Are you an Emotionally Focused Therapist intrigued by the Internal Family Systems model? Are you an IFS therapist who wants to offer your clients a more loving and co-regulating presence? Do you want to explore cutting-edge psychotherapy grounded in neuroscience? Join us as we expand our therapist presence and skills while integrating both models and beyond.

Ghost Ranch is a 21,000-acre preserve with stunning land, rock, and skyscapes and fascinating geographical, fossil, archeological, and art history. It is located 65 miles northwest of Santa Fe in Abiquiu, NM. Now a non-profit learning and education center, Ghost Ranch offers learning spaces, accommodations, dining services, and activities. We have a mid-day break each day and the entire afternoon on Friday set aside to explore the ranch and absorb its beauty, history, and spirituality.

We’ll celebrate all that the EFT and IFS models have given us and honor the challenges they present. We will see, hear, and appreciate each other for our accomplishments and struggles. Through experiential learning, we will grow our connection with our own selves and nervous systems by grounding in both models simultaneously

An attachment-based parts model, Better Together, involves seeing, understanding, and supporting the client’s parts that emerge and engage in the room. With an appreciation of the enormous cultural and generational burdens we all carry, we bring radical support to these parts’ needs to protect the client from others, including ourselves as mental health professionals, as we are all limited in our capacity, willingness, and availability to provide needed support. We support clients in seeing and appreciating how strong, capable, and right their parts are to keep them safe. By embracing mistrust, we develop the client’s ability to say “no” clearly and understandably rather than in hidden and controlling ways through their protective parts.

As clients begin to trust themselves and us in asserting “no” to connection, we develop their ability to say “yes” to test whether we can see, appreciate, and join them in their experience. The sense of no longer being alone is not entirely pleasant, but also frightening. After a lifetime of being alone, judged, and unseen, it isn’t easy to believe that another could understand and support the pockets of experience beneath our protective parts.

In this training, we learn to welcome emptiness, collapse, cynicism, disgust, and rage and what it takes to be trustworthy guides in the client’s journey to reassociate with these disowned experiences. We support clients in bringing these experiences into awareness with validation and appreciation. We develop the client’s ability to trust their wisdom about whether and when it is safe to let us “in,” to trust they do not have to be alone, and are safe to explore these spaces with our guiding presence.