​Stephanie Mitchell is a Level 3 Certified IFS Therapist, psychotherapist, teacher and supervisor. She specialises in working with complex trauma and experiences which often get labelled as 'mental illness'. 

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Stephanie is interested in how healing and change occur in the human to human relationship, within spaces of safety and acceptance and outside the constructs of diagnostic labels.

 

Stephanie's primary focus for all therapeutic work is on creating a safe space where all parts of a person are welcomed and valued, and the pace of therapeutic exploration is set by the client. 

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Stephanie works from a deeply compassionate place that believes that all patterns of behaviour, thought or feeling come with important and valuable, hidden meanings, and that as the client and therapist work together to listen to the parts who hold these important and previously unknown meanings and offer them a space to be heard, witnessed and deeply understood, that deep change and inner transformation is stirred up. 

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Stephanie’s initial training included 3 years of advanced studies in Transactional Analysis and she has since trained in Open Dialogue, Family Systems Therapy, Person Centred Therapy and Yalom Group therapy, before moving over to working exclusively with Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS). Stephanie is trained to Level 3 in the IFS Model and has undertaken extensive supervision, additional training and personal work within the Model.

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Believing that a therapist can only take a client as far as they themselves have travelled Stephanie has undertaken her own long journey of healing from significant childhood trauma over many years of psychotherapy and human loving.

 

She states: “My healing work with an Internal Family Systems Therapy Practitioner has offered me a profoundly life changing experience - something that years of work with other therapy models has not offered me”.

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Stephanie is also a passionate advocate and activist for social and systems change towards non-pathologising and compassionate approaches to mental distress and is involved at national and international levels around mental health reform.

Stephanie has over 500 hours of her own personal therapy in the IFS Model and is deeply acquainted with her own parts, embodying the model from the inside out. 

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Stephanie offers IFS Consultation for IFS Therapists and Practitioners who work with complex trauma, clients diagnosed with 'psychosis' or BPD and new IFS therapists who are seeking to gain nuanced skills in attuning to their clients in the IFS Model. 

Stephanie is recognised by the IFS Institute as a Certified IFS Therapist. Most workshops offered at Connections Heals are are eligible for CEU points with IFS Institute for therapists and practitioners who are seeking certification or re-certification

(please see each training page for details)