IFS Talks

Sue Richmond is a L3 IFS trained, Certified IFS therapist and IFS Assistant Trainer.

Sue lives in central CT with her wife and their dog Milo Thomas. Sue has an individual psychotherapy practice, an IFS consultation practice, and has expanded the use of the model by bringing IFS-informed practice into her work with psychotherapy groups. Sue is currently working on a book about bringing IFS-informed practice to groups and will be presenting a module about her work with groups to the 2021 IFS Continuity Program series.

Sue received her BA in English from Keene State College, and her MSW from the University of Connecticut. During her time in graduate school, Sue was also a member of the United States Naval Reserve and served in the Reserves for 5 years. She has presented many workshops, and has a special fondness for the Intro to IFS workshop that she presented to the United States Navy Chaplain Corps, in Hampton, VA.

She has a love for teaching, and taught social work to undergraduates as an Adjunct at the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, CT.

Personally, Sue’s spiritual life has been a great influence in her own personal journey of healing, and she brings that healing into her practice with her clients.

Mona Barbera, Ph.D is a psychologist with over 35 years experience, specializing in couples therapy, couples workshops, and training psychotherapists. She has been quoted in Better Homes and Gardens, Cosmopolitan,and Mens Fitness and has appeared on Fox25 news in , NBC in New York, News8 in Washington, D.C., Peachtree TV in Atlanta, and KARE11 in Minneapolis.  Her book for couples, “Bring Yourself to Love: How Couples Can Turn Disconnection into Intimacy” is the winner of the prestigious 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award in psychology/self-help, the Bronze medalist in the 2008 IPPY awards in Relationships and Sexuality, and a finalist in the 2009 Eric Hoffer Awards.Mona has written for the academic journals “The Journal of Imago Relationship Therapy” and “The Journal of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,” and she has a chapter in “Imago Relationship Therapy: Perspectives on Theory,” by Luquet, Hannah and Hunt. She is past chair of the program committee and past board member of the New England Society for the Study and Treatment of Trauma and Dissociative Disorders. She is an Assistant Trainer for Internal Family Systems, a system of psychotherapy developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband. She has private practices in Providence, RI and Middletown, RI.

Daphne Fatter, Ph.D. (Dallas, TX, USA) is a mid-career licensed psychologist, certified IFS therapist and approved clinical IFS consultant. She has a private practice specializing in trauma and addressing legacy burdens including the impact of oppression, marginalized identities, racism, and collective trauma. She also teaches on trauma treatment and on white race socialization in the US. She is an Ancestral Medicine Practitioner and integrates working ancestral guides with IFS. She is a student of animism and has also studied with teachers of Taoist and Mahayana and Theravada Buddhist meditation practices. She has also published professionally on mindfulness.Her ancestors are from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, and Scandanvia. She lives on the traditional lands of the Cherokee, Comanche, Wichita and Caddo peoples.

Chris Burris, LPC, LMFT is a Senior Lead Trainer for the IFS Institute. He has been an IFS Therapist since 1999 and is trained as a Marriage and Family Therapist. He uses mind/body approaches of therapy in alleviating traumatic stress, depression, and anxiety disorders. He works extensively with individuals and groups.

Since 1990 he has been very active with Men’s, Couples, Self Leadership Groups and Rites of Passage Programs. As the former Director of Counseling at The North Carolina School of the Arts, Chris has considerable experience with performance enhancement with Athletes, Artists, Actors, Filmmakers, Musicians, Writers, and Dancers. He is currently in Private Practice in Asheville, NC.

In addition to being a psychotherapist, Chris has trained in many nature based models with Animus Valley institute, School of Lost Borders, The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and The Center for Conscious Eldering.

Stephanie Mitchell is a psychotherapist, trainer and group therapist . She specialises in working with complex trauma and experiences which often get labelled as 'mental illness'. Stephanie is interested in how healing and change occur in the human to human relationship, within spaces of safety and acceptance and outside the constructs of diagnostic labels.Stephanie's primary focus for all therapeutic work is on creating a safe space where all parts of a person are welcomed and valued, and the pace of therapeutic exploration is set by the client. Stephanie works from a deeply compassionate place that believes that all patterns of behaviour, thought or feeling come with important and valuable, hidden meanings, and that as the client and therapist work together to listen to the parts who hold these important and previously unknown meanings and offer them a space to be heard, witnessed and deeply understood, that deep change and inner transformation is stirred up. Stephanie’s initial training included 3 years of advanced studies in Transactional Analysis and she has since trained in Open Dialogue, Family Systems Therapy and Person Centred Therapy before moving over to working almost exclusively with Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS). Stephanie is trained to Level 3 in the IFS Model and has undertaken extensive supervision and personal work within the model.Believing that a therapist can only take a client as far as they themselves have travelled Stephanie has undertaken her own long journey of healing from significant childhood trauma over many years of psychotherapy and human loving.She states: “My healing work with an Internal Family Systems Therapy Practitioner has offered me a profoundly life changing experience - something that years of work with other therapy models has not offered me”. 

Stephanie is also a passionate advocate and activist for social and systems change towards non-pathologising and compassionate approaches to mental distress and is involved at national and international levels around mental health reform.

We can find many theories about dreams. Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious.”  Jung believed dreams were a gateway to the “collective unconscious”.  Indigenous cultures believe dreams are a way to communicate with spirits and other beings that do not live on this earth plane.  For neuroscientists dreams are mostly a way for the brain to integrate experiences and reconsolidate memory. Other cultures believe there is different types of dreams: teaching dreams, in which we are taught something useful in our waking life; prediction dreams that let us know ahead of time what will happen.

Heloisa Garman is a licensed clinical psychologist, educated at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology and have been in private practice for over thirty years. Heloisa was trained in family therapy at the Juvenile Research Program at the University of Illinois. Also received training in the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model . As a Brazilian American, she  specialized in cross-cultural psychology. Heloisa’s doctoral dissertation was on the impact of migration on the family structure of those coming from impoverished areas seeking work in the city. Her masters thesis took place in an Indian reservation in Brazil. Heloisa has extensive experience with families, couples and individuals experiencing grief, loss, depression and anxiety. Treated families with children who suffered severe early traumas, and conducted evaluations for the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). Previously affiliated with the Family Institute at Northwestern University, taught and supervised family therapy at two major universities in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Heloisa utilize dream work and mindfulness training with clients,  published articles and presented workshops on dreams in conferences at the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD).

Today Heloisa walks us through the 4 steps she practices when applying IFS to Dream work.

IFS Talks will be back soon with brand new episodes. In the meantime, we bring you an episode released April 2020, that we so much enjoyed: Sexual Abuse through an IFS lens, with Bob Falconer.

Robert Falconer has an undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology, with a focus on the history of religions.In the early 1980s he pursued his masters degree in psychology while balancing a career in construction and real estate investment.When Robert started as a therapist, he focused on the work of Milton Erickson and hypnotherapy. He then moved into working with Jack and Helen Watkins; who developed ego state therapy. In his career as a therapist, Robert spent considerable time at the Esalen Institute and decades involved in gestalt therapy. Robert has been familiar with IFS therapy for 20 years, but completely devoted himself to the model for the last 10 years.Robert was one of the first men to speak publicly about being sexually abused as a child, and for many years he worked primarily with men with a similar trauma history. Now he works with people learning IFS. Most recently Robert co-authored with Dick Schwartz a book entitled “Many Minds, One Self: evidence for a radical shift in paradigm“.
Trigger warning: this episode may contain trauma events descriptions that may be triggering for many.

IFS Talks will be back with a brand new episode soon.  In the meantime, we’re excited to introduce you to a new IFS Informed Podcast. Its called Explorations in Psychotherapy, and is an Internal Family Systems informed audio podcast introducing authors whose work may be of great value and interest to the psychotherapy field as to all communities and practitioners in the helping professions who may benefit from a better understanding and integration of emerging perspectives.

In this third episode of Explorations in Psychotherapy,  Healing Ancestral Lineages are discussed withDaniel Foor.   We hope you can find the time to enjoy this amazing conversation, that we believe so relevant in many ways for our personal and clinical lives. Many thanks for listening and subscribe this new IFS informed Podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/pt/podcast/explorations-in-psychotherapy/id1490941234

Frank Anderson began his professional journey as a chemistry major at the University of Illinois in the pre-pharmacy program. He quickly developed a fascination with the workings of the human body and switched into a pre-medicine program. He happily entered Rush University Medical College, initially wanting to become a pediatrician due to his love of children, but switched into psychiatry after a close family member developed significant mental health symptoms. He was deeply touched by this experience and also keenly aware of the impact it had on others. During his residency program in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, he noticed that many of the clients struggling with major mental illness had also experienced significant trauma in their lives.

The pain he witnessed in others activated something deep within himself and compelled him to enter into therapy, which quickly connected him to his own trauma history. Becoming a psychiatrist at the Trauma Center in Boston under the direction of Bessel van der Kolk was a natural fit for him, where he learned more about trauma while simultaneously continuing his quest of helping others heal. He was fortunate enough to meet Dick Schwartz at a conference during this time, and his career focus instantly came into full alignment as he was able to integrate his knowledge of neuroscience and trauma treatment with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy.

Dr. Anderson is the former chair and executive director of the Foundation for Self Leadership, an organization focusing on IFS research and the expansion of the IFS model beyond psychotherapy. He authored the chapter “Who’s Taking What? Connecting Neuroscience, Psychopharmacology and Internal Family Systems for Trauma” and coauthored the chapter “What IFS Brings to the Treatment of Trauma.” He also coauthored the book Internal Family Systems Skills Training Manual.

He is a lead trainer and program consultant for the IFS Institute, is an advisor to the International Association of Trauma Professionals (IATP), and maintains a private practice. He is passionate about teaching and enjoys providing psychotherapy consultations, as well as teaching IFS-related workshops throughout the world. To learn more, please go towww.FrankAndersonMD.com.

Liz wound her way into therapy after a circuitous route through a few degrees: English, Fine Art and Education; and after a career in Communications writing. Her passion for couples work led her to a training in couples therapy two years before she was even accepted into a formal therapy school. While Liz was studying to be a therapist, she simultaneously trained in Levels one and two of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples. But it wasn’t until she bumped into IFS and IFIO that Liz felt she found her therapy home. She has completed her Level 1 in IFS and Level 2 in IFIO and has run two of her own IFIO-informed workshops to introduce the model to her Canadian community. Currently based in Toronto, Liz is a self proclaimed coffee snob and loves long winter runs along the waterfront. You can find more about Liz at her website: https://www.lizphillipstherapy.ca