Working with Couples - A Humanistic Approach

This course aims to provide training for qualified professionals wishing to incorporate relationship counselling into their practice in a client-centred, integrative way.

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Course structure

The course will run from September 2018 to April 2019 (with a break in December), with 2 day - Saturday+ Sunday workshops on a monthly basis.

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Each workshop will contain theoretical input, discussion of clinical and couple issues as well as practice. Collaborative learning is encouraged, so participants can bring and contribute their own knowledge and experience.

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The programme uses a variety of teaching methods. Which include formal seminars, structured skills development and practice, and workshops. As this programme is a clinical programme, there is a strong emphasis on practical and experiential work. This is an independent training course for qualified counsellor's, providing a private certificate. It is not affiliated with any educational boards.

Working With Couples - a Humanistic Approach

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How to be connected with another person and maintain your own self is one of the most complex human dilemmas shared by the human race from birth to death. It is a delicate balance between being an individual and at the same time being part of a relationship, and is often fraught with tension and difficulties, yet when it works well; it can be one of the most profound experiences.

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To function well in a relationship we need to manage issues around boundaries, power, autonomy, phenomenology (how individuals make meaning), cultural introjects, gender biases, communication differences, ethnicity, faith, education, socio-economic status – to name but a few!! We need to understand how we are different, and also how we differ in dealing with difference.

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It’s this latter part that generally creates most tension. We see difference as dangerous – a threat to our autonomy, criticism, attack, betrayal – and thus try to eradicate it either by becoming like the other (fusion), or trying to make the other the same as us (conflict). Yet in reality, contact and connection can only authentically occur through difference.

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This course will enable you to understand how to track and modulate the process of contact / connection / separation / withdrawal, using isolation as one polarity and confluence at the other. The model integrates many approaches and disciplines, including from Gestalt, TA, and some systems theory.

Areas to be covered:

• The theories underpinning couples counselling
• Couple assessment
• Relationship life stages
• Couple dynamics
• Family systems
• The Imago concept: from unconscious to conscious relationship
• Working with sexual intimacy
• Separation and divorce

For bookings or to learn more about this 7 Weekends 'Working with Couples Course', head to the New Dawn Counselling Centre