Today we’d like to introduce you to Stacy Smith.
Hi Stacy, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
My goal of becoming a therapist started in 1989 while receiving my own psychotherapy as a college student. My therapist gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life: a quiet space where I could feel safe enough to explore the depths of my own emotional needs, having her steady, nonjudgmental, caring presence as an anchor and guide. Since that time, over 30 years passed while I lived through different meaningful experiences and circled back to become a licensed marriage and family therapist. In my graduate training, I came to understand the importance of addressing and healing emotional trauma, and now, after establishing my own psychotherapy practice, I feel so honored to have been able to witness hundreds of people’s healing processes.
As a graduate student, I was drawn toward trauma therapies, and when I learned about Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), I was moved by how transformational this approach was in helping people heal emotional wounds and create new patterns of well-being anchored in self-compassion. In addition to my gratitude for IFS, I feel so fortunate to work in the field of psychology now as it moves toward the scientifically supported inclusion of the responsible use of psychedelics as catalysts to emotional healing. Combining IFS and Psychedelic Assisted Therapy (PAT) is a profound experience that offers people a way to advance their healing journeys deeply.
I’d say my 30-year road to becoming a therapist was well worth the wait.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The road was not smooth.
In hindsight, and after years of my own therapy, I can look back and say that the biggest struggle I had along the way was believing in myself. As a young adult, I knew that my core being held a desire to help people heal emotional wounds, but I made choices in my early 20s that took me away from seeking the graduate education I needed to formally make that my life’s work. Most of those choices came from my struggles with neurodivergences and learning differences; I didn’t believe I was capable of going to graduate school and becoming “successful.” It feels great to look back now and be able to identify that with total self-compassion for that younger me. Though my road was not linear, I wouldn’t change a thing because my life was enriched with great opportunities for my own healing, and I have three beautiful adult children who are now embarking on their own life journeys!
One of the greatest celebrations of that challenging road is that all three of my children value the process of emotional healing and contribute to making the world a safer place for others to engage in their own healing. My daughter is an outcomes manager for a national adolescent behavioral health company, my oldest son is a graduate MFT intern, and my youngest son hopes to become a psychedelic-assisted therapist. They are amazing people who care about the greater good, and I’m so proud of them!
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Stacy Smith Psychotherapy?
I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified psychedelic-assisted therapy provider in Carlsbad. I run a private psychotherapy practice using IFS, EMDR, and psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) to help people heal from emotional trauma. My specialty is working with adults who experience depression, anxiety, PTSD, or C-PTSD as a result of inter-relational trauma or childhood attachment wounds. I’m known as a trauma therapist who provides a calm, respectful environment while helping people access their inner worlds in a deep way so personal growth and inner healing can lead to lasting change. In addition to my private practice, I provide ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) for a local ketamine retreat company.
A few years ago, I began to notice that a lot of my clients were exploring the healing properties of psychedelics on their own, hoping to heal emotional struggles and not become dependent on antidepressants. Some of them had tried antidepressants and found no lasting healing, only masking of symptoms. That really resonated with me because, from my own experience of being prescribed antidepressants in the past, I knew that they do not heal the root cause of emotional suffering. They sometimes reduce symptoms, but they do not get at what causes the symptoms. For that endeavor, a deeper, more personal healing journey is required.
Because my graduate studies did not include training in psychedelic-assisted therapies, I searched for psychedelic-assisted therapy providers I could consult with or refer my clients to. I was particularly interested in finding therapists who combined IFS and PAT. Not finding any in San Diego, I decided I would find the appropriate training to be able to offer that specific combination of approaches to my clients. I was fortunate to be admitted to the Integrative Psychiatry Institute’s yearlong Psychedelic Assisted Therapy Provider certification program while at the same time advancing my formal training in IFS for addictions and eating disorders. What sets me apart from other therapists is having the formal training of all three of these therapies: EMDR, IFS and PAT.
EMDR is a well recognized trauma therapy that uses bilateral stimulation to assist people with reprocessing trauma memories so that they can exit old patterns and form new adaptive ways of living. When I work with clients I use IFS predominantly but I also bring in certain aspects of EMDR to enhance the flow of therapy if it seems to stall.
IFS is a powerful trauma therapy that takes people through specific steps to access their own innate healing essence (what IFS calls Self) in order to bring compassionate care to the parts of themselves that need healing. Founded by Richard Schwartz PhD, IFS is an evidence based and empirically supported therapy that has been growing worldwide for the last 40 years. It is a non-pathologizing therapy that works from the assumption that deep within, we all have a natural capacity to heal our emotional wounds.
IFS is grounded in the concept of multiplicity of mind. This is the idea that the human mind is made up of smaller parts of the whole. For example, most of us have experienced an inner conflict at some point, where a part of us leans toward doing something restful, fun, indulgent, or relaxing, and another part of us leans toward doing something more responsible. Sometimes these parts can get intense. Historically, different psychological approaches have referred to the experience of multiplicity using terms such as ego-states, sub-personalities, or aspects of self. In IFS the language is user-friendly and we use the word parts. When the stakes are high, parts-driven inner conflict can become compounded with painful emotions such as guilt and shame. For this reason, healing requires a compassionate approach to identifying the root cause of the shame and bringing loving compassion to the parts that try to protect us from feeling it and the parts who have been exiled away to hold it. That is not an easy thing to do without skilled guidance and support. IFS and PAT do not need to be combined to provide an opening for that natural process to emerge but when paired together, the experience is exceptionally transformative.
Unlike traditional talk therapy, IFS offers people the experience of “inner focus,” which is a somatically anchored relational emotional connection to these aspects of ourselves. Parts often get stuck in protective patterns that are fueled by deeper, sometimes subconscious, emotional pain. Rather than focusing on problem solving, applying reason or tracking behavioral change to the exclusion of deeper emotional meaning, IFS engages the system within from a relational framework and invites a person to notice the difference between what it feels like physically and emotionally to be in Self energy and what it feels like to be parts-driven. When a person builds awareness of this difference, IFS offers opportunities to practice Self-to-part relationship where protective parts are befriended, engaged, and witnessed with compassion so that a new configuration of the system can emerge in which Self is positioned to bring healing to the vulnerable parts who hold emotional wounds. Self-to-part healing is the game changer.
What makes IFS so compatible with PAT is that they both share the deep experience of accessing the essence of who we are inside in order to bring about compassionate inner healing and change from within. I believe that what IFS calls Self is the same experience that Stanslav Groff referred to as the Inner Healing Intelligence. Groff used this term to refer to the vast compassionate state of inner healing that naturally arises during some psychedelic healing experiences. The term was later refined by Michael Mithoefer of MAPS (The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) when he noticed that in MDMA assisted therapy trials, subjects began spontaneously talking about parts of themselves and building new compassionate relationships with the parts who had been stuck for years in emotional pain.
I’m most proud of my ongoing love of learning how to blend IFS, EMDR and PAT.
It’s important to emphasize that there are risks to the use of psychedelics and people should not attempt to use them to heal their own traumas without the guidance of a person who is well trained and experienced specifically in healing trauma. Currently, medically prescribed ketamine is the only legal substance used for PAT.
The field of psychotherapy is just beginning to normalize the responsible, supervised use of psychedelics as an adjunct to psychotherapy. I provide IFS without ketamine or with medically prescribed ketamine in partnership with medical providers, and I provide IFS based preparation and integration for psychedelic assisted therapy. My practice is about half and half in-person and telehealth, serving adults throughout California.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up.
My favorite childhood memory is a collection of memories of times my sister and I got to play with two cousins who lived far away. I remember being thrilled that they were coming over or that we were going to their house. They were incredibly funny, and we would play and laugh for hours. One visit stands out in my head because of the anticipation I had that they were coming for a sleepover. Back in those days (the 1970s), special television shows aired very rarely, and there were no replay opportunities, not even a VHS video. On this particular day, my cousin’s visit coincided with an airing of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I was thrilled for what felt like weeks, looking forward to the day they would come over to watch the show with us, stay up late, and have a sleepover.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.stacysmiththerapy.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ifs.journey/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ifsjourney
Image Credits
Jake Smith
