Inner Relationship Focusing

Psychotherapists and Other Healing Professionals: You Can Be Effective and Empower Your Clients

Does this sound like you?

You’re passionate about your work – but sometimes you question whether you’re working with clients in a way that really helps them.

You can see your clients circling around and around where they need to be but never getting there – and you long to be able to help them more.

You wonder if you need to take training in EMDR or SE or IFS but you don’t want to just start all over again with a new modality… or maybe you already have taken a training like that, and something is still missing…

Perhaps you’ve tried going to your supervisor or mentor with your doubts or you talked it over with colleagues, but got no satisfying answers. You’ve tried going to more trainings, some of which really stretched your comfort zone, but none of them clicked. You’re left feeling dissatisfied, knowing there had to be something that really helps, something that would be effective, that would really work, but that would also feel comfortable and fit with the methods you already know, that wouldn’t require you to throw everything away and start over.

You wish you had more ways to be helpful to clients who:

• don't know what they feel or feel “nothing”
• struggle with self-criticism and confusion
• feel stuck in their lives
• talk about feelings rather than having them
• get overwhelmed by intense emotions
• struggle with depression, addictions, and other effects of trauma

It’s painful to have clients who aren’t getting helped… you even wonder what’s wrong with you…

Wouldn’t it be great to have a way of being with clients that can be blended with what you already do, that’s body-oriented yet also verbal and relational, that empowers your clients and takes them right to the source of change inside themselves?

A process that enables your clients to experience real change needs to include the following components:

• You have a way to give your clients immediate support if they feel overwhelmed
• Your clients feel more empowered, stronger, more able to give themselves support in between sessions
• Your clients start to open up to a fuller life, more connections with others, more peace with old issues, a greater sense of life being on track
• And you’re experiencing those expansions for yourself as well!

In addition:

• You’ll feel more comfortable and confident during psychotherapy sessions
• You’ll feel you are showing up in sessions as yourself, genuine and real
• You’ll have a way to process feelings and reactions that come up in your work with clients

For an article about Inner Relationship Focusing by Carol Nickerson that includes a story about how she used IR Focusing to process feelings about a client, click here

Inner Relationship Focusing is a powerful and natural process for positive life change… and psychotherapists around the world are finding it an effective support for the therapy they’re already doing.

Hi, I’m Ann Weiser Cornell, and I’ve been teaching and developing IR Focusing training programs since 1985. I created these programs because I saw people struggling with procrastination and action blocks, sinking under low self-esteem and severe inner criticism, having a hard time feeling grounded and making confident decisions, and most of all longing to live the fulfilling lives they knew they could live but never quite getting there.

At first my programs were designed for individuals themselves but more and more psychotherapists kept asking me to create trainings for bringing this work into therapy. I agreed – but with one very important proviso. Healing professionals who want to use this work with clients have to learn it for themselves. How can we take other people to a place we don’t know how to go ourselves? Plus, your ability to be in a Focusing kind of contact with yourself is contagious – your very presence, even without words, becomes a healing containing space for your clients.

Our Focusing Training Program for Healing Professionals follows the same curriculum as our regular Focusing Training Program with two important differences:

(1) We will pause from time to time to talk about how to integrate the learning into your sessions with clients, and

(2) All the other participants will be healing professionals, so the conversations in the course and the practice sessions outside the course will all be with fellow professionals. It does make a difference!

And since we now teach the Focusing Training Program by phone seminar, you don’t have to leave the comfort of your home or office in order to take courses that used to be offered only in a few locations in the world.

What will you receive from taking the IR Focusing Training Program for Healing Professionals?

• a practical, step-by-step method for starting with any problem or stuck situation and finding relief, insight, and new steps of action, so you feel bigger than your problems and in control of your life – and ways to help your clients do this too
• a process that lets you help your clients be in touch with the very place in them with the potential to open up into flow, change, and new possibilities
• facilitative language that enables you to be supportive of your clients – and yourself – without pushing (and so without bringing up resistance)
• a structured plan for moving forward and taking the lessons beyond the course into your daily life so you feel empowered to take your life into the areas you’ve always dreamed of

A Not-Very-Well-Kept Secret: As you’ve long suspected, it’s not just about helping your clients. It’s about you… your life, your goals, your healing and wholeness. Imagine the possibility that life could feel wonderful – a steady feeling of ease, aliveness, spaciousness… that it feels good to be you. Wouldn’t that be great?

What the Level One Focusing class actually includes:

• Five three-hour meetings, with a 15-minute break about halfway through each class.
• A copy of The Focusing Student’s and Companion’s Manual written by Barbara McGavin and myself, distilling a combined fifty plus years’ experience developing, teaching and living IR Focusing.
• “Crib cards” that tell you exactly what to do as you split up into pairs to practice the Focusing process during the class and during the week between classes. No anxious guesswork!
• A “seating chart” with photos of the teacher, the assistants, and your fellow students so you can connect names with faces and you’re not just hearing voices in the dark. (We’ll ask you to send your own photo and we’ll help you do that if you’re not sure how.)
• Recordings of every class meeting as an mp3 download that will be available up to 60 days after the end of the class. You’ll be able to listen again and again to any class material you’d like to review.
• A private web page where you can access the mp3 recordings, homework assignments, PDFs of the crib cards and further reading assignments and other important class information from any web browser.
• Email and/or phone support from the teacher and class assistants if you have questions between class meetings or need extra help.
• 15 hours of Continuing Education Units for MFTs and LCSWs in California. (We’ll supply you with a Record of Completion with Learning Objectives which are honored by the licensing boards of most states for comparable licenses.)

Yes, three hours a week is a lot of time, and with readings and practice it will come to more like five hours a week for five weeks. But compare that to the time it would take to travel to a course. This one has no travel time… and the amount of information we share each time is quite intensive. We really pack the time with practical and empowering, immediately useful information.

We really want this course to work for you, so are always thinking of what else we can do to enhance your experience. Which brings me to the pre-requisite…

Prerequisite: at least one individual session with an Inner Relationship Focusing teacher. This session prepares you to get the most out of the class. It's recommended to have your session with Lucinda Hayden, the teacher of the course. Right now we are offering a special discount: your first session with Lucinda for just $95, a savings of $55. You will be able to sign up when you click the ADD TO CART button for a Level One Focusing class. Or if you prefer you can come back to this page any time up to a week before your class and pay the $95 with the PayPal link.

The Fee

The cost of the Level One Focusing course is $275 until 10 days before the course begins (then the fee goes up to $295). Registration closes on the Wednesday before Monday and Tuesday classes, and on the Monday before Wednesday and Thursday classes, so it pays to plan ahead.

Our Schedule

Here are the Level One courses for Healing Professionals we have currently scheduled. We typically offer the Level One course for Healing Professionals twice a year, in January and September. These courses are offered in the daytime because we find the majority of healing professionals are busy in the evenings. If this schedule doesn’t work for you, feel free to take one of the regular Level One courses – the curriculum is the same. We usually post courses here on the website about four months in advance. If you have a request for a time or day for a future course, do email us to let us know.