Benefits of the DFI Training Program

• Complete the coursework required for the LMFT.
• Gain much-needed direct client contact hours for experience and licensure.
• Work with a dedicated, passionate faculty that is second to none in the area.
• Know the central importance of relationship in all clinical work.
• Mature and grow as a strength-based, systemic therapist.
• Gain the competencies necessary to be successful.
• Move beyond a singular focus on treating disease to empowering clients to resolve their pressing life problems (which might include a DSM diagnosis).
• Expand as a clinician to having a “self of many possibilities”.
• Learn to join with a diverse array of families, couples and individuals.
• Bring your diversity to the program to add to the mix, and strengthen your appreciation of diversity in clients, other clinicians and communities.
• Facilitate change in the therapy session.
• Create therapeutic relationships with clients most likely to generate change.
• Maintain therapeutic maneuverability, especially with court-ordered cases, and other reluctant or resistant family systems.
• Gain a foundational knowledge of the major family therapy and couples counseling theories.
• Apply theories in practical ways in your clinical work.
• Gain solid systemic assessment skills.
• Be able to formulate useful systemic hypotheses from those theories.
• Understand of your own family-of-origin role, experiences, cultural identity and heritage to strengthen your therapeutic presence.
• Value your own cultural, gender and sexual identity, and those of your clients.
• Develop an optimistic, hopeful approach to working with difficult cases.
• Join a warm, supportive, diverse therapeutic community (click here to download the DFI Diversity Statement).
• Work with diverse clients in the DFI clinic.
• Team up with fellow students in mutually supportive, enriching relationships.
• Integrate your strengths, experiences and knowledge in to your therapy.
• Receive direct feedback, expansive experiences and team support in DFI’s  live supervision format.
• Further your journey to becoming the best therapist you can be for your clients.
• Foster connections with other professionals in the family-therapy field.
• Cultivate a deep sense of ethics and integrity in your work, not from fear, but from integrating relational ethics as the foundational element in good therapy.
• Have fun while learning and stretching with other motivated, dynamic students.
• Accept challenges to your comfort zone as needed so you can supervise yourself as an independent licensed clinician.
• Nurture your sense of self as a clinician and your use of self in your work.

“I love DFI. This is a warm, supportive community. We challenge and encourage each other to be the best therapists for our clients in so many ways.” – Pamela “Sunny” Marsh, Ph.D. candidate