IFS Essentials: Building Your Foundation in the Core Tenets of the Internal Family Systems Model

Fatimah Finney, LMHC, is a serial goal-setter, lover of new ideas, and imaginative thinker. She is a skilled licensed mental health counselor and founder of Healing Differently, a counseling, training and consulting business where she serves a variety of clients with diverse backgrounds, lived experiences and clinical symptoms. Fatimah is a certified L3 trained IFS therapist and trainer at the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Institute where she’s helped train hundreds of therapists in the model. She was profoundly impacted by IFS early in her career and enjoys introducing the IFS treatment protocol to others. Fatimah is also the associate director of IFS Programs and a Senior Instructor at the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at Cambridge Health Alliance, where she leads IFS training and facilitates an IFS workshop series focused on the use of IFS for different clinical presentations.

Fatimah is a highly sought after speaker, thought leader and author. She's been featured on several podcasts, including IFS Talks, where she discusses the intersection between IFS and Intercultural Competence. Her chapter on using IFS with Black Clients is published in the upcoming book IFS Integration: A Comprehensive Guide to Applying IFS Across Modalities, Populations and Clinical Presentations and her chapter on Racism, Social Location and Trauma is in the newly released book Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral, and Collective Trauma.

Prior to her counseling and consulting practice, Fatimah spent the majority of her career providing in-home therapy to children, adolescents and adults and serving in clinical leadership roles. As the director of an outpatient mental health clinic, she cultivated a strong commitment to helping therapists increase their cultural competence and clinical fluency with diverse populations. She recharges her spirit by playing with her children, taking walks with her parts, and dabbling in creative writing. Her microessay In My Skin: An Autobiography was recently published in the anthology Nonwhite & Woman: 131 Microessays on Being in the World.