Skills for therapists and helping professionals
We created our therapist training courses because we have seen just how much skills based approaches can give clients hope and practical tools to feel accept what can't be changed, and to make the changes they need without:
Reinforcing harmful social norms around sexuality, gender, relationships and sex work.
Pressure to become more “normal”
Assuming a one size fits all approach is going to work.
Do you ever wish you had more tools you could offer clients?
We have taught therapists:
- Effective self soothing skills
- How to use brief 1-2 minute mindfulness interventions to increase contact with the present moment.
- Self consent basics
- How to support clients to work out what they want in interpersonal interactions and to move skilfully towards their objective
- How to use DBT skills work through intense emotions and patterns with compassion.
We want to share the tools we have used successfully with our groups and one to one clients.
Most of us did our training in heteronormative contexts, often focused on the concerns of neurotypical able bodied clients. We have focused on making the skills we use work for queer, disabled and neurodivergent clients who live lives outside the norm. We know that no skill will work for every client, which is why we focus on building a portfolio of options to offer the folks that need them.
The therapist training we offer is for queer and allied therapists and helping professionals and others who could be described as cultural renegades.
Lots of folks feel like they might be a fit for our groups but aren’t sure if they are queer enough or ‘renegade’ enough. If this is a space that appeals to you, we are pretty sure that you’re going to be a good fit. Many of the people on our courses are neurodivergent (sometimes with a formal diagnosis, sometimes self diagnosed), sex workers, trans or non binary and/or prioritise relationships outside heterosexual and monogamous norms. But there are lots of kinds of cultural renegade – and we are here for most of them!
WHAT'S INCLUDED IN THE COURSE?
WEEKLY MEETINGS
Live classes.
Learning materials
Workbooks, videos, and podcasts to support your learning.
COMMUNITY
A group of other quirky queers and cultural renegades & their closest people to learn alongside you.
CHAT WITH THE COMMUNITY
A slack community where you can ask questions between sessions and share how things are working for you.
RELATIONSHIP TOOLS
Skills that give you more choices and control in your life.
READY to invest skills and processing that will support your own and your clients wellbeing?
Starting in 2026
DBT SKILLS FOR THERAPISTS AND HELPING PROFESSIONALS
We love DBT skills here at Love Uncommon and we are excited to share them for a third time. This course will take you through all 4 modules of DBT skills, giving you the opportunity to practice them in your own life and to share them with clients.
Renegade Practitioners Network
Join Alex Iantaffi and Sophia Graham for a 3-month interdisciplinary learning and reflective space for queer, neuroqueer, and cultural renegade therapists, coaches, and helping professionals. This is a movement towards a more relational, sustainable, and interdependent way of working in community towards our collective healing and liberation.
FAQS
Because they work. We have learned these skills and found them incredibly useful in our own lives and seen how they have improved the lives of people we have taught them to. We also know the evidence stacks up across different cultures, racial groups, age ranges, sexualities and class backgrounds. We know that learning DBT skills reduces distress, increases enjoyment of life and relationship satisfaction. Because we believe these skills to be particularly powerful and liberatory when taught by peers outside of institutions. We want these skills to be accessible to folks that find therapy hard to access – especially people who are trans, neurodiverse, sex workers and other quirky queers and cultural renegades.
We mean this expansively and we will not be policing identities. Anyone that is LGBTQ, a sex worker/performer and/or consensually non-monogamous certainly fits within our community. Many of us are neurodiverse, and this often links to our experiences of queerness in other parts of our life. We particularly welcome and center neurodiverse folks!
Anyone that doesn’t believe in structural oppression. It exists and it shapes our lives. We center that in our understanding of distress and how we work with emotional activation – so it isn’t going to work out if you’re not coming from the same place.
If you think “black lives matter” is a controversial statement, this isn’t the group for you.
We wouldn’t welcome anyone who identifies with TERF/gender critical ideology because we believe trans people know their own minds and bodies best. Similarly, we wouldn’t welcome anyone that thinks all sex workers need rescuing or who thinks that their work should be criminalised.
We will do our best to make accommodations when we know what folks need. We are disabled folks ourselves and have experience of asking for accommodations to be made and we know that can be very difficult. We have worked to make the course as accessible as possible, and would love to know what you need to make it work for you.
No. This is a place for learning skills. We recognize how many of us live with trauma and aim to operate in a trauma informed way. We have some guidelines about topics we avoid during our time together to keep the focus on learning skills. We think it is essential to have chances to work with and process trauma, and believe that many of the skills we will learn together are helpful in stabilizing mental health, which may make working with trauma in other spaces more effective.
This course is all about learning how to survive intense emotions and reduce emotional activation rapidly. You will learn to work out when you need to treat your emotion as the emergency, and a toolkit of emotional first aid tools.
This course teaches participants how to recognise, understand and regulate emotions so that they have more choices about how to manage day to day stressors and distressing events.
This course is about empowering us to handle interpersonal situations more effectively. This course invites you to reflect on the myths that hold you back in relationships and teaches you skills to be more assertive. We will talk about how to prepare for difficult conversations by creating scripts and anticipating pushback. These flexible and scientifically supported dialectical behavior therapy skills will help you to have clearer communication and more fulfilling relationships.
They are stand alone modules, but they do work best when used together. Afterall, it can be hard to have effective relationships if your emotions get in the way, and ineffective relationships can make it hard to manage emotions! They are connected, and so are the modules that we teach.