Michael Elkin, LMFT

Internal Family Systems Senior Trainer

Michael Elkin has been struggling with addiction for over fifty years. After a brief adventure with heroin while still in high school in the 1950's, he found that his experiences as a marginal jazz musician qualified him to practice psychotherapy with people colonized by drugs. Initially his only resources in this project were the skills he acquired as a minor league pool and poker hustler, but he was fortunate to find mentors who taught him to add strategic and structural family therapy and hypnosis to his repertoire. In 1984 he published Families Under the Influence (Norton, still in print) and began teaching systemic approaches to addiction throughout the US and Europe. In 1995 he discovered Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems therapy model, which he considers to be the most effective tool for healing currently available. He is dedicated to helping healers use this model effectively.