Enhanced Healing Through Attachment & IFS/EMDR Integration

Understanding How Early Relationships Shape Protective Systems

This training explores Internal Family Systems (IFS)+EMDR integration through an attachment-informed lens, offering clinicians a clear, relational framework for understanding why internal systems organize the way they do — and how this organization shows up in both therapy and relationships.

Drawing on IFS, attachment theory, relational neuroscience, and the 8 phases of EMDR, we will examine how early caregiving experiences shape protective strategies, influence how needs are expressed or suppressed, and impact internal and relational dynamics across the lifespan. Rather than pathologizing symptoms or attachment patterns, this approach reframes them as adaptive responses designed to preserve safety, proximity, and connection.

Participants will learn how to:

• Conceptualize protectors as attachment-informed strategies

• Understand authenticity, dependency, and need expression through a parts-based lens

• Apply IFS and attachment concepts across the 8 phases of EMDR, from history-taking and preparation through reprocessing and integration

• Support the development of internal secure attachment between Self and parts

• Work more compassionately and effectively with shame, people-pleasing, emotional suppression, and relational reactivity

• Slow down the work to deepen self-to-part relationships and support lasting change

This training emphasizes clinical pacing, consent, and curiosity, and is especially well-suited for therapists who integrate IFS, attachment-based, trauma-informed, or EMDR-informed approaches. The focus is on practical conceptualization, language you can bring directly into session, and helping clinicians feel more oriented when navigating complex internal systems.

Whether you are newer to IFS or looking to deepen your integration of attachment, IFS, and EMDR, this training offers a coherent, humane, and deeply relational way to think about parts, attachment, and healing.