“If you’re always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be”
Maya Angelou
Counselling and psychotherapy training and relationship therapy courses rarely discuss relationship diversity. Yet more and more therapists are finding themselves working with clients in contemporary open and polyamorous relationships, also referred to as consensual non-monogamous relationships (CNM). Therapists can feel unprepared and challenged by the client’s relationship style fluidity in the face of Western society’s norming of monogamous relationships.
- Can therapists adapt to the changing socio-cultural landscape and the increasingly fluid relationship structures that many of our clients are living in?
- Are therapists who hold mainstream values and beliefs about relationships, at risk of imposing normative beliefs, standards, and expectations onto their more flexible and diverse clients?
- How do we adapt existing narrow therapeutic frames in relationship therapy to meet the unique requirements of multi-partnered relationship constellations?
This training addresses these questions and more as Psychosexual and Relationship Therapists are helped to build knowledge about the specific challenges and joys for people living and loving in relationally diverse ways. Participants will develop the following:
- An understanding of diverse relationship styles
- An insight into the most common issues that people in open and polyamorous relationships may face – including the topics of compersion, jealousy, gender and sexual fluidity, boundary setting and violations, relationship contracting, relationship implosions, and mismatching relationship expectations
- Confidence to make use of Niki D’s 7-STAGE MODEL of co-creating an open relationship, which aids relational negotiation in more complex relationship structures
- The ability to notice and work with the strengths of those in CNM relationships
- An awareness of how mononormative bias in the therapist or client shows up in the therapy room
| Modules | Content |
|---|---|
| Module 1 | Introduction to polyamory |
| Module 2 | Introduction to context and terms used in polyamory |
| Module 3 | Mononormativity as a given? |
| Module 4 | The 7 stage model of co-creating an open relationship |
| Module 5 | Jealousy and compersion |
| Module 6 | Conflicts and dilemmas |
| Module 7 | The therapists competence – skills needed |
| Module 8 | Case studies for reflection on practice |
| Module 9 | Review of course |
About the Trainer
Niki D works as an existential psychotherapist and supervisor in London, with over thirty years of experience in private practice, statutory and voluntary sectors. As a relationship therapist, Niki works exclusively with GSRD clients (gender, sexual, and relationship diverse). She is a Pink Therapy clinical associate and teaches on the GSRD relationships module. Niki holds supervision groups an in-person GSRD therapy group for therapists and groups for GSRD clients.
Niki has an MA in Existential Psychotherapy and additional training in GSRD therapy and somatic body therapy. She has been a visiting lecturer at Regents University, the Existential Academy, and the University of Milano-Bicocca’s clinical sexology programme.
Niki is a co-director of an in-depth CPD training on open and polyamorous relationship therapy now in its second year. www.rainbowrelationships.co.uk
Her writing includes chapters on:
• Now you see me, now you don’t: addressing bisexual invisibility in relationship therapy. COSRT journal (2017)
• Beyond monogamy – opening up a dyad. Pink Therapy – Relationally Queer (2023)
• Compulsive Sexual Behaviour from an Existential Approach – Avoiding Existential Truths. Routledge International Handbook of Sexual Compulsivity and Clinical Sexology (2025)
• GSRD Group Therapy. Gender Sex and Relationship Diversity Therapy: Theory and Practice – Pink Therapy (2026)
