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 who are 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.
What Licensed Professionals Can Expect
The Somatica Core Training 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, experiential, and hands-on 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:
- How to remove shame from clients’ sexual desires in five steps
- How to help your clients find their core desires and share their hottest sexual movies
- The three most common types of sexual expression — partner connection, role play, and trance — and how to discuss them with clients
- How to practice the 10 steps of relationship repair
Looking for additional training to grow your confidence as a sex and relationship coach and access personalized support to build your practice? We recommend exploring our six advanced modules as part of our full sex coach training and certification program.
Check out the full curriculum.
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 hands-on exercises. By developing more comprehensive language, skills, and general knowledge in the realm of physical 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 pleasurable 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 set of relational tools 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.
Learn more about how the Somatica Method can elevate your practice.
MEET THE FOUNDERS AND HAVE YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED LIVE ON ZOOM!
Tuesday, September 26th, 2023 @ 11am PT
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 Marriage & Family Therapists, Licensed Clinical Social Workers, and Licensed Professional Counselors. When you apply for the program, simply inform us that you’d like to receive CEs — we will track the course hours and issue your credits.
What Does the Certification Process Involve?
Upon completing the core training program, you can get your sex and relationship coach certification, which satisfies the requirements for you to be individually accredited by the American Board of Sexology (ABS) as a sexologist.
Dates and Times
The 2023 Fall Somatica Training dates for the core curriculum are:
- October 13-15, 2023
- November 10-12, 2023
- December 8-10, 2023
- January 19-21, 2024
- February 16-18, 2024
- March 22-24, 2024
Hours: Friday – Sunday from 8:30 – 11:00am and 11:45am – 2:15pm Pacific Time (with a break from 11-11:45am).
The training is offered fully online over Zoom. You can miss up to 3 days of training, and receive recordings for the days that you missed.
How Much Does the Somatica CE Pathway for Therapists Cost?
Tuition for the Somatica CE Pathway for Therapists is $7,400. It includes the first 6 months of the certification – for a total 6 modules (18 days), that go from Friday to Sunday, with one month in between each module. Upon acceptance, a $500 non-refundable deposit will be required to hold your space in the training. We also offer pay-in-full discounts, early bird discounts, and scholarships.
$7,400 (before discounts)
- 6 LIVE online weekend training modules where you’ll learn the Somatica method (18 full training days)
- 90 CE's credits
- Hands-on training and support from our exceptional faculty, including Celeste and Danielle
- A global community of like-minded people
- Small ~9-student home group
- Weekly peer coaching
- Access to Somatica mastery classes
Payment Plan Options
- $500 discount for paying in full
- $200 discount for attending a live Q&A
- $500 - $1,000 scholarships available for students with a financial need
THE NEXT SOMATICA SEX & RELATIONSHIP COACH TRAINING
BEGINS OCTOBER 13, 2023!
Join us and Master the Art of Transformation Through Pleasure™.
Add in-demand Sex & Relationship skills to your practice
and watch your own life transform in the process.
THE SOMATICA CORE TRAINING
The Somatica Core Training 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 with 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:
- Participants will 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.
- Participants will acquire 5 steps to deshamify their client’s sexual desire.
- Participants will name how resources and restrictions based on certain identities and demographics impact sexual expression and emotional connection and practice 1 tool for understanding identity.
- Participants will learn the 3 most common types of sexual expression – partner connection, role play and trance – and how to discuss them with clients.
- Participants will be able to explain attachment and perform 3 tools to increase attachment.
- Participants will apply an ethic of repair in relationships and practice the 10 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 sex coaches, relationship coaches, somatic sex therapists and coaches, certified Sexological Bodyworkers, and life coaches, people intereted in gaining a new career, psychotherapists, MFTs and LCSWs. If you are not on this list of professionals, please feel free to contact us to see if the training is right for you.
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 Sharing 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 – 2 hours
- Trigger mapping and de-escalation
- Sharing triggers so others can understand them
- The Relationship Lab: Attachment – 2 hours
- Attachment and adult attachment
- Eye contact, holding exercises
- The Foundations of Sharing Erotic Energy – 1 hour
- Erotic breathwork
- Creating an energy circuit
- The 3 Dimensions of Sex – 3 hours
- Define the 3 dimensions
- Practice with trance, partner connection and role play
Module 3: Repair Basics, 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 clients 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: Enhancing pleasure, dating, and dealing with Dysfunction
- Giving and Receiving – 2 hours
- Meeting and Dating – 4 hours
- How to meet someone online or out in the world
- How to have a successful first date
- Orgasms: Anatomy, Physiology, and Expansion – 2 hours
- Understanding female anatomy and arousal
- Understanding male anatomy and arousal
- Exploring and Deshamifying Toys – 1 hour
- Normalizing use of vibrators
- Discussing the many pleasure-enhancing toys
- The Most Common Sexual Dysfunctions – 3 hours
- Low desire and ED
- Dealing with disappointment
- Sex Across the Ability Spectrum – 3 hours
- What does it mean to have a difference in ability
- How to work with clients along the ability spectrum
Module 6: Hottest Sexual Movies & Repair, Launching your business
- What is Your Hottest Sexual Movie (HSM)? – 4 hours
- The field of HSM including – Spiritual/Earth-Based, Romantic, Passionate, Dominant/Submissive
- How to teach someone your HSM
- Repair – Philosophy, and Practice – 6 hours
- How to tell that your relationship needs repair
- The 10 steps of relationship repair
- Business and Marketing – 5 hours
- Sandbo
- Elevator Pitch
- Screening Clients and Safety
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
Course meets 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 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 (CAMFT Approved Provider #146640) 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.
Course completion certificates will be awarded via email as soon as completed evaluation forms are filled out.
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.
ACCOMMODATIONS FOR SPECIAL NEEDS
We are committed to making our trainings accessible. To request accommodations for special needs, please email the Program Administrator at [email protected].
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.