Cece Sykes

Cece Sykes, LCSW, is a Senior Trainer for the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Institute with over forty years of clinical experience. She saw her first client — a thirteen-year-old sexually abused runaway foster child — at a community-based family services agency in 1978, and spent the next twelve years working in Chicago with families affected by abuse, neglect, and addiction. Initially trained as a structural-strategic family therapist, her focus included treating adult trauma survivors and eating disordered clients, providing individual, couples, and group treatment. She also provided workshops and training on family therapy and trauma treatment at the Institute for Juvenile Research, the Department of Children and Family Services, The Family Institute at Northwestern, and many other mental health agencies.

In 1992, Cece opened her private practice treating adults, couples, and families. She taught experiential psychology seminars for women at Governors State University for five years and served as adjunct faculty at the Jane Addams School of Social Work at the University of Illinois in Chicago for three years. She expanded her clinical focus to include the IFS model in the late 1990s, and beginning in 2004 led Level 1, 2, and 3 IFS training programs across the country and internationally. She contributed a chapter titled 'An IFS Lens on Addiction: Compassion for Extreme Parts' in the 2016 book Innovations and Elaborations in Internal Family Systems Therapy.

In 2023, Cece co-authored the best-selling manual Internal Family Systems Therapy for Addictions with IFS author Martha Sweezy and IFS founder Richard Schwartz, offering a novel framework that links the inner focus of trauma treatment with the behavioral focus of addiction treatment. Another dimension of her work is the intersection of psychotherapy with spirituality, having worked with Zen communities, traditional religious groups, and twelve-step followers. She also created and leads the Heart Lessons of the Journey workshops, exploring the personal narratives of psychotherapists across the globe, and currently leads international retreats focused on therapist self-care and renewal using the IFS model.