CEs for Licensed Therapists
According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, once our physiological (food, water, sleep) and safety requirements are met, the next priority is for us to feel love and belonging. But, despite the importance of interpersonal relationships for fulfillment, sexual and emotional intimacy rarely come easily.
When that part of our lives is neglected, it can manifest as sexless marriages, low libido, or sexual dysfunction, often leading people to seek professional help from MFTs, LCSWs, or LPCs. By pursuing a sex and relationship education program, you can better support and empower your clients facing these issues.
As an approved CE-granting school, Somatica Institute offers a holistic and in-depth training and certification program for licensed professionals — so you can start making a real difference in your clients’ sex lives and romantic relationships.
Who Is It For?
What Licensed Professionals Can Expect
The Somatica Core Curriculum is based on the latest neuroscience research. It is designed to give licensed professionals a new toolbox around helping their clients achieve greater intimacy by embodying sexual and emotional desires, moving beyond shame, and increasing connection in their relationships. Using a combination of talk, demonstrations and experiential training, you’ll learn and practice different tools related to consent, boundaries, emotional self-awareness, communication, and pathways to arousal.
Some key topics in our core six modules include:
- Learn how to use 2 key concepts – Core Desires and Hottest Sexual Movie. These two concepts are central to helping people have better sex and relationships.
- Acquire 5 steps to deshamify their client’s sexual desire.
- Learn the 3 most common types of sexual expression – partner connection, role play and trance – and how to discuss them with clients.
- Be able to explain attachment and perform 3 tools to increase attachment.
- Apply an ethic of repair in relationships, and practice the 9 steps of relationship relationship repair.
How Can Somatic Training Enhance Your Practice?
Unlike traditional talk-based methods, somatic training bridges the mind-body gap using a combination of philosophical and experiential exercises. By developing more comprehensive language, skills, and general knowledge in the realm of sexuality, intimacy, and relationships, you can:
- Better understand your clients’ needs, and help them unlearn old habits and develop new skills to increase self-awareness and create a fulfilling sex life. Studies show clients are waiting to be asked about sensitive topics, meaning it’s helpful to be well versed in how to start conversations about erotic and emotional intimacy.
- Unblock common barriers to coaching and therapy using a somatic and pleasure-based approach to transformation, rather than a problem-centered and analytical one.
- Connect deeper with clients through mutual vulnerability, which builds a foundation of trust, acceptance, and safety.
Incorporating Somatica’s comprehensive philosophy of intimacy into your practice will enable you to not only attract more new clients, but also help your existing clients feel more empowered and satisfied than before.
Does Somatica Offer CEs?
The Somatica Institute is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT Provider #146640) to sponsor continuing education units (CEs) for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs. The Somatica Institute maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
What Are the Training Dates and Times?
Refer to the certification training page for information about training dates and times.
How Is the Training Offered?
The training is offered fully online over Zoom. You can miss up to 3 training days and receive recordings for the missed days.
What Classes are Eligble for CEs?
CEs are offered for the hours you attend the live modules of the following trainings:
- The Somatica Core Curriculum (the first 6 modules of the Somatica Certification Training, 90 CEs).
- The Somatica Professional Couple’s Training (30 CEs).
- The Somatica At Your Core™ Professional Training (30 CEs).
* Supplemental materials such as homework and practice sessions are non-CE eligible components.
Tuition
$775/month
To apply for the core curriculum only, use this application. To learn more about the difference between the core curriculum and full certification training, see the pricing table.
Meet the Founders in a Free Online Q&A Session
Find out about the latest in cutting-edge sex and relationship coaching and have your questions answered!
Tuesday, June 30, 2026 at 12pm PST
Not ready to join our live Q&A session or can’t make it? You can still save $400 by watching this recorded Q&A (discount code at the end). Or you can reach out to us with questions.
The Next Somatica Certification Training Starts on October 23, 2026!
Join us and let pleasure be your guide to an exciting new career.
Become an in-demand Sex & Relationship Coach and watch your own life transform in the process.
Training Details
The Somatica Core Curriculum
The Somatica Core curriculum can be utilized to work with individuals and couples to embody and communicate their sexual and emotional desires, move beyond shame, and increase overall intimacy in their relationships.
It offers guidance to help individuals and couples practice important key interpersonal tools to help them thrive in romantic partnerships. These tools include consent, boundaries, emotional self-awareness, communication and repair skills, as well as skills to help them understand and enhance their sexual lives, including awareness of their own and other’s desires and pathways to arousal.
Education Goals
- Understand how people get in touch with and share their sexual and emotional desires, feelings, and boundaries with one another.
- Gain a systematic approach to helping individuals and couples have better emotional and erotic intimacy.
Learning Objectives
After completing this course, students will be able to:
- Learn how to use 2 key concepts – Core Desires and Hottest Sexual Movie. These two concepts are central to helping people have better sex and relationships.
- Acquire 5 steps to deshamify their client’s sexual desire.
- Name how resources and restrictions, based on certain identities and demographics, impact sexual expression and emotional connection, and practice 1 tool for understanding identity.
- Learn the 3 most common types of sexual expression – partner connection, role play and trance – and how to discuss them with clients.
- Be able to explain attachment and perform 3 tools to increase attachment.
- Apply an ethic of repair in relationships, and practice the 9 steps of relationship repair.
For Whom
The training is for professionals who are interested in deepening their knowledge of people’s emotional and sexual dynamics and who want to have solid tools to work with men, women and couples on emotional intimacy and sexuality. It is for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs licensed and practicing in California. If you are not on this list you may still be eligible for AASECT CEs.
Module 1: The Emotional Foundations
- Community Agreements – 30 minutes
- Establishing Safety Within – 2 hours
- Understanding what safety really is
- Visualization to feel embodied safety
- Knowing Your Boundaries – 4.5 hours
- Why boundaries are important to a relationship
- How do you know if a boundary has been touched
- Embodiment – 1 hour
- Attunement to Self and Others – 3 hours
- Self-attunement – how to feel connected to your own body and emotions
- Attunement to others – how to read other’s cues and respond
- Empathizing and Speaking Empathy – 4 hours
- Embodied empathy
- Talking empathy
Module 2: Consent, Attachment, and Erotic Energy
- Emotional Empowerment Basics – 2 hours
- How to create a resilience basket
- Emotional self-regulation – finding neutral
- Resilience and Self-regulation – 2 hour
- Sharing Boundaries – 2 hours
- Sharing boundaries lovingly
- Making room for others’ boundaries
- Having Consent Conversations – 1 hour
- The two types of consent
- Understanding consent when you have trauma
- Trauma Empowerment Basics – 2 hours
- Trigger mapping and de-escalation
- Sharing triggers so others can understand them
- The Relationship Lab: Attachment – 2 hours
- Attachment and adult attachment
- The Foundations of Erotic Energy – 1 hour
- Erotic breathwork
- Creating an energy circuit
- The 3 Dimensions of Sex – 3 hours
- Define the 3 dimensions
- Understand trance, partner connection and role play
Module 3: Repair, Inner Child, And Core Desires
- The Basics of Repair – 1 hour
- Projection – wishful thinking about a partner
- Giving feedback
- Shame / Deshamifying – 5 hours
- What is shame, how does it happen
- How to lower shame – the 5 Somatica tools
- Visiting With the Inner Child – 2 hours
- What is the inner child
- Bringing your own adult to your own inner child
- Understanding Triggers – 2 hours
- Core Desires: What Turns People On and Why – 5 hours
- The feeling you want to have
- How to find out what your Core Desires are
Module 4: Socialization, Identity, and Sharing Desires
- Moving Beyond Gender Socialization – 3 hours
- Understanding gender socialization – what it is and how it happens
- Visualizing yourself beyond gender
- Awareness of Your Own and Your Client’s Identities – 4 hours
- How to work with people across different identities, whether they be LGBTQ+, gender, race, ethnicity, etc.
- How to have sensitivity to differences while seeing the client’s uniqueness
- Reclaiming Full Erotic Self-Expression – 3 hours
- Overcoming shame that inhibits arousal
- Keeping your head in the game sexually
- Sharing Desires – 1 hour
- Surviving Rejection 1.5 hours
- Overcoming rejection around desires
- Resilience in dating
- Disinhibition 2.5 hours
- Finding the inner passion
- Touch for your own pleasure
Module 5: Hottest Sexual Movies, Coaching as a Man, and Anatomy
- What is Your Hottest Sexual Movie (HSM)? – 5 hours
- The field of HSM including – Spiritual/Earth-Based, Romantic, Passionate, Dominant/Submissive
- How to teach someone your HSM
- Debunking the Fairy Tale – 4 hours
- Dealing with disappointment
- Coaching as a Man – 2 hours
- Projections
- Enthusiastic Consent
- Client lead pace
- Needs and Desires – 2 hour
- Asking for what you want
- Working with expectations
- Anatomy of Pleasure – 2 hours
- Mapping
- Expanding pleasure potential
Module 6: Trajectories, Growing Edges & Trauma Empowerment
- Trajectories of Growth – 4 hours
- Trauma Empowerment
- Growing Edges
- Power Dynamics in Coaching – 2 hours
- Acknowledging your power
- Supporting client agency
- Code of Ethics – 2 hours
- Somatica boundaries
- Ethical consideration in experiential coaching
- Self Care – 2 hours
- Honoring capacity
- Identifying congruent self care practices
- Clients Feelings Towards You – 2 hours
- Responding to clients feelings
- Empathy Lab – 1 hour
- Speaking empathy drills
- Celebration – 3 hours
- Celebrating self-awareness
- Celebrating successes
Meet your Instructors
Danielle Harel, PhD and Celeste Hirschman, MA are the co-creators of the Somatica® Method of sex and relationship coaching, and the co-founders of the Somatica Institute.
CE INFORMATION
The first 6 live modules of the Somatica Certification Pathway meet the qualifications for 90 hours of continuing education credit for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences.
There will be a 45 minutes lunch break each day. Please note: breaks will not be counted towards CE time awarded.
This training is provided by the Somatica Institute. The Somatica Institute is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists to sponsor continuing education for LMFTs and LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs. The Somatica Institute maintains responsibility for this program and all its content (CAMFT Approved Provider #146640) .
Course completion certificates will be awarded via email as soon as completed evaluation forms are filled out and $45 CE administrative fee is paid.
Refund Policy
If you choose to withdraw from the training 45 days or more prior to the first day of the program, you will be refunded all tuition paid minus the non-refundable $500 tuition deposit (minus any processing fees incurred).
If you choose to withdraw from the training for any reason whatsoever less than 45 days before the first day of the program, or should you miss any individual class sessions, you will be held responsible for payment of the full tuition.
Accessibility and Special Needs
We understand that everyone is unique, with their own needs and ways of being, and we honor and welcome those differences. If you have a disability or special needs regarding the training, please email your request to [email protected], and we will do everything we can to accommodate them.
If you have a Grievance
We take the feelings and concerns of our students very seriously. If you have a grievance of any kind, please email [email protected], and we will get back to you within 48 hours to address your concerns.