Online Gender Journey

Gender Journeys and Disenfranchised Grief

Are you an IFS professional seeking deeper understanding and more effective tools to support queer and gender-diverse clients? Our training offers a profound exploration into the often-unspoken grief and cultural dynamics shaping gender identities.

Many gender journeys are marked by disenfranchised grief - the kind of grief that remains unseen, unacknowledged, and invalidated by dominant cultural narratives. In many societies, transgender and non-binary people are systematically erased or actively pushed back by conservative forces. Even within dominant queer cultures, there’s immense pressure to self-label and disclose, leaving little room for grief work surrounding gender incongruence and societal expectations.

This workshop provides a groundbreaking approach to retracing gender journeys through the lens of disenfranchised grief. By illuminating key moments of identity exploration, loss, and resilience, participants gain essential insights and skills to create truly affirming and healing
therapeutic environments.

Expand knowledge

• Deeper understanding of the gender binary as a cultural constraint, that potentially burdens systems
  
• Explore the interplay of personal and transpersonal gender journeys, acknowledging cultural and generational influences on identity development
  

Gain insights

• Recognize how language impacts our gender experience, from highly gendered languages like Portuguese to more fluid linguistic structures like English
  
• Discover how queer experiences intersect with generational sexual cultures and shifting societal expectations
  

Refine competencies

• Learn to hold inclusive spaces for queer clients having retraced your own gender journey
  
• Deepen the way you hold space without an agenda or pressuring clients into premature articulation of their gender journeys
  
• Critically engage with and adapt IFS protocols to mitigate access fatigue for queer clients
  

Enhance skills

• Track gender journeys with sensitivity, identifying hidden pathways in clients’ experiences
  
• Cultivate delicate attunement to unspoken or subtly expressed aspects of gender identity

For whom

This training is relevant for all IFS therapists, since patriarchies may offer heterosexual cisgender people social standing and dignity by default, patriarchies burden them too.

Still, this particular training is set up as an affinity space, designed for queer IFS professionals and queer-adjacent IFS professionals who are deeply involved with queer life. Participants get to trace their gender journeys, and deepen their understanding of their disenfranchised grief. By retracing their paths with curiosity and compassion, participants will illuminate key moments in their development, guided by the concept of disenfranchised grief, will be trained in holding space for the Other in this regard and will be invited to dare to grieve together giving grieving rituals a try.

For Queer IFS professionals and queer-adjacent professionals deeply invested in queer life:
✔️ seeking an affirming space to explore their own gender journeys
✔️ eager to deepen their cultural competence in working with queer clients
✔️ longing to release binary constraints and engage in liberatory healing practices

Join us in reshaping the landscape of gender-affirming IFS therapy. Gain knowledge, insights, and practical exercises to support your clients on their journeys with depth, sensitivity, and authenticity.

Training Overview:

• Explore the interplay of disenfranchised grief and gender journeys
• Understand the impact of empathic 'failure' regarding gender and sexual identity development
• Enhance personal insights by retracing your gender journey with curiosity and compassion
• Explore grieving together and creating repertoire in holding disenfranchised grief together
• Deepen your knowledge of creating inclusive, affirming therapeutic environments
• Queering and adapting IFS Protocols to cater to queer needs

Format:

• Participants receive a training manual developed by Alessio Rizzo & Anna Thomas Tijsseling
• Interactive training days combining personal reflection, experiential exercises in dyads, working in practice gropus, reflecting daily in base groups and leaving feeling professional proficient in the area of gender and disenfranchised grief.