The Counselling Academy

If you're working with couples, you're working with their sexual lives. Whether or not anyone has said the word out loud.

Most counselling training treats sex as either a clinical specialism reserved for psychosexual therapists, or as something so personal it should be referred on the moment it surfaces. Neither approach serves the couples actually sitting in your room. The sex stopped, or it never really started, or it changed after the baby and never came back, or one of them wants it three times a week and the other wants it three times a year. None of this is going to be addressed in counselling that flinches at the word. This course teaches you not to flinch.

Across fifteen modules, the work moves through why sex is so often the last thing to be talked about, and what it costs couples to leave it untouched while everything else gets attention. Desire and the way it actually works between two people, the desire discrepancy that shows up in a substantial proportion of couples coming to counselling, and the long thinning-out of sexual life that happens to many couples without either partner choosing it. The difference between spontaneous and responsive desire. The conversation skills couples need to talk about sex without it becoming an argument. The bedroom dynamics couples carry quietly when sex has stopped feeling good for one or both of them. Specific clinical pictures, including erectile difficulty, vaginismus, anorgasmia, and the medical, psychological, and relational layers of each. Sex after children, after illness, after surgery, after menopause. The sexual material couples bring that isn't a sexual problem in itself but is shaping the sexual life anyway, religious and cultural shame, body image, sexual trauma carried into the relationship, attachment patterns playing out in the bedroom. The scope question, when to refer to specialist psychosexual therapy, how to refer well, and what couples counsellors can hold within their own remit.

Two couples thread through the course. The first is a long-married couple in their early forties dealing with the slow drift into a sexless marriage, both of them missing the sex they used to have but neither knowing how to start it again. The second is a younger couple trying to conceive who have never had penetrative sex because of vaginismus and the religious shame layer underneath it.

You're not training to become a psychosexual therapist, and the course is clear about that throughout. You're training to do the sexual conversation properly within ordinary couples work, recognise what you can hold and what needs specialist referral, and stop avoiding the layer of couples life that most needs attention from someone who isn't going to flinch.

This is the fifth course in the Couples Counsellor's Guide series. 35 CPD hours.