Master Series in Clinical Practice

Co-sponsors: The Continuing Education Program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Major Teaching Hospital of Harvard Medical School; Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; and William James College.

The Master Series affords the chance to spend a complete day with leaders in our field to consider the unique perspective each speaker brings to the challenging dilemmas in both theory and practice. We hope that you will consider joining us for the entire series at a reduced tuition or choose the programs most relevant to your own practice.

Richard C. Schwartz, PhD & Mary Kruger, MS, LMFT, instructors

The traditional approach to addictions has been to coach clients to control or override their urge to use. This often creates an unnecessary power struggle between the client and the part of them that is using the substance to deal with inner pain. Clients can win this struggle but will pay a price in terms of constant vigilance and effort as the part strives to regain power. In contrast, IFS helps clients honor their part's attempts to protect, gets permission from it to go to the exiled pain it is trying to manage, heals that pain, and finds that the addictive part now wants a new role. This workshop will describe and illustrate this process. Richard Schwartz will describe IFS in the morning and Mary Kruger will apply it to addictions in the afternoon.

Specific learning objectives:

• Discuss the key concepts of Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)
• Examine the IFS construct/view of addiction
• Describe how the IFS paradigm shift addresses current challenges in addiction treatment
• Explain how IFS brings a deeper level of healing to clients in recovery
• Discuss how IFS offers a compassionate, innovative and non judgmental approach for working with diverse populations

Program Code: MS95

6 CE/CME Credits (MFT CE Credits available)

Location: William James College, Newton

Mary Kruger, MS, LMFT, is an AAMFT supervisor and an IFS Lead Trainer. She is the founder of Rimmon Pond Counseling, LLC; an IFS based group practice located in the New Haven, CT area. She also offers private therapy, consultations and workshops nationally and internationally. Mary has been working in the field of addictions, eating disorders and trauma for over twenty- five years.

Richard Schwartz, PhD, began his career as a systemic family therapist and an academic, at the University of Illinois and at Northwestern University.  Grounded in systems thinking, Dr. Schwartz developed the Internal Family Systems model (IFS) in response to clients’ descriptions of various parts within themselves.   In 2000, he founded the Center for Self Leadership (www.selfleadership.org), which offers three levels of trainings and workshops in IFS for professionals and the general public, both in this country and abroad.  A featured speaker for national professional organizations, Dr. Schwartz has published five books and over fifty articles about IFS.