Cay’s Journey to Becoming an IFS Specialized Therapist

My Journey to Specializing in IFS Therapy

In my mid-30’s, after being a licensed therapist for nearly 10 years and spending the last several years increasingly specializing in trauma therapy professionally, I told my sister that I was very excited about this new IFS therapy that I had started trying out for myself.

I had realized that I had Complex PTSD and it explained so many of the puzzling symptoms that I had struggled with all my adult life, which had never been effectively treated by any of the medications or more conventional therapies I had tried.

She reminded me of a conversation we had in my mid-20’s, which I had no memory of. She apparently told me, “You clearly have PTSD, you idiot, you need to do some actual trauma therapy”, and I apparently replied, “Fine. I’ll go try out some therapists. But the moment one of them says something about, ‘healing my inner child’ or ‘having compassion for myself’ or any of that new age nonsense, I’m standing up and walking out.” 

I have since become trained to provide IFS as a therapist and it has become the centerpiece of my practice.

It has created profound, transformational changes in my own life. Frankly, it has saved my life, as I would have very likely committed suicide sometime soon after the pandemic unless I had suddenly made a lot of very rapid life changes, and I would not have been able to make those changes without processing a lot of my childhood trauma very quickly.

I am eternally grateful to the IFS therapists I hired during that period of my life, who didn’t insist that I needed to slow down, or wait until my life was more ‘stabilized.’

Or, that I needed to go into a hospital or take more medications, or that the fact that I was thinking about suicide so often made it too risky for them to do intensive trauma work with me. They honored my autonomy, my dignity of risk, and they supported me in doing the work I needed to do at the pace I needed to do it. Having worked in the field for over a decade, I am very aware of how rare it is to find therapists like that, who look at the people they serve as actual human beings and not invalids to be paternalistically cared for and sheltered.

I am honored to carry their lineage forward and to allow this work to touch and transform more lives.

In grad school, I took a class called “Historical Controversies in Psychology.”

Among other things, I learned about how the man who invented lobotomies won the nobel prize, how little actual research evidence there is to support the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of mental illness, how much the writing of the DSM has been compromised by financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, and how little the mechanism of action in either psychotherapy or psychopharmacology is actually understood even by the people who practice in these fields. 

It was during this period that I connected with the Mad Pride, Psychiatric Survivor, and Liberation Psychology movements, and those perspectives have had an increasing impact on my thinking and my practice of psychotherapy ever since.

It has taken me a long time, and a great deal of privilege, to finally reach this point in my career where I can detach myself from financial dependence on insurance companies, and the need to participate in the medical model of mental health in order to have my claims paid.

I’d love to work you as a therapist to help you and bring you along the same journey I myself have taken.

Reach out today if you’re in Texas, Massachusetts, or Maryland for IFS Therapy or IFS Intensives.