This course is designed for IFS-informed mental health professionals and healing practitioners who want to deepen their work with clients navigating addictive processes.
Whether you’re new to addiction work or feeling stuck in old frameworks, this course offers a compassionate, empowering alternative to pathologizing models—and space for your own integration along the way. Addictive processes often carry pain, shame, and confusion—for clients and clinicians alike. As IFS practitioners, we’re invited to see beyond the behavior and toward the protective systems that keep deeper wounds hidden.
In this 4-part live webinar series, IFS Senior Trainer Cece Sykes offers a fresh and compassionate approach to understanding and healing addictive behaviors. With deep clinical insight and warmth, Cece guides us into the internal systems that fuel compulsive patterns—and toward the parts that long for connection, safety, and transformation.
Whether you’re working with substances, food, gambling, or other addictive processes, this series will help you feel more confident, attuned, and prepared.
Materials and methods included in this course may include interventions or practices that are beyond your scope of practice. As a professional in your given field, you are responsible for reviewing the scope of practice, including activities that are defined by applicable law as beyond the boundaries of your practice, and applying your learning in compliance with your professional standards.
Meet Your Instructors
Cece Sykes
Cece Sykes, LCSW, ACSW; IFS Senior Trainer, US and international. Contributed to IFS training manuals and teaches L1,  L2  Compassion for Addictive Processes and Level 3. Cece has over thirty-five  years of clinical experience working with individuals, couples and families, specializing in work with the effects of trauma and addiction. Her chapter on working with addictive processes appears in IFS Innovations and Elaborations (2016). She co-authored IFS Treatment for Addictions: Trauma-Informed Compassion-Based Interventions for Substance Use, Eating, Gambling and More (2023) with Martha Sweezy and Dick Schwartz. Cece also has special interests in spiritual practices intersecting with therapy and in the impact of psychotherapy upon the life of the therapist and she lectures, consults and and leads workshops on these and related topics. Cece lives and works in Oak Park/Chicago.
Program Content
