Nuance and Attunement in the IFS Model

Spring 2026 - Two Cohorts!

Advanced Training in IFS

Experience a unique DEEP dive into the skills of IFS.

This course is focused on:

Compassionately working with even the most skilfully evasive protectors, and the most wounded, dysregulated, or distrustful exiles.

Adaptively attuning to clients who the usual IFS approaches don’t work with.

Skills for helping you holding your seat with even your most challenging clients.

Are you ready to take a deep dive into a more RELATIONAL APPROACH to IFS?

This course is exclusively focused on attunement and skill-building within the IFS Model.

Drawing on the research of Interpersonal Neurobiology we look at how we can create safety for clients with early attachment wounding, complex trauma, and other highly polarised systems

Dates and Price:

We’re excited to offer two cohort options – so you can join us from anywhere in the world:

Cohort 1

US/America/Australia Friendly Time

7 Class Dates

US/America

April 6, 20

May 4, 18

June 8, 15, 22

Australia

April 7, 21

May 5, 19

June 9, 16, 23

Class Times*

Pacific Time PT, 3pm-6pm

Eastern Time ET, 6pm-9pm

South America – Sao Paolo, 7pm-10pm

Hawaii – Honolulu, 12pm-3pm

Australia – Perth, 6am-9am

Australia – Brisbane, 8am-11am

New Zealand – Auckland, 11am-2pm

Sign Up for Cohort 1

Cohort 2

Europe/Asia/Australia Friendly Time

7 Class Dates

Australia

March 11, 25

April 8, 22

May 6, 20, 27

Europe/Asia

March 11, 25

April 8, 22

May 6, 20, 27

Class Times*

UK – London, 8am-11am

South Africa – Cape Town, 10am-1pm

India – New Delhi, 1.30pm-4:30pm

Australia – Perth, 4pm-7pm

South Korea – Seoul, 5pm-8pm

Australia – Brisbane, 6pm-9pm

Eastern Time ET, 4am-7am

Sign Up for Cohort 2

*This is a virtual training, based on Brisbane Time, Australia, (please take into account the time zone where you live and plan for daylight savings changes in March 2026).

Time changes happen on different dates around the world, so please double-check your local time zone to stay aligned.

Price - USD $1300

Payment Plan - USD $1500

$200 USD deposit + 4x $325 USD

Deposit is refundable until February 8.

No refunds after February 9

❗Enroll 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 19 CEUs with IFS Institute – pending final approval from IFSI.

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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.

This Program Includes:

Over 35 Hours of Live & Asynchronous Learning

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.

Practical Tools for Complex Clinical Work

Concrete strategies for working with shame, transference, dissociation, and clients who don’t fit the “classic” IFS model — grounded in real-world therapeutic experience.

In-Depth Resources

A curated library of academic papers, demo videos, transcripts, and topic-specific lectures on attachment, psychotherapy skills, and interpersonal neurobiology

Guidance from an Exceptional Teacher

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.

We will look at how to work with:

• 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.

What you will learn:

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.

“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

About our Trainer:

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 8 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.

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)

More about the training:

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.

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