course catalog
Introduction to ISTDP
Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) is a form of brief experiential dynamic psychotherapy. This approach is affect-focused, attachment-based and experiential, providing in-the-moment change for the client in each therapy session. Clients don’t just need a new insight; they need a new experience. ISTDP employs specific interventions to resolve the cause of client problems, instead of using a surface level focus on coping with symptoms. ISTDP pays exquisite attention to client unconscious interpersonal behaviors and emotional experiencing in the context of a collaborative therapy relationship. This creates near-experience immediacy and fertile ground for rapid client progress. ISTDP activates and mobilizes the unconscious attachment system to heal attachment wounds driving client symptoms. Rapid change can occur as a result. With a solid understanding that all client response and behavior is perfectly collaborating with the therapy (think resistance), the therapist can assist the client in understanding his own behavior and feelings in a new way. This helps him to turn against behaviors that hurt him and develop a deep and abiding self-compassion, making way for adaptive action. The scientific method is employed in session to guide each therapist intervention based on psychodiagnosis of patient response. Hypotheses are tested and client responses drive the therapy instead of therapist ideas of what the client should do driving sessions. This course will explore and demonstrate ISTDP- informed interventions that will help patients get to the bottom of what is driving their symptoms so that problems can be resolved.
This short version introductory course is recommended as a pre-requisite to prepare you for other courses but is not a requirement. A full-day Introduction to ISTDP is also available upon request.
Credits: 1
Length: 1 hour
Cost: Free
ISTDP Intervention Training
In ISTDP Intervention Training, you will learn about the metapsychology behind the powerful interventions of ISTDP designed to unlock the unconscious and facilitate rapid change in therapy. When clients enter therapy, their healthy internal signals have been automatically and unconsciously blocked due to the threat they posed to attachment in childhood. This learned avoidance of internal feeling information causes symptoms and problems. Intervention training will give the therapist the tools to unlock the healthy signals that have become hidden to the patient over time so they can re-align with themselves to find their own best answers to solve the problems they brought to therapy. The primary interventions in ISTDP will be covered in detail including:
- Establishing correct causality of their symptoms through moment-to-moment psychodiagnosis of their experience
- Distinguishing a client’s healthy signals from anxiety and defenses
- Deepening client physical experiencing of their healthy signals and feelings to deepen the connection with self
- Identifying and working with common defenses or avoidance behaviors that move the client away from feeling and away from emotional closeness with others
- Using “pressure” or encouragement to a) pressure to a positive goal, b) pressure to experiencing feeling, c) pressure to an internal focus, d) pressure to awareness of defenses and anxiety
- Identifying, assessing and regulating anxiety
- Listening for whispers from the unconscious
- Mobilizing the client’s unconscious drive for health such that it overcomes unconscious resistance
Attendees will become aware of many powerful interventions in this one-day training in a complex model.
Credits: 6 CE
Length: 6 hours
Cost: $275.00, Group Pricing Varies
Next Scheduled Date: 08/08/2025
Time: 9am - 4pm EST
Location: Virtual
The Psychotherapy Institute
This course offers a rare opportunity to join a small cohort of intentional learners, taking a deep dive into Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP). This training will skyrocket your effectiveness as a therapist, give burnout the boot, and unlock profound personal change for yourself. Therapists commit to one year of trans-theoretical skills training delivered through 1-hour virtual classes. These are experiential, attachment-focused, and intensive to enhance your current clinical skills, no matter your therapeutic approach. The classes will also provide opportunity for supervision on integrating skills learned in the course into your current practice. If you find yourself stuck with challenging cases, and want to rediscover the joy of therapy, join us to find a deeper connection to yourself and your clients.
Credits: 1 CE per hour class
Length: 1 hour, each week for 48 weeks
Cost $20.00 per class, Group Pricing Varies
Next Scheduled Date: Course begins 07/09/2025
Time: 12:00pm EST
Location: Virtual
ISTDP Pre-Core Training
This training is an opportunity to begin building a basic understanding of the principles of ISTDP and to find out if a 3-year Core Training program is something you are interested in pursuing. This 3-day training offers an immersion into the understanding and practice of ISTDP through session video analysis and skill-building exercises. The ISTDP Core Training is the training experience of a lifetime. Therapists gain a deeper understanding of their work with clients, become more effective, and learn about their own anxiety and defenses emerging with a new appreciation for and understanding of self. Attend this Pre-Core Training to get a true sense and experience of what Core Training has to offer. Email Leslie Auld with questions at leslieauld@mindfulistdp.com
Credits: 18 CE
Length: 1 three-day weekend
Cost: $350.00
Next Scheduled Date: 8/22/2025 - 8/24/2025
Time: 9am - 5pm
Location: East Lansing, MI
ISTDP Core Training
This is a three-year program to become a fully trained practitioner of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic psychotherapy. Participants engage in four three-day weekends of training per year. This is a small group learning cohort of 8 maximum. The training involves lecture, readings, extensive skill building exercises, and group supervision of each participant's video-taped therapy sessions. A three-day Pre-Core Training is recommended to enroll. Email Leslie Auld with questions at leslieauld@mindfulistdp.com
Credits: 18 CE per three-day training
Length: 4 three-day weekends of training per year, for 3 years
Cost: $600.00 per three-day training
Next Scheduled Date: TBD
Time: TBD
Location: TBD
Foundational Therapist Training
Foundational training gives therapists the foundational skills they need to structure an effective therapy. We were taught in graduate school to meet the clients where they are at. There is an important truth in this statement but often it is taken to mean following the client’s content in therapy wherever it goes. The problem with this is that talking about difficult things in therapy is painful and most people have an automatic urge to avoid what is painful. As a result, therapy often gets derailed before it even starts as therapists follow their clients into avoidance- waiting and hoping that the difficult topics will come up. This training gives you a roadmap to guide clients away from their natural avoidance tendency and toward that which they deeply desire help with but find difficult to talk about. This course will help therapists understand client behavior from an attachment perspective and provide options for intervention that will speak to the client’s attachment needs. The skills and understanding in this course will help therapists create an effective therapeutic focus for the therapy by forming an alliance around working together to identify an internal emotional problem that the client wants help with. Therapists will learn anxiety assessment techniques to keep the process from being derailed by excessive anxiety in session. Once a problem is identified and the client’s will to work on it is mobilized, the necessary next steps that will create the foundation for getting to resolution of problems and symptoms are provided.
Credits: 4 CE
Length: 4 hours
Cost $150.00, Group Pricing Varies
Next Scheduled Date: TBD
Time: TBD
Location: Virtual
Building Capacity in the Traumatized Client
Often when therapists are working with a traumatized client, both client and therapist want to get to work on addressing the trauma in session but quickly find that addressing the trauma directly is so dysregulating that the therapy cannot progress. A client may become frustrated that they cannot work on the trauma without becoming overwhelmed and the therapist can also feel at a loss with how to help. In this training, therapists will learn interventions that build client capacity so that they become ready and able to face their previously unbearable traumatic experience. Capacities such as affect tolerance, anxiety regulation, understanding causality, self-observing capacity can be built using a graded approach that allows the client to become ready to explore trauma without distress so unbearable that it interrupts the therapy process.
Credits: 3 CE
Length: 3 hours
Cost: $100.00, Group Pricing Varies
Next Scheduled Date: 6/27/2025
Time: 9am - 12pm EST
Location: Virtual
Understanding Anxiety
Anxiety is one of the most widely misunderstood problems affecting people’s health and enjoyment of life. In this course you will gain a deeper understanding of the nature of anxiety, what causes it and what you can do to help your clients and yourself to be in charge of anxiety, rather than having anxiety in charge of you. You will learn about the pathways of anxiety discharge, how to assess the severity of anxiety in the moment and how to help clients identify, pay attention to and regulate anxiety symptoms in the body.
Credits: 3 CE
Length: 3 hours
Cost $100.00, Group Pricing Varies
It's Not Always Depression
This course is designed to create a deeper understanding of depressive symptoms through a lens of understanding offered by Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP). Depressive symptoms have a cause which can be identified and eliminated, creating freedom from symptoms. Because symptoms are often caused by unconscious behaviors, people need help to identify them, bring them to consciousness and address them. Of course, it is difficult to change something that is happening outside of awareness. Therapists are trained to help clients identify the source of their symptoms so that they can become aware and turn against behaviors that harm them.
Credits: 3 CE
Length: 3 hours
Cost: $100.00, Group Pricing Varies
What Is Healthy Emotional Functioning?
We often find ourselves talking about mental health problems and symptoms but what exactly does health look like? Attend this training to get a clear description of healthy emotional functioning and learn what the blocks to good mental health are and how to remove them. Patterns of problematic emotional functioning begin forming early in life and become automatic and unconscious, making it difficult for us to see what is going amiss for ourselves. Certain types of early learning experiences can prevent us from registering information that we are getting from our environments correctly. Getting a clear understanding of how it works creates self-compassion and will point to a path forward toward healthy emotional functioning with mind and body working together seamlessly to allow for good decision making and attachments that are close and safe.
Credits: 2 CE
Length: 2 hours
Cost: $85.00, Group Pricing Varies
Suicide Crisis Intervention: Treating the Cause of Suicidal Ideation
This training will give you effective tools for working with crisis through the lens of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP). There are times when clients come to therapy in a crisis so painful that suicide has begun to look attractive and may seem like a solution to something. When this occurs, we must, as clinicians conduct a thorough suicide risk assessment and take necessary action to protect the life of the client. These skills are vitally important and are covered in another training. In this training, we are looking at the crisis itself, the elements driving the suicide crisis so that we can intervene at the root cause of this suicidal impulse and eliminate it. Powerful internal forces are driving the self-destructive urge and equally powerful interventions are needed to address it.
Credits: 3 CE
Length: 3 hours
Cost: $100.00, Group Pricing Varies
Next Scheduled Date: 6/6/2025
Time: 1pm - 4pm EST
Location: Virtual
Overcoming Imposter Syndrome as a Therapist
In this training for therapists at all stages of development, we will explore the experience of Imposter Syndrome often experienced in the field by newly trained and veteran therapists alike. Therapy is a complex task, human beings are complex, relationships are complex too. No wonder there are times when therapists wonder if they are really prepared to take on such complexity! It turns out Imposter Syndrome has a cause and a cure. Come to this training to enjoy a healthy and realistic view of yourself as a therapist and gain a way forward in which you can experience fulfillment and joy in your career without excessive self-doubt.
Credits: 2 CE
Length: 2 hours
Cost: $85.00, Group Pricing Varies
Next Scheduled Date: TBD
Time: TBD
Location: Virtual
Anxiety Class for Therapists
As therapists, we are helping clients with their anxiety all day long as part of our work but how often do we really stop to take notice of our own anxiety? How often do we consider how our own anxiety affects the therapy our clients receive from us? We therapists have anxiety too and it can be especially likely to occur while working. In this training we explore the situations at home and at work that stir up the most anxiety for us and then identify how to address it. This course provides you with a detailed understanding of anxiety in yourself, what causes it, what it causes you to do, and how you can regulate it. This will make you happier and more relaxed as well as improve your effectiveness in the therapy that you provide.
(3 sessions over the course of 6 weeks)
Credits: 1.5 CE per session
Length: 1.5 hours per session
Cost: $160.00, Group Pricing Varies
Next Scheduled Series: TBD
Time: TBD
Location: Virtual
Self-Compassion in Action
Mental health is a topic we frequently hear about in the news and in social and professional circles, but mental health is rarely well-defined. Understanding what healthy emotional functioning is, what causes mental health problems and what to do about them starts and ends with self-compassion. A focus on self-compassion addresses the most important relationship you will ever have in life - the relationship you have with yourself. Begin today taking actions toward your own healthy emotional functioning, putting self-compassion into action.
Credits: 2 CE
Length: 2 hours
Cost $85.00, Group Pricing Varies
Next Scheduled Date: TBD
Time: TBD
Location: TBD
Identifying and Overcoming Implicit Bias As a Therapist
Many of us feel anxious when discussing social issues such as racism, gender, sexuality, and many others. In this training, you will learn what implicit bias is and how it operates in our therapeutic relationships. You will develop your capacity to gain conscious awareness of your perception and judgment to make more intentional and equitable decisions. You will gain courage to more effectively communicate with your clients about difficult topics and feel more confident to serve diverse populations. Join us to reduce your anxiety about discussing social change, elevate your existing clinical abilities, and gain practical steps you can take to promote social justice within your work and everyday life.
Credits: 3 CE
Length: 3 hours
Cost $100.00, Group Pricing Varies
Next Scheduled Date: TBD
Time: TBD
Location: Virtual