Professional Certificate in Gender, Sexuality & Relationship Diversity
Four days | 24 CPD hours | Live online | 20 places
24 and 25 October, 7 and 8 November 2026
Early Bird €475 until 30 September. A €100 deposit secures your place.
BOOK YOUR PLACE → https://buytickets.at/rainbowmindscentre/2354625
Most of us were trained to be welcoming. Very few of us were trained to be competent.
If you work as a counsellor, psychotherapist, or in any helping profession, you have already sat with LGBTQ+ and GSRD clients. You may have done it well. You may also know the other feeling: sitting with someone and quietly realising you were working from goodwill rather than knowledge, hoping that warmth would carry you through the parts you did not understand.
That gap is not a personal failing. It is what happens when specialist content is left out of core training. Most of us qualified without it, and then met the clients anyway.
This is four days for practitioners who want the framework that was missing.
About the training
The Professional Certificate is drawn from the year long GSRD Diploma at Rainbow Minds, the first programme of its kind in Ireland, which has 35 graduates now working across Ireland and the UK. This is the foundational teaching from that programme, condensed into four days, for practitioners who want the clinical depth without committing to a full year.
It is not an awareness course and it is not a list of terms to memorise. It is a way of thinking clinically, so that when a client brings you something you have never encountered, you have somewhere to stand.
What we will explore
Foundations of GSRD practice
Identity development, minority stress, stigma, belonging and discrimination, and the assumptions the therapist carries into the room without noticing them.
Shame, identity and belonging
How shame develops, how it becomes internalised, and how it arrives in therapy wearing other clothes. Self-criticism, perfectionism, hiding, people pleasing, difficulty with intimacy, the need to belong.
Sexuality and identity across the lifespan
Sexuality does not begin at coming out and it does not end in young adulthood. Early relationships, long partnerships, midlife reconsideration, coming out at forty or sixty or seventy, life after a heterosexual marriage, ageing, loneliness and community, and the generational difference between clients who came out under criminalisation and those who came out into visibility.
Gender diversity
Transgender and non-binary experience across the lifespan, identity development, family and relationships, embodiment, and how to practise ethically inside a public conversation that is often hostile and rarely clinical. We will be honest about where the evidence base is established and where it is contested.
Sex, intimacy and relationship structure
Sexual wellbeing, sexual shame, consent, body image, communication and relationship difficulty, alongside consensual non-monogamy, polyamory, open relationships and kink. The emphasis is on staying in these conversations thoughtfully, inside the boundaries of your role, and knowing where referral is the right clinical decision.
Adolescence and families
Identity development, school and peer experience, bullying, body image, consent, what young people are absorbing from pornography and online culture, and how to hold a family conversation where two people in the room need opposite things.
Neurodivergence and GSRD
Autism, ADHD, masking, communication, sexuality, relationships and sensory experience.
Trauma and minority stress
Formulating difficulty without losing sight of the environments that produced it.
Culture, migration and intersectionality
There is no single GSRD experience. Culture, race, religion, migration, class, disability and family context all shape how identity gets lived.
Throughout, we work with clinical examples, case material, discussion and reflective practice.
What you will take away
You will not leave knowing everything. Four days is the foundation stage and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What you will leave with is a clinical framework you can think from: the ability to notice where acceptance ends and understanding begins, to recognise shame in the forms it actually takes, to stay in conversations about sex and identity without steering away from them, to formulate distress alongside minority stress rather than separately from it, and to ask a useful question when a client brings you something unfamiliar.
That last one matters most.
BOOK YOUR PLACE → https://buytickets.at/rainbowmindscentre/2354625
Who it is for
Psychotherapists and counsellors
Psychologists
Clinical supervisors
Mental health professionals
Therapists working with children and adolescents
Therapists in advanced training or on clinical placement
Practitioners already working with GSRD clients who want to go deeper
No previous specialist GSRD training is required.
If you have been avoiding this area because you are afraid of getting it wrong, you are exactly who this is for. And if you think you rarely see GSRD clients, that is worth testing. Every client has a gender and a sexuality, and most of them have never been asked about either.
What previous participants have said
"I came into it believing I was already an affirming therapist, but the course helped me see the difference between being accepting and actually understanding what may be happening for a client clinically."
"The breadth was excellent. We looked at GSRD across the lifespan rather than treating LGBTQ+ people as one group. It gave me a framework I could actually take back into practice rather than another set of notes that would sit in a folder."
"James creates a learning environment where you can ask the questions you might normally be afraid to ask. We were encouraged to think, question our assumptions and stay curious. That made the learning much more useful than simply being told the right thing to say."
These quotes come from participants on the year long GSRD Diploma. This is the first cohort of the Professional Certificate.
Your trainer
James Byrne, MSc, BA (Hons), Dip Supervision, MBACP (Accred)
Psychotherapist and clinical supervisor based in Ireland. James developed and led the first year long GSRD therapy Diploma in Ireland. His specialist areas are gender, sexuality and relationship diversity, the meeting point of neurodivergence and identity, and adolescent and family work, with a research interest in shame and identity.
He teaches and practises through Rainbow Minds, which provides therapy, supervision and education in GSRD and neurodivergence.
Dates and format
Weekend One: Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 October 2026
Weekend Two: Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 November 2026
Each day runs from 9.30am to 5pm. 24 CPD hours across the programme.
The weekends are separated so the first block has time to settle before you come back. Most of what people take into their practice arrives in that gap.
Live online. Teaching content is recorded so you can revisit it or catch up if life interrupts a day. Discussion, case material and experiential work are not recorded, so that people can speak freely. Live attendance is the expectation.
If you want to go further
The Professional Certificate stands entirely on its own. Take the four days, bring the learning back into your practice, and that is a complete piece of training.
For practitioners who want more, there is a longer pathway. A five day Advanced Certificate in Gender, Sexuality & Relationship Diversity is planned for 2027, taking the same clinical thinking into greater depth and complexity. Completing both stages is the route to the Diploma in Gender, Sexuality & Relationship Diversity.
Nothing about the four days commits you to it. You can decide later, once you have seen how the teaching sits with you and how it lands in your work.
One thing worth knowing now: progression to the Advanced Certificate and the Diploma requires live attendance at 80% of the Certificate teaching. If a longer pathway is something you might want, attend live where you can.
Booking and payment
Early Bird €475, closing 30 September 2026
Standard €575
Your place includes four full days of specialist training, 24 CPD hours, live online access, recording access to teaching content, training materials, and your Professional Certificate on completion.
You do not have to pay the full fee upfront. A €100 deposit secures your place, with the balance paid in two instalments before the training begins. A payment link will be sent to the email address you provide.
Early Bird €475: €100 deposit, then two instalments of €187.50
Standard €575: €100 deposit, then two instalments of €237.50
The €100 deposit is non-refundable. Full payment must be completed before the first training day on Saturday 24 October 2026.
BOOK YOUR PLACE → https://buytickets.at/rainbowmindscentre/2354625
Questions before you book? Get in touch, and we will answer them properly.