident in my abilities and flexible in adapting IFS various client needs”
– IFS Healers student, Spring 2025
🌟 Are you interested in learning more relational ways of using IFS with clients at the “pointy end of the distress spectrum”?
🌟 Do you have a good grasp of IFS and how to be with clients in all the phases of the healing process but still have certain clients that you feel uncertain or stuck with.
- Working with our most challenging tor-mentors.
- Clients with the most skilfully evasive protectors, and the most wounded, ‘needy’, and distrustful exiles.
- Clients that the usual approaches in IFS don’t work well with.
This course focuses on exclusive use of IFS protocol without blending other modalities, but deepens our understanding of how to stay unblended from our own parts, understand our clients’ complex systems through an Interpersonal Neurobiology lens and find clarity and courage to be with even our most challenging clients.
7 Class Dates
August 26th 2025
September 9th & 23rd 2025
October 10th & 21st
November 11th & 25th
Times August - October
1 – 4pm Eastern Time (New York)
10am – 1pm Pacific Time (Oregon)
6 – 9pm UK (London)
Times November
12am – 3pm Eastern Time (New York)
9am – 12am Pacific Time (Oregon)
5 – 8pm UK (London)
* Please note: In November, the course will take place 1 hour earlier for participants in the US, Europe and UK due to daylight saving time changes:
Price
USD $1300
Payment Plan
$200 USD deposit + 4x $325 USD
Deposit is refundable until July 31.
No refunds after Aug 1
* This is a virtual training, ET time zone (please take into account the time zones where you live and plan for the end of daylight savings time on November 2nd for US and London/Europe October 26th, 2025).
❗Enrol early as there is a lot of pre-reading before the course to immerse yourself in to get the most out of our time together.
❗This course is eligible for 21 CEUs with IFS Institute – pending final approval from IFSI
Cancellation Policy:
For full refund of registration fee, an USD$125 admin fee will be applied.
Payment may be refunded up to 4 weeks prior to the start date of the course. There will be no refunds 4 weeks prior to the start date.
Partial Scholarships:
To accommodate participants from diverse economic backgrounds, we will offer significantly reduced fees and a limited number of scholarships. Individuals with limited financial resources or experiencing financial harship will also be eligible for a reduced fee or a payment plan.
Each 3-hour full group meeting will be recorded, and the recordings will be made available only to participants. At the end of the course, you will receive a certificate of completion provided you have attended 90% of the live sessions – i.e., you may miss two of the 3 hour sessions.
Graduates are recommended to refer to themselves as offering IFS-Informed Therapy.
21 hours of live experiential sessions — including demos, meditations, practice groups, personal work and Q&A
All teaching lectures are pre-recorded
You’ll receive 14 hours of rich content to watch between meetings — including lectures, readings, and practice invitations. Learn at your own pace, reflect, complete homework, and prepare questions before each live session, where we focus on practice, integration, and Q&A.
Concrete strategies for working with shame, transference, dissociation, and clients who don’t fit the “classic” IFS model — grounded in real-world therapeutic experience.
A curated library of academic papers, demo videos, transcripts, and topic-specific lectures on attachment, psychotherapy skills, and interpersonal neurobiology
Learn with Stephanie Mitchell — a seasoned therapist and IFS educator with 35+ years of lived and clinical experience, known for her clarity, courage, and compassion in even the most complex spaces.
Shape shifting parts
Systems who find fault in everything the therapist does
Shame saturated systems where the more healing that happens the more the person seems to hate themselves
Systems committed to ‘not knowing’ what is inside despite the managers that bring them to therapy,
Clusters of protectors who form alliances to step-up one after the other, so you never get to the exiles
Systems who use mania, psychosis, and extreme dissociation, to keep away from the pain of the exiles
Exiles who think they are dead, and protectors afraid to go to that deadness/void
Parts who hate IFS and don’t want you to use the word ‘part’
Parts who believe that Self is an abuser like all adults, or parts who want 100% guarantee of safety from anything happening in life before letting you go to the inner world.
Parts who use transference and projection as part of their healing journey, and along the way become deeply attached to the therapist, expecting perfection and hoping the therapist will magically be able to heal their exiles if she/he/they just love these parts enough. And on the converse side, they expect rejection and hatred from the therapist so the client gets caught in the push pull of wanting attachment and terror as connection, and perceiving rejection at every turn.
Work with Self like and spiritual bypassing parts who say they are Self and feel shame if called out.
And any other populations you find yourself working with and needing help with.
- Learn to slow down to a snail’s pace with some clients to witness the moment-to- moment feelings, thoughts, sensations, beliefs, reactions that occurred at the time of wounding so that a more thorough healing can take place. (So in the long run it is faster healing – even though it looks slower).
- Expand your understanding of what it means to “be the Self to the client’s system” for a period of time when they have little access to Self-energy
- Gain clarity about how parts cascade on each other to create stuckness, confusion and seeming difficulty in one area of a person’s life – when it is actually to do with a different issue once we gain clarity.
- Work with your own parts who get triggered by your clients and begin to understand your own ‘Achilles heel’ as a therapist and which parts need your care.
- Learn embodied ways of “being with” our clients that don’t use “somatic techniques” but attune from a place of palpable Self-led intuition.
Meet Stephanie Mitchell
– Certified Level 3 IFS Therapist
– Over 100 hours of in-person training with Dick Schwartz
– International teacher and presenter on IFS & trauma
– Supervised by IFS Institute Lead trainers for over 7 years, including Mariel Pastor, Paul Neustadt and Rina Dubin
Stephanie is well positioned to offer this training because of her own deep healing with IFS.
Having a tenacious system of parts who have been dedicated to ‘full healing’ of her extensive early developmental, trauma, neglect and abuse, she has undertaken over 700 hours of her own IFS work with a senior IFS Practitioner.
Stephanies embodies the grounded energy that is possible when our parts allow us to go to their core wounding and unburden.
In this course Stephanie briefly shares her own experiences of transference enactment, unbearable times of feeling “crazy”, and how she made it out the other side to a Self-led life that is deeply connected to her parts.
This course is enriched by significant academic rigor and the student is invited to take both a deep dive into the research and then allow that to stay on the side of their therapeutic work as they move to a right-brained connection to their clients.
“You answered some of the most difficult questions we travel with out of our Level 1. We want answers AND we also want to know the know-how and you’ve done that. You’ve expanded much further beyond “just check with your parts” and given us depth and nuance.”
– Alanna Kaplan
“I can really trust that my client’s system knows what it needs. This course reinforced that for me with tangible experiences.
I wish my mom had a therapist like you with so much compassion and knowledge.”
– Klara Veer
“You are so generous giving examples from your own experience and personal process. I’m very appreciative of that.”
– Eileen Sweeney
“Patience, Perception, Persistance – it has all grown deeper.”
– Sylvia Schyberg
“I now have a sense of how to stay long enough in the relational field.”
– Franco
Who is this Workshop for:
Therapists, Psychologists, Counsellors, Social Workers, Coaches, Practitioners, as well as those seeking to do their own inner healing work.
Prerequisites:
This course is for those who have completed an IFS training that includes at least six practice group sessions, with a minimum of four supervised by a program assistant, and who have begun using IFS with clients.
Graduates of IFSI Level 1, IFS Skills Immersion (Stephanie Mitchell), IFS Comprehansive (David Stern), Stepping Stones, or similar programs are welcome to apply.
(If you are an experienced therapist and have over 50-100 of your own personal IFS therapy with an IFS therapist or Practitioner, but have not been able to get into one of the trainings mentioned above, you can also join this course)
Each module builds on the last and you will have access to reading and video material to watch/read between the bi-weekly workshops. These resources will continue to be available to you at the end of the course.
Each person will also be invited to participate in break out groups and to reflect on their own parts as part of the learning environment.
Each participant will be expected to work on with their own inner system during practical exercises. There are no ‘role-plays’ only ‘real-plays’.
Please note: This course is not affiliated with the Internal Family Systems Institute (IFSI) nor is it a substitute for nor equivalent to the IFS Institutes Level 1, 2 or 3 trainings. To become IFS certified, you must complete the IFS Institute’s Level 1 training and complete the certification process.
🌟 Week 1
Overview of
Interpersonal Neurobiology
Attachment Theory and
Social Baseline theory
And why it is important for working in the therapist/client relational field with IFS
🌟 Week 2
Working with clients who ‘can’t go inside’ or say they ‘have no Self’ inside their system.
Understand the double bind theory of schizophrenia
Addressing concerns with parts who don’t like IFS and parts language
Moving seamlessly between Implicit Direct access and Insight – demos and practice groups
🌟 Week 3
Working with highly protected systems including those with obfuscating parts, ‘puppet masters’, parts who use psychosis or dissociation as a protective function
Understand Alan Schore’s Right Brain Psychotherapy
Understand that some systems need some help with mentalizing their experience
Learning to distinguish between following and listening to what is under what is said and offering back what is implicit
Understanding implicit and explicit memory from a neurobiology perspective so you can work with clients who “have no memories”
🌟 Week 4
Learning about the wisdom of transference and how to work with clients whose parts use projection and enactment onto the therapist as part of their healing path.
Gain a robust understanding of Transference and Countertransference through the IFS Lens
Understand the both the exiles and protectors involved in the dance of transference and learn why parts use this enactment as part of their healing
Unburden parts of yourself who are afraid of/dislike clients who seem, ‘contrary’, ‘needy’, ‘argumentative’,
Understand how to recognise enactments that are not obvious at first glance e.g. clients need endless reassurance or where you are doing all the work,
Learn how to bring the relational field to the work through a parts lens
🌟 Week 5
Understand how got polyvagal approaches to co-regulation/self-regulation have been co-opted by the Three Phased school of thought, to turn the Polyvagal research on its head in the implementation of ‘social engagement system’
Learn how IFS uses the social engagement/ventral vagal system differently
Understand why IFS doesn’t use grounding techniques and how what we do is more effective for helping clients’ parts to unblend and trust their Self energy
Understand the Window of Tolerance through the IFS lens and learn to work with parts who use upregulation as well as parts who use collapse/faun/freeze.
Work with your own parts who fear dysregulated clients
🌟 Week 6
Learn why shame doesn’t simply go away when we focus on working with shaming and shamed parts
Learn what does help to begin to loosen up the shame held in the system
Understand the preverbal origins of shame and how to move safely towards pre-verbal wounds that are often outside of explicit memory
Explore and work with our own parts who don’t want to shame our clients or are afraid of our clients’ shame.
Learn how shame absolutely can be healed, contrary to popular belief in therapy circles that shame is a lifelong difficulty.
🌟 Week 7
What does the Self-led life look like? Is full healing possible?
The Self-led therapist and the Self-led life – hope for full healing and harmonious inner and outer relationships
In week 7 we:
Debunk some of the myths of the “Self-led life”
Debunk the ideas around “Speaking for parts rather than from our parts”
Learn skills for remaining Self-led in session and in our daily relationships
Learn skills for unblending so we can speak for our parts with courage and clarity
Understanding speaking for parts and social justice