Certificate in Psychosexual Therapy

Prefer to study in person?
Enrol for the Spring 2023 intake

Course overview:

This 8-day certificate course, facilitated by Cabby Laffy and Polly McAfee, is designed for qualified counsellors, psychotherapists or psychologists who would like to become more skilled in working therapeutically with psychosexual issues. Through theoretical teaching and experiential work - including group discussion, case vignettes, and skills practice - you will gain conceptual insights, practical tools and more confidence to work with clients’ sexual concerns. These concerns may range from lack of sexual interest to pain during penetration, to difficulty asserting boundaries or communicating preferences, to recovery from sexual trauma, and the psychosexual impact of shame. The course also gives an overview of sexual anatomy for the purposes of enhancing pleasure. It looks at ways to help clients keep desire alive in long term relationships.

Our approach celebrates Gender, Sex and Relationship Diversity (GSRD), avoiding assumptions of normativity. We include the impact of societal and cultural beliefs on our sexual lives - along with the importance of social identity and positionality for sexual expression. The trainers advocate working with both/all partners where possible when treating psychosexual issues, and the course will include reference to working with individually and with couples/relationships.

This course has a sex-positive philosophy, in which sex has a valid place within therapeutic work. Overall, this training provides a practical toolkit of working with psychosexual material in therapy, backed up by current theory. It provides a platform if you lack confidence or specialist knowledge about working in the therapy room with sexual expression and sexual problems - especially when sexual issues are indicators that the conditions for good sex aren't in place or something has gone off track with sex in a relationship.

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Aim of the course

This training provides deeper understanding and a practical toolkit for working with sexual issues in therapy. This equips you with more confidence and competence around psychosexual issues.

The course is designed for therapists to begin this training without any prior experience of working with psychosexual topics. However, those practitioners who already work with couples or relationship issues may find this training to be useful as an additional layer of learning, by adding further dimensions to this work.

This training is offered as a CPD programme (Continuous Professional Development). It is designed to give participants a CPD certificate as evidence of having taken additional specialised training in psychosexual therapy for couples and other types of relationship – to equip therapists with relevant knowledge and models when addressing sex in their therapy work.

This course rests on the existing scope of practice for which the participant is already qualified, such as psychotherapy or coaching, or client groups such as young people.

Course content:

The syllabus includes:

Overview of psychosexual therapy as an educational and psychotherapeutic model, outline of homeodynamic model authored by Cabby Laffy
Considerations and process for intake, history-taking and assessment, and therapeutic process with couples and other relationships
Discernment between universal or situational factors along with conceptualisation of the psychosexual difficulty
Familiarity with sexual and reproductive anatomy, indicators of physcial dysfunction
Key interventions and when to use them, drawn from current models including "bodyfulness"
Dealing with common client presentations such as differing levels of desire, painful sex
Identifying and addressing physical issues with sex such as unreliable erections, lack of orgasm, vaginismus, premature ejaculation
Understanding preferences and desires, as well as how to communicate them
Exploring kink and BDSM
The debate around sex addiction or sexual compulsivity
Looking at the effect on sex of trauma, dissociation, and shame
Working with projection, transference and counter-transference also affecting the therapist
Creating your own model for approaching psychosexual health with clients

This course has a bio-psycho-social underpinning – where the body’s physiology and the client’s psychological process are considered within the sociological context.

The structure of the course includes:

Teaching material on all the course topics, including client-friendly diagrams or information sheets
Description of other services available to clients addressing psychosexual issues
Introduction to psychosexual tasks outside the session time
Discussions in the full group about the material being presented, including opportunities to ask questions and check understanding
Experiential exercises to embed understanding of the material presented
Work in small groups (dyads, triads) as skills practice to gain familiarity with the taught material for use in a therapy setting.

Assessment:

The CPD certificate will be issued upon satisfactory attendance on all 8 days of the course. If any days are missed, this will be reflected on the CPD certificate. Learning is absorbed by attendance and participation on the course. There is no other formal assessment. Additional reading is encouraged to broaden learning gained from the course.

We also recommend that practitioner undertaking sex therapy seeks supervision from a suitably-qualified professional, to support this important area of work.

Faculty:

Cabby Laffy

Cabby Laffy has been a facilitator of training and workshops since 1991. She has also worked as a psychotherapist with individuals and couples, and a supervisor for individual and couple work, for over twenty-five years. She is a UKCP registered and NCP accredited psychotherapist, a COSRT accredited psychosexual therapist and supervisor, an educator and group facilitator, and a member of PCSR and PCU. Cabby’s book LoveSex: An Integrative Model for Sexual Education (Karnac 2013) presents a model for psychosexual health. Cabby is available for one to one and couple therapy, training, and supervision. www.psychosexualhealth.org.uk

Cabby has created a Homeodynamic Model for Psychosexual Health, which offers an integrative understanding of human relationships and sexuality encompassing the physical, emotional, spiritual, and our social and cultural environment. This approach includes research from neuroscience, complementary and alternative health therapies and cognitive behavioural therapy, and draws from eastern sexual healing practices as well western approaches to psychosexual therapy. The Homeodynamic Model is taught at Cabby’s Centre for Psychosexual Health (CPH) – www.psychosexualhealth.org.uk – primarily through a two year Diploma in Integrative Psychosexual Therapy. She is an experienced practitioner in her client work and training roles, with a speciality in psychosexual therapy.

Cabby and her daughter, Shana Laffy, have established Heartful Therapy to provide training courses and therapy with the aim of providing high quality and experiential training in relationship and couple therapy and using the arts as a therapeutic tool. Heartful Therapy Training offers a variety of courses, some 1-day CPD events, as well as this certificate course run in association with The Grove. www.heartfultherapy.co.uk

Polly McAfee

Polly McAfee is a partner at the Centre for Psychosexual Health. She is an integrative humanistic counsellor, a graduate of CPH and holds an M.A. in Effective Learning. She has completed additional training with the Institute of Group Analysis, Pink Therapy, the Gestalt Centre, Barbara Carellas, Layla Martin and Spectrum Therapy. She is a member of BACP and COSRT. As well as her counselling work and teaching for CPH, she runs groups for women exploring sex and sexuality.

Together, Cabby and Polly have successfully run a 2-year Diploma in Integrative Psychosexual Therapy, a course accredited by COSRT (College for Sex & Relationship Therapy). So their credentials and knowledge base in this area are very well established.

Please note that the tutor team may vary according to feasibility in relation to the number of enrolled students. The Grove fully intends for the course to be taught as planned. However, sometimes tutor availability may change according to unforeseen circumstances such as but not limited to illness or bereavement. In any such circumstances, The Grove may be required to adjust the tutor schedule at short notice.

Autumn 2022 intake:

This intake is now enrolling.
This intake will take place on Zoom.

Friday and Saturday dates in 2022:

16 & 17 September
14 & 15 October
18 & 19 November
16 & 17 December

Times each day:
10am – 4:30pm.

Spring 2023 intake:

This intake is now enrolling.

This intake will take place in person, held in the training venue at NCVO, London N1.

Friday and Saturday dates in 2023:

17 & 18 March
14 & 15 April
12 & 13 May
16 & 17 June

Times each day:
10am – 4:30pm

Autumn 2023 intake:

This intake is now enrolling.

This intake will take place on Zoom.

Friday and Saturday dates in 2023:

15 & 16 September
13 & 14 October
17 & 18 November
15 & 16 December

Times each day:
10am – 4:30pm

Fees:

£1,900 + VAT = £2,280 payable in full or by instalments. A non-refundable deposit of £300 is payable to secure a place on this course. After that, the total remaining payable must be reached by 6 weeks before the final weekend of the training.

The course fee includes all training materials and the CPD certificate.

When training is held at a venue (rather than by Zoom): tea, coffee and biscuits are provided during the course. Lunch is not included in the course fee. There are many shops and cafes nearby offering refreshments and lunches.

After paying the deposit of £300 including VAT, the remainder of the fee can be paid by instalments as indicated on the invoice. Some reduced-fee places may be awarded depending on student circumstances, subject to availability. The course fee can also be invoiced fully or partially to an employer or funding organisation. Please contact us for details.

Application criteria

Applicants are expected to be qualified and experienced professionals in a mental health or helping profession, who are established in their practice. This will be covered in the application form. All applicants are expected to:

be qualified and experienced in their field
be full members of their professional body (such as but not limited to BACP, UKCP, COSRT, BPS, AHPP, NCP, NCS, ACC)
hold professional liability insurance
have supervision arrangements in place for their client work as well as access to support for any clinical or organisation practice they undertake during the course

Professional standards

The Grove Practice is accredited by NCIP (National Council for Integrative Psychotherapists) as a CPD training centre. As such, all The Grove’s courses are awarded NCP accreditation for CPD (Continuous Professional Development).

This accreditation provides reassurance regarding high standards of teaching and course content.

Participants who successfully complete this course can use the qualification as evidence of CPD hours required for membership of COSRT.

The Grove’s courses have been successfully recognised as CPD for members of the following membership bodies: BACP, UKCP, COSRT, NCP, NCS, AHPP, BPS, among others. Organisations such as Relate and MIND and Place2B have also supported their therapists in taking training with The Grove. This is a mark of unofficial validation of our courses as worthy of being listed on the CPD logs for these members and organisations.

This course is taught at Level 6 equivalence. This training is a post-qualification course designed for mature professionals who are established in their way of working according to their original therapy training for working with individual clients. The designation "Level 6" is drawn from the numbered educational levels according to Ofqual's Regulated Qualification Framework operating in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. (Scotland has its own educational levels in place.) This is a post-qualification training which requires theoretical evaluation, self-reflection, and interpretation of how to apply the models in therapeutic settings such as clinical practice or multi-disciplinary teams in organisations. The Grove is setting its own courses at a training level in line with industry-wide language for setting the academic level of the course.

Our guidance to anyone researching CPD courses is to ask any training provider stating a Level, to provide the Ofqual qualification number (which looks like this 601/8674/4). If the training provider cannot give this information for their course, then the course is unlikely to be allocated an official Level by Ofqual. In our view, any other course provider should state that their course is taught “at a level equivalent to Level x but is not a qualification regulated by Ofqual”. This approach is implemented by The Grove.