Together, we are stronger.
Group offerings
Virtual and in-person, Boston and other locations
We humans are meant to exist in community and support one another. Group therapy and healing retreats can decrease the sense of isolation we feel when living in a highly individualistic culture. The groups and healing retreats I offer contain space for internal work and reflection as well as external sharing and collaboration.
When sharing with the group and listening to others, we have opportunities to decrease our sense of shame when we realize we are not alone with our struggles. This is important because socially stigmatized issues are often kept quiet, when in fact, we all experience them. Breaking the silence is hard but liberating.
A restorative IFS healing circle for Latina-identified therapists
En Comunidad con Terapistas Latinas: Navigating Cultural Legacies, Aspirations, and Moral Injury, Using an IFS Framework
With Lydia E. Rosa, LCSW, and Joya Lonsdale, LICSW
New York City, June 10-13, 2027
A restorative IFS healing circle for Latina-identified therapists to tend to the parts of themselves shaped by cultural devotion, personal dreams, and the invisible wounds of practicing within systems that often conflict with who we are.
As Latina therapists, we hold so much. In the therapy room, we offer presence, care, and deep attunement. Outside of it, we are often pillars within our families and communities—daughters, mothers, partners, and caretakers—carrying expectations of strength, sacrifice, and responsibility. Alongside these roles live our own aspirations and dreams: the parts of us that long for expansion, authenticity, rest, and self-definition beyond what has been asked of us.
Many Latina therapists who work in the U.S. health care system (in agencies or in private practice) carry a quiet, often unspoken weight—the pain of being asked to work in ways that conflict with our deepest cultural values. We are trained and work within systems that prioritize efficiency over connection, individualism over community, profits over human need, and rigid protocols over relational wisdom. In these spaces, we may find ourselves unable to include family in healing, forced to uphold policies that harm undocumented communities, or required to pathologize what we understand as systemic oppression and culturally rooted suffering. These moments can create a profound sense of moral injury—a feeling that, despite our intentions, we are participating in systems that betray our values of familismo, respeto, and personalismo.
This four-day workshop is an invitation to gently turn inward and tend to these experiences. Using an Internal Family Systems (IFS) Healing Circles–informed approach (developed by Chris Burris, M.Ed, LMFT, LCMHCS), we will create space to explore the parts of ourselves that carry cultural loyalty, professional pressure, moral distress, ambition, and exhaustion. Together, we will begin to identify and/or unburden the internal conflicts that arise when our identities as Latinas and clinicians collide with dominant U.S. systems, and reconnect with the clarity, compassion, and leadership of our core Self.
Within a community of Latina clinicians, we will name what is often held in silence: the grief, the resilience, the contradictions, and the strength. This is a space not only for learning and reflection, but for restoration—a place to reclaim alignment between who we are, how we practice, and how we choose to live.
Workshop Description:
Through a combination of didactic teaching, guided IFS experiential exercises, meditations, somatic practices, group process, and sculpting, participants will gain more awareness of their own internal systems, identify cultural messages that shape us, learn the basics of the IFS model, and learn more about the impact of moral injury on us and how we can mitigate it individually and collectively. This workshop will provide a deeply experiential learning environment. Therapists will engage with their own internal systems while also gaining practical tools for working with clients who struggle with similar issues in their lives.
What Participants Will Gain:
Recognize how Latine cultural values shape clinical practice and identity
Name the impact of cultural and gendered expectations on family, work, and personal aspirations
Identify internal parts activated by cultural conflict between Latine cultural messages and dominant U.S. culture
Increase knowledge of moral injury and burnout for Latina therapists working in the U.S. healthcare system and gain practical strategies on how to mitigate the impact of moral injury individually and collectively
Gain knowledge of the core concepts of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model
Learn tools and practices that promote resilience and sustainability in clinical work, which can be applied to clinical work with clients
Training Structure:
Who: Latina-identified therapists who want to expand their capacity to understand how Latine cultures and moral injury influence their work/life and those of their clients.
What: Four-day workshop in person. Limited to 10 participants. Conducted in English/Spanglish.
Where: New York City (Manhattan), Balance Arts Center
When: June 10-13, 2027. 9:00-5:00 pm EST daily
Note: One month prior, there will be a Zoom meeting to meet fellow participants.
Cost: $950 when you register by 10/31/26 ($200 deposit due today, followed by four equal payments of $187.50). $1,100 from 11/1/26. Please reach out if you need an alternate payment plan.
Meals and lodging are not included and are to be arranged on your own.
CEU Credits: We have applied for CEU credits for social workers, psychologists, licensed mental health counselors, and licensed marriage and family therapists.
Your Workshop Leaders
Lydia E. Rosa, LCSW-R
Lydia Rosa is a Puerto Rican licensed professional Social Worker, trainer, and clinical consultant who is a trauma specialist in New York, USA, with over 25 years of experience. She is a Level 3, IFS Certified Therapist and Approved IFS Clinical Consultant. She has been a Program Assistant (PA) 11 times for the IFS Institute, teaches an introductory IFS course in the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis’ Trauma Program and is trained in IFS Healing Circles with Groups. She is also trained in EMDR; Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Level 2; Brainspotting, Phase 2; as well as other modalities.
Lydia has a full-time private practice dedicated to helping primarily Latine, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ individuals heal from Trauma, including cultural and legacy trauma. Prior to being in private practice, she was the Director for a community mental health agency serving primarily a Spanish-speaking, low socio-economic population in the South Bronx. She is a member of Circulo IFS LATAM, a group dedicated to bringing IFS to Latin America and the Caribbean. They have worked with the IFS Institute to create Instituto IFS Latinoamerica (Sistemas de Familia Interna) which now offers approved IFS Institute trainings, starting in Mexico. Learn more about Lydia here.
Joya Lonsdale, LICSW
Joya Lonsdale is a bilingual (English/Spanish) psychotherapist, trainer, and clinical consultant in private practice in Boston, MA, with over 20 years of experience. Though not Latina-identified, she has lived and worked in Latine communities in the U.S. for 35 years and has lived in Latin America. She is a Certified IFS Therapist (trained to Level 3), an Approved IFS Clinical Consultant, and a Co-Lead Trainer for Intimacy From the Inside Out® (IFIO), training therapists worldwide in the IFIO model for relationship therapy in both languages. She is also trained in EMDR, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, IFS Healing Circles with Groups, and other models, and holds a Certificate in Couple and Family Therapy from Therapy Training Boston and a Certificate in Group Work from Boston University School of Social Work.
In her private practice, she sees adult individuals, intimate partners, families, and groups, specializing in trauma, moral injury, intimate relationships, and Latine and immigrant mental health. Joya previously worked at a community health center serving Boston's Latine community for 10 years, where she continues to facilitate three therapy groups in Spanish. In 2024, she co-facilitated a retreat for healing from moral injury and burnout for frontline health workers—the majority Latine — at the Uplands Center in the Catskill Mountains. She also consults to healthcare, immigrant, and non-profit organizations on moral injury and burnout.
Other future healing retreats are under development. Sign up below to join my mailing list and be notified about future retreats.
Past Retreats
Sanemos en Comunidad
In October 2024, I co-lead the Sanemos en Comunidad (Healing in Community) retreat at the Uplands Center in Walton, NY with an interdisciplinary multiracial leadership team. This retreat helped 20 front-line health care workers and therapists from Boston to heal from burnout and moral injury from working in medically underserved communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can read more about moral injury here.
Group Therapy
I facilitate three weekly Spanish-language groups at the Southern Jamaica Plain Community Health Center (Mass General Brigham) in Boston:
El Grupo de Hombres Latinos (Latino Men’s Group)
El Grupo de Reducción del Estrés (Stress Reduction Group for Women) (co-lead with a social worker)
Comunidad en Acción (Support Group for Spanish-speaking adults with diabetes or pre-diabetes, co-lead by a multidisciplinary medical team)