Tag Archives: Training

Think of Training to be a Counsellor, Psychotherapist or Sex & Relationship Therapist/Clinical Sexologist?

Posted on by

Training to be a therapist takes between three-seven years depending on the programme you choose.  It’s likely to cost you around £20-30k, in course fees, supervision, personal therapy not including textbooks, and any loss of earnings from taking time off from your day job.

There also isn’t a great deal of well paid work for most therapists and so recouping your financial investment will take a long while.

Most training courses are very heteronormative and cis-normative and so if you feel particularly called to work with LGBTQ+ people, you will probably need to add some additional training to supplement or address the gaps. 

So before you leap, it’s worth doing some research. You might find these questions helpful to ask your potential training programme as you might prefer to invest your money in a course which represents the needs of the people you seek to serve by asking the course staff a few questions:

  • Do they have any ‘out’ LGBTQ+ Faculty?
  • How much will they be directly involved in teaching you?
  • How much specific input on gender, sex and relationship diversities  (GSRD*) will the course be including (hours/days etc)? Will this be integrated throughout the curriculum as well as specific specialist input about GSRD identities, psychology, sexuality and lifestyles?
  • Who delivers this material? Course staff, external trainers or are YOU the students expected to deliver it?
  • Do they know how many GSRD folk are like to be in the next cohort?
  • Can they say how many GSRD folk have been in the last two cohorts (i.e. does the course attract GSRD people), is it possible to speak with them about their experience of the course?
  • How does the course challenge homophobia, transphobia and heterosexism when expressed or implied in the course?
  • What about when this might come for example  from students as part of their deeply held religious or cultural beliefs?

These questions are motivated out of a primary concern for psychological safety – is this training place going to be an emotionally and psychologically safe place for you and will the course prepare you adequately for working with GSRD clients.

People identifying from gender, sex and relationship diverse communities are more likely to experience mental health challenges and have poorer mental health than those from outside those communities. This is due to something known as minority stress. It results in higher levels of depression, anxiety and self-harm and substance misuse. Also same-sex relationships often operate along different dynamics to different gender relationships. We might also experience different kinds of sexual difficulties and challenges regarding parenting, family relationships, ageing etc. Basically life is different for folk from GSRD communities/identities. Yet very few therapists trained on mainstream courses are taught anything much about all of this.

We think this is unacceptable and you deserve to be trained by knowledgeable people who can prepare you for working with the tremendous diversity present in today’s society.

Pink Therapy now offers a course endorsement scheme to help identify courses who have recognised the need to be inclusive and honour the promises made by the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy v2 which has been signed by all the major professional bodies including BPS, UKCP, BACP, NCS, COSRT and BABCP. Only one training currently has that endorsement.

* Gender, Sex and Relationship Diversities is our preferred more inclusive term for a wide range of gender identities and sexual orientations/practices which extend beyond LGBTIQ and include Asexualties, BDSM/Kink, various forms of consensual non-monogamies (polyamory, swingers, open relationships etc).

Dominic Davies
28 February 2020

Intersecting Identities – March 30th 2019

Posted on by

Our Annual Spring Conference this year is looking at how identities are not singular, but instead multiple and overlapping.
Intersectionality explores the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, gender, faith and disability/health as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of privilege and disadvantage. The term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 although the dynamics she described, of course, predate this. The majority of the conference will comprise a series of panels which will explore some of the implicit and explicit intersectional issues inside and outside of the therapy room.   .

The conference will look at how both as therapists, and as individuals who ourselves have intersectional identities we navigate the world, and our client relationships. The vital importance of understanding the context within which clients and therapists present, not as a single issue but as complex, multifaceted human beings is woven throughout the day.

Olukemi Amala

We are excited to have Olukemi Amala as our keynote speaker. Olukemi has been a psychotherapist in private practice for over 18 years. She says that “Being a black, queer, disabled wheelchair using feminist”, offers her a view from multiple othered social positions which informs her personal and professional practices. and as you can see from the programme below we will be looking in depth at intersections of race, faith, disability, and gender.

This year we have partnered with OnlineEvents who have agreed to undertake the event administration and who will video the event for their extensive CPD library.  You can book your tickets here for what we hope will be a challenging and ground breaking day..  We are using our usual venue – Resources for London, which is very close to Holloway Road Tube and is fully accessible.

The conference is open to counsellors and psychotherapists, clinical sexologists and psychosexual therapists, counselling and clinical psychologists, and those trained in somatic sexological bodywork and sex coaches.

Programme 
09.00       Registration
09.30       Welcome and Announcements – Dominic Davies CEO Pink Therapy
10.00       Keynote: Intersectionality: Olukemi Amala
10.30       Q&A/Discussion
10.45       Coffee
11:15       Panel: Intersections of Faith 
                Kathy Spooner Chair Association of Christian Counsellors
                Khakan Qureshi  Birmingham South Asians LGBT
                Joel Korn              Judaism
12.15      Panel: Intersections of Disability and Health/Wellness
                Rich Knight                
                Lou Futcher
                Liz Day
13.15       Lunch
14.15       Panel: Intersections of Race & Ethnicity
                Zayna Ratty
                Sabah Choudrey
                Joel Simpson
15.15       Break
15:45       Panel: Intersections of Gender            
                MJ Barker                
                Ellis Johnson
                Leah Davidson
16.45       Conference Closing – and feedback 
17.00       End

Click here to book your tickets for the conference, via Eventbrite. There is an early bird discount until 31 January, when the tickets will rise from £120 to £140.

For those not familiar with Intersectional approaches, here is a great cartoon! 

image

No longer in the minority

Posted on by
A photpgraph of Robert, smiling, in front of trees, wearing a blue rain jacket.

I first became aware of Pink Therapy when Dominic came to the University of Nottingham to do a talk as part of my degree studies. I was very fortunate that my course included some training on working with gender, sexuality and relationship diversity [GSRD] clients. This sparked my interest in attending further trainings provided by Pink Therapy, as I felt that it was important for me to expand my knowledge in this area. I had a wonderful experience attending the international summer school in 2013, and really valued the experience brought by the trainers and my course peers from all around the world. I remember thinking, it was such a unique experience to share the learning in an environment where I felt I really belonged, and wasn’t in the minority for once!


When I had the chance in 2015 to attend the two year Post-Graduate Diploma in Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity, I jumped at the chance, as I knew the quality of trainers that are involved in all Pink Therapy training. I found the course to be fantastic, and it covered all aspects of issues that may arise when working with GSRD clients. The overall support provided by the faculty was incredible, and I feel very honoured to have been in the first cohort of students, to complete the mostly online training. I wouldn’t hesitate doing it all over again, and the residential week was a truly empowering experience. I now approach my work with GSRD clients with a renewed competence, and am even mentoring/ supervising some of the current Pink Therapy students!

Robert Patterson
Psychotherapist in Private Practice
Co. Kerry, Republic of Ireland.
http://www.robertpatterson-counselling.com

A Finnish Psychotherapist’s Thoughts

Posted on by
Aleksi Jalava

ON THE 2013 SUMMER SCHOOL

I am a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist from Finland. When I attended the summer school back in 2013 I was on my third year of my (four years) Training of cognitive-integrative psychotherapy. I learned so much, something that was not included at all in my own psychotherapy training! After the summer school I started writing my diploma work ”GSRD therapy in cognitive-integrative psychotherapy”. Based on this text, I later expanded it into a booklet which was (and still is) the only one written in Finnish language on this very topic. It has been so rewarding to hear from clinicians that the booklet has been helpful and they have learned a lot from it. After the Training of cognitive-integrative psychotherapy I took a one year Training of couples therapy and wrote another diploma work: ”GSRD therapy in couples and relationships psychotherapy”.

Together with the booklet I introduced seminars intended for psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists and started running these basically around the country. Not only private clinicians have been interested but also the public healthcare sector organizations. For example, next spring I am one of the invited speakers in a seminar organized by Helsinki university hospital. I am also trying to make the organizers of Finnish psychotherapy trainings interested in making GSRDT topics part of the four year psychotherapy training programmes organized in this country – just one day would be great! In the spring of 2019 it is going to happen the first time when my seminar day will be part of Solution-focused therapy training. I am so excited about this! Earlier, my seminar day was already a part of a couples therapy training organized in my hometown Turku. 

At the moment I am taking a 2,5 years Training of trainer and supervisor of cognitive-integrative psychotherapy, which means that after this I can lead psychotherapy trainings organized by the Finnish universities. Yet another diploma work, including research, is on the way – you can guess the topic! After this training I can have so much more influence in what is included in psychotherapy trainings offered.

What I learned in the 2013 summer school has of course given me so much as a clinician and helped me to be a better, more skilful psychotherapist. I can also remember the summer as a period of deep personal growth, figuring out who am I as a psychotherapist and what it means to be a gay psychotherapist. Naturally, these are questions I have also worked through in my own personal psychotherapy, am still doing that, and most probably always will in my own mind. After all, it is a never ending journey! Without all that I learned in the summer school and the process it started in my mind, I think I would never have made it this far, would not have been able to learn so much about myself, too! And most importantly, without the summer shool’s teachings, I clearly would have been less helpful for my patients.

Thank you so much Pink Therapy summer school 2013!
Aleksi Jalava

Psychologist/Psychotherapist – Finland

http://www.sateenkaarisohva.fi