Advanced Certificate in Couples and Relationship Therapy

The course will cover the following topics (view the full prospectus for more details):

• Starting out: establishing a practice for couples work, setting up the room, the shift from individual work.
• Screening: safeguarding advice and how to watch for red flags, abuse, or contra-indicators to therapy.
• Contracting for couples work: maintaining boundaries, avoiding triangulation, and establishing the no-secrets policy.
• Diversity: working with neurodiversity in relationships, kink, open relationships, polyamory, trauma-informed couples work, cultural inclusivity, and relationships as a place to heal.
• Transference and countertransference: understanding our own wounds and how they are activated within therapeutic relationships.
• Sex: intimacy challenges and how to work with them.
• Infidelity: why it happens, what it represents, and how and when repair takes place.
• Attachment in practice: moving from anxious or avoidant cycles to secure functioning relationships.
• Different models of couples therapy: EFT, PACT, Gottman, and alternative approaches.
• Happily ever after: the end of therapy and what lies beyond.

The nature of this course

This course is not only about professional development; it is equally about personal development. While we will explore theory, technique, and the skills that underpin effective therapeutic practice, the heart of the work lies in turning the therapeutic lens inward.

You will be invited to look closely at your own attachment history: the relationships that shaped you, the wounds you carry, and the patterns you have developed in order to feel safe, seen, and connected. We cannot meet our clients more deeply than we have been willing to meet ourselves, and so this course asks you to consider honestly your own capacity for attunement and relational presence, including where it flows freely and where it falters.

For this reason, a willingness to engage in your own therapeutic work is a prerequisite for attending. You will be asked to be emotionally vulnerable, with yourself, and with the class, and to stay with discomfort rather than reaching quickly for answers. This is not always an easy process, but it is a profoundly rewarding one.

We will work within a framework of care, respect, and mutual safety, because vulnerability can only be offered where it is held well. If you are ready to bring your whole self to this work, you will leave not only a more skilled practitioner but a more self-aware and relationally attuned one. After all, how we love is who we are, and it is who we bring into the room with every client we meet.

Course Requirements