Untouched

Practical Tools to Resource Victim/Survivors of Gendered Violence to Reclaim Sex & Intimacy

Training Description

This full-day training aims to build foundational skills and knowledge for counsellors, support workers and therapists seeking to increase their capacity and confidence in providing support to survivors of sexual abuse and violence, regarding issues related to sex, intimacy and pleasure. Building on practitioners' existing expertise, this training upskills workers to support victim/survivors of all genders, gender identities and sexual orientations reclaim sex and intimacy as powerful sites of healing and transformation. The focus of this Untouched is sexual self-sovereignty, or one’s relationship to sex with self. 

We adopt an intersectional feminist and somatic approach to this work - providing practical tools and resources that can be integrated into existing counselling and support frameworks. 

This training facilitates experiential learning through interactive activities, embodiment processes, reflective learning and the provision of specialised information. These tools are drawn from Sexological Bodywork, Somatic Sex Education, Somatic Experiencing and Wheel of Consent frameworks. 

Partipants will:

  • Gain information on how the nervous system impacts people’s experiences of pleasure and how to include the body in healing sexual trauma

  • Develop ways to work with sexual shame, guilt and triggers

  • Become familiar with the foundations of embodied consent and tools to support this learning with survivors, including sexual communication and boundaries

  • Learn new theoretical frameworks and practical tools for working with desire, including its relevance to embodied consent

  • Learn new theoretical frameworks and practical tools for working with and cultivating erotic pleasure.

How we Facilitate Untouched:

We adopt an experiential, somatic and interactive learning approach. 

We are most often encouraged to learn through an academic framework that prioritises our minds and ignores our bodies. This limits the potential for full, authentic change. 

Working somatically is vital when we are wanting to reclaim and reshape our experiences of pleasure, sex and intimacy.   

Untouched invites participants onto their learning edges - to practice and play with ideas and concepts; to fully embody the ideas and concepts through ourselves first. 

This learning approach is grounded in the principle of embodied consent. Attendees are encouraged to engage with the training by bringing full awareness to their own capacity and desire to participate. Full, authentic choice is cultivated throughout the day.

Assumed Knowledge

As this training is designed for counsellors, it assumes participants bring a basic knowledge of trauma, its embodied impacts, polyvagal theory and 3-stage trauma recovery.

In order for participants to get the most out of the Untouched training, we recommend you have reasonable experience and skills in being able to notice and intentionally regulate activation and deactivation cycles in your own nervous system. This involves bringing conscious awareness to stay with and track sensations in your body. This is more than simply an ability to engage in physical movement or activities like yoga, breathwork and other exercise. If these skills and body awareness are not available or easily accessible to your system, we recommend you begin with the Foundations in Feminist Somatic workshop.   

Also note, most of us have unhealed wounds and/or sensitives regarding sex and pleasure and the experiential nature of this training may touch on or activate these. 

We assume attendees will participate in this somatic workshop from a place of awareness and self-responsibility.