Diploma in Couples Counselling

A Theory of Intimacy & Disconnection:

2025 Dates - 5 taught days: 5th & 6th April, 10th & 11th May, 8th June

Course Leaders: Jack Rochon & Catherine Jones

Venue: Mackintosh House, 136 Newport Rd, Cardiff, CF24 1DJ

Time: 10.00 am - 4.00 pm  

Fee: £550 (£522.50 if paid for in one advance payment)

Monthly payment options available* (4 x £87.50)

Secure your place with a deposit of £200

The Diploma is a post qualifying course for counsellors and psychotherapists with some, experience of couples counselling and or previous coupes training.

The course offers you the chance to develop further your own theoretical framework of understanding how couples narratives and experiences of intimacy & disconnection play out in their relationships. Contemporised sources are considered in pursuit of a coherent integrative practice model.

Five Modules collaboratively explore the over arching themes of Intimacy and Disconnection.

Relational Trauma: the repetitive dimension of couples experience

Codependency, Coercion & Narcissistic characteristics

Attachment Informed quests for Intimacy

Sex: How we like to be loved

Shame, secrecy & addictions, including pornography

These areas offer the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the difficulties couples face when encountering unrealistic demands and ambiguous expectations of intimacy within relationships today.

Given that people are relationship seeking beings, here are a few questions to consider when developing a theory of intimacy and disconnection:

Why do we have a need to be emotionally related?

Why does sex so often drop out of long term relationships?

How can relationships offer a voyage of discovery?

How do relationships offer the chance to re-create self within the merged attachment that is the couple?

Why do we need to feel just safe enough in relationship?

Why do we desire to be ‘seen’ in relationships?

Why do we need to give love?

Why do we seek to recreate the familiar unresolved and punishing parts of our childhood in intimate relationships?

(Orbach & Eichenbaum, 2019)