Register for a package of 3 classes with Colleen West!
What to Do When Clients Can’t Go Inside: A series of 3 Classes:
1 - Building Relationship with Complex Systems (May 17, 12-3 EST)
2 - Implicit and Explicit Direct Access: Essential Skills (May 31, 12-3 EST)
3 - Implicit and Explicit Direct Access: Practice! (June 7, 12-3 EST)
We would love to invite you to watch Colleen and Mel talking about Complex Systems in this video.
TIME: Fridays 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT/ 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM PDT
Building Relationship with Complex Systems: Survival Kit for IFS Therapists
Frequently IFS doesn’t go as smoothly as it did in your asic training!
Are you stumped when clients can't unblend from their parts with the standard prompts, 'Can you ask this part to soften back?'; Or if they look at you blankly when you suggest they 'Go inside'? This series of classes will help you navigate those messy and confusing sessions when your basic IFS skills are just not enough.
First, a session devoted to externalizing parts (priced separately), next, a primer on beginning therapy with complex/highly polarized systems, followed by two classes devoted to implicit and explicit direct access; you will leave this series with strategies to call upon when your therapist parts are feeling stuck and wondering where to go next.
All classes are designed for therapists and practitioners who have a working knowledge of IFS, because we are not teaching the basics.
2 - Building Relationship with Complex Systems: The Primer (May 17, 12-3 PM EST, 9 AM-noon PST)
This 3-hour class picks up where Stepping Stone, Level 1, and the Online Circle leave off, for clients whose systems won’t let them ‘go inside’ because it’s just too scary or they don’t know how. Here are the skills to help you/help them get started with IFS.
- Reading the room
- Lending Self-energy: Do’s and don’ts
- Building a ‘we’ container, where the therapist is ‘in’ the room
- Confused, fraudulent, and overwhelmed therapist parts
- Targeted psychoeducation: Support for thinking managers
- 5 Parts to Start: Fight, flight, freeze, attach/submit, inner critic
- When more skills are needed: DDNOS and DID
- Lecture, Q&A
3 - Implicit and Explicit Direct Access: Essential Skills, (May 31, 12-3 PM EST, 9 AM- noon PST)
This class will cover implicit and explicit direct access, both essential skills for the IFS therapist, but skills which many clinicians have trouble employing. When to use them, how to use them effectively, as well as the therapist parts that interfere, will be covered. Lecture, Q&A.
4 - Implicit and Explicit Direct Access: Practice! (June 7, 12-3 PM EST, 9 AM-noon PST)
After a brief review of the previous three classes, this final session will provide students a chance to observe and practice implicit and explicit direct access, in a friendly, low pressure environment. Special attention will be paid to therapist/practitioner parts along the way. Lecture, demonstrations, practicum, Q&A.
Disclosure: This workshop will be recorded for future use on Colleen's website. To respect participants' privacy, only Colleen's face will be shown during the recording, ensuring that participants' faces will not be displayed when asking questions. However, individuals participating in demos may be featured on Colleen's website. Your registration implies acknowledgment and consent to the recording of the session.
BIO:
Colleen is all about creating connection: between you and your parts, between you and your loved ones, between you, your community, and the wider world. She is unabashedly optimistic about the human capacity to heal, to tap into the wellspring of compassion that is Self. Her professional focus is healing preverbal attachment trauma.
As a Marriage and Family Therapist and IFS Consultant, she devotes herself to training and mentoring psychotherapists, and writing. Thanks to Zoom, she is training therapists all over the world.
She is author of We All Have Parts: An Illustrated Guide to Healing Trauma with Internal Family Systems (2021) and The IFS Flip Chart (2023). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and the fabulous dog Sky. In her leisure,she likes spending time in nature and preparing feasts for family and friends.
More at www.colleenwest.com and www.smarttherapytools.com.