The importance of gender, sex, and relationship diversity in counselling training

Zoe avatar

I’ve recently had a piece published in Counselling Matters, the journal of my professional membership body the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society. It’s a reflection on my training to become a therapist and how important it’s been for me to get advanced specialist training in working with people who are gender-expansive, have a range of sexualities that aren’t heterosexual, and whose relationships don’t follow the typical pattern for what is considered the norm.

It also considers how this training is helping me to support people who are cisgender*, straight, and have relationships in ways that don’t require extra explanation to most people.

You can read the article in the images below, or go here to read it in the context of the rest of Counselling Matters’ Pride Month edition.

Update: I wrote this piece when I was using the name Zoe Goodacre. I have since changed my name.


*Cisgender refers to people whose sense of their own gender identity aligns with the gender they were assumed to be based on appearance when they were born.