Tag Archives: online counselling training

Pink Therapy is (almost) Global

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When you see the reach of Pink Therapy, we are almost global. This map shows the location of people who have either attended our Summer School or engaged in a deeper year or two-year-long training programme.

I was in Warsaw last November. Over the three days, I was there, I had a significant epiphany about the profound impact the International Summer Schools we used to run has had on many people’s lives.

Class of 2012

The International Summer School was a five-day not-for-profit intense training and an idea suggested by our Clinical Associate Olivier Cormier-Otaño when he was involved in Pink Therapy’s administration. Olivier was a co-facilitator on each of the events and indeed, along with fellow Clinical Associate, Pamela Gawler-Wright (graduate of the class of 2012), took on the major facilitation roles of the School from 2013-2016 when I decided to launch a more substantive online training which itself has a week-long residential component.

The night I arrived in Warsaw, I had dinner with Dr Daniel Bąk (Daniel attended the second of our Summer Schools in 2011) he is a Gestalt psychologist and involved internationally with other LGBTQ+ Gestalt psychologists and along with my other dinner companion Dr Bartosz Grabski they are co-editors of the first Polish textbook on LGBT psychology. Bartosz attended the Summer School in 2014. He is a consultant psychiatrist and recently became a fellow of the European Society for Sexual Medicine. Bartosz’s primary area of particular interest is in working with trans people in Krakow. He also wrote the Mental Health modules for our online teaching programme.

Graduates of the first European Sexual Diversity Training
Warsaw, November 2018

I was in Warsaw to deliver a pioneering new training – the European Sexual Diversity Training (ESDT) – a three-day intensive course to help psychologists and clinical sexologists understand more about the sexual difficulties of gender, sexuality and relationship diverse populations. It’s a course that Bartosz, I and Dr Agata Loewe co-conceived and wrote. Agata is a graduate of the Class of 2013 and works as a psychologist, clinical sexologist, and she co-founded the Sex Positive Institute in Warsaw. The ESDT was one of my proudest achievements of 2018. To bring together a medically trained sexologist alongside two clinical sexologists working at the cutting edge of alternative and diverse sexualities was an incredible achievement. I think the course is a profoundly life-changing programme with a significant experiential component and the end of course evaluations was incredibly heartening.

One of ESDT participants, Marco Pilia, had travelled from London where he has a private practice and works for a Mental Health charity. Marco is also graduate of the class of 2013 and has gone onto pioneer the development of GSRD therapy for counsellors and hypnotherapists in Rome and is currently putting together a Master’s programme, the first of it’s kind in the world.

Memorandum of Understanding
Version 2

On the second morning in Warsaw, I received an email from Anita Furlong (graduate of the class of 2012). Anita brought a variety of Pink Therapy faculty over to Dublin to deliver some training locally and has subsequently gone on to provide a fair amount of training herself. Anita is currently holding the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (IACP) to account and ‘encouraging’ them to adopt the recently updated Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy. This document has been signed by virtually all the leading British Psy/Therapy bodies

Earlier in the Summer, I had the pleasure of travelling to Edinburgh at the invitation of Jo Russell (class of 2013) who has now just graduated from our Diploma programme and joined the Faculty as one of our Clinical Case Discussion tutors (alongside, Daniel, Agata and Olivier). Jo had invited me to deliver a workshop for the ‘Rainbow Therapists’ a group she has set up for people north of the border. They will be hosting their first National Conference in May 2019.

One of the other participants in Warsaw is the partner of Aleksi Jalava (Class of 2013), and you can read about how his career has developed here. Aleksi was the first of our graduates to respond to my invitation to share their lives since the Summer School with us and an enthusiastic supporter of Pink Therapy, having travelled from Finland for many of our training courses and conferences.

More blogs will be forthcoming from other Summer School Graduates.

When I think about what has been so profoundly inspiring about the International Summer Schools, I believe is the opportunity to share our life stories in a safe space where the whole person can be present, where the majority of the people attending identify as GSRD. Also the opportunity to meet and learn from people across the globe and who remain in touch with each other as part of an international support network is another important factor. Indeed, I’ve harnessed some of this incredible knowledge and energy by having some of the graduates join the faculty of our international online training courses.

Dominic Davies
CEO – Pink Therapy
January 1st 2019

From Glasgow…

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In July 2013 I attended an “International Summer School” run by Pink Therapy? Why?

Jo Russell

I was a therapist of 10 years’ experience. I had trained as a therapist while living ‘by faith’ as a Christian Missionary on a faith-based diploma course. We had one day on ‘talking about sex with clients’. That was it. Nothing on LGBT ‘issues’. I didn’t even know what Q meant. By 2013 being a therapist had changed me and I was no longer a missionary, although I hadn’t walked away from my faith. In supervision I recognised that I could no longer excuse my ignorance, I needed to confront myself. 

And that is something I like about myself: when I make a decision I go all the way. Where would my ignorance be most confronted? Where would I be most confronted? Google directed me to Pink Therapy (I never did like the colour pink), and I began to explore training possibilities. London was too far away for short workshops (I live in Glasgow), but a week… A week would give me the opportunity to learn, not just to catch a glimpse of something, to build new connections.

The International part of Summer School was significant for me. That aspect of diversity I was comfortable with. I had travelled the world. I was accustomed to different cultures and languages; I felt at home with them. Perhaps that helped me to feel less defensive, more open to new things?

I had to raise the money; friends and family helped. But that week was career changing. It was life changing. I still work in private practice, and 90% of my clients have stories of diversity in gender, relational styles or sexuality. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity I was afforded, and for those who believed in me, accepted me, and allowed me to move from where I was, without pressure. 

Since then I have found the confidence to do more than I believed possible. I completed the 2 year Pink Therapy Post-graduate diploma in working with gender, sexual and relational diversity, and am now part of the faculty for the Foundation Certificate course. I still attend (and hopefully contribute to) Pink Therapy conferences, and recently presented a paper for the Psychology of Sexualities section of the British Psychological Society. Since Pink therapy is London-based, and since the experience of being GSRD north of the border is different, I have started a group (www.rainbowtherapyscotland.org.uk) which meets as a peer-led networking and CPD opportunity for those working therapeutically in a non-pathologising way with GSRD clients. We will have our first national conference in May 2019. 

Below are some extracts of my journal, written during That Week. They are unaltered, and I hope they give a flavour of my experience of summer school. 

Day One: “I realised just how cloistered I have been and in some ways how naive and inexperienced I am. But during the course of the day I noticed a subtle change in myself, reminiscent of my first trip to Central Asia. “They” went from being labels, categories, types to being “thou” in the old use of the word, someone I know, respect, and identify with, a fellow human being with a whole lifetime of a story to tell, and with whom I have far more in common than I have different.”

Day Two: “If day 1 felt rich, day 2 stirred a much deeper personal commitment to engage in this work therapeutically, and an emotional response to those who have lived through deeper and more scarring experiences than I could have imagined. May God be my helper.”

Day Three: “This week is changing me on the inside. It seems to me that as humans we can feel intimidated by the things we know little about or have little experience of. The unknown can be scary; at the same time we feel drawn to it and hold back from it. We need not fear. Human is human; it just may sound different on the outside.”

Day Four: “The diversity within the group of life experience and of background and personality added to rather than strained the dynamic. We were all able to listen to each other and so no-one felt constrained to shout over any group consensus to make their individual voice heard.”

Day Five: “To all of you who made it possible for me to be here, please know that not only am I grateful to you for your generosity, but I hope my future clients will also be grateful without knowing it. You are investing in them as well as me. Thank you for believing in me and valuing them!”

Joanna Russell

jo1russell@gmail.com