Trans Affirming Frameworks for Healing
An advanced on-demand course for therapists supporting trans clients - through gender questioning, dysphoria and internalised transphobia - towards healing.
Most trainings stop at definitions and basic inclusion. This one is designed for transformation.
Trans-Affirming Frameworks for Healing is an advanced on-demand course for therapists who want to move beyond basic principles—and offer meaningful, healing support to trans clients.
If you’ve ever wished for clearer strategies to navigate dysphoria, internalised oppression, or the impacts of cisnormativity with your clients, this course will meet you there.
You’ll gain practical, evidence-informed tools to support your clients through the complex emotional and social terrain of gender exploration, dysphoria, and disconnection—and learn how to offer truly attuned, transformative care.
What's Included
5Â Core Modules
Immediate access to easy-to-follow self-paced video lessons. See outline below.Â
Short, Digestible Lessons
Each module is broken into short, digestible videos—perfect for lunch breaks or between sessions.
Q&A Library
Optional, in-depth answers to real practitioner questions, searchable by topic.
Downloadable Resources
No need to take notes. Download printable visual frameworks, guides, and key takeaways to use in your practice.
12 Months Access
We’ve found (and research supports this)that unlimited access often leads to lower completion. A 12-month window helps you stay focused and actually complete the training. Need more time? Just let us know.
Course Outline
This groundbreaking course will provide you with frameworks, concepts and strategies formed over a decade of personal experience, clinical practice and research.
They are each roughly 90-minute, broken up into easy to consume shorter videos.Â
Module 1
From Questioning to Integration: Supporting the Gender Identity Formation Process
Having a clear model for gender identity formation will allow you to support clients throughout their first few years of gender questioning and affirmation. Understand where they are in their own gender process, what is holding them back, and your role in supporting their journey towards greater self-awareness and alignment.Â
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Module 2
Working With and Alleviating Dysphoria
Understand the cause of gender dysphoria and the 3-part Dysphoria Relief Framework, so that you can:
- 1. Support clients to reduce the factors in their life leading to dysphoria distress
- 2. Help clients understand their inner process and triggers
- 3. Explore ways to reduce dysphoria in the moment
- 4. Work towards meaningful long term alleviation
Module 3
Emotional Safety & Responding to Experiences of Transphobia
Understand emotional safety for trans people and respond effectively to clients who have experienced transphobia.
In this module you will learn what to listen for, and the most effective interventions, to increase safety and wellbeing, even when they experience external transphobia. Â
Module 4
A Return to Self:Â Supporting Gender Affirmation Decision Making
Help clients get unstuck in their gender affirmation process, as they move towards greater wellbeing and authentic connection with themselves and others.Â
Module 5
Healing Internalised Transphobia
Bringing the course concepts together, we will talk about internalised transphobia and how to support clients towards 'trans healing'.
What Practitioners Are Saying
Meet Your Trainer
Hi, I'm Ari Heart (they/them).
I am a psychotherapist, educator, parent, trans non-binary person, and co-founder of Trans Wellbeing.
I have been supporting trans people and their families to navigate the various stages of their journeys for many years.
When I began working with trans clients, I quickly realised that lived experience wasn’t enough to guide me in working with other trans and gender diverse people.
I created this training to give therapists the frameworks I wish I had when I began this work. Because inclusion isn’t enough.
When sitting with a client in tears about their struggle with body dysphoria, I could offer presence and empathy, but I felt ill-equipped to help in other ways.
I felt sure that there must be more to know, and I just could not find the information I wanted. The existing guidelines and standards of care didn’t offer the granularity, nuance, theoretical underpinning, or the strategies I wanted. Mostly, they re-iterated similar principles about inclusion and respect – something I felt was setting the bar too low for where I wanted to take my practice and how strongly I wanted to help my clients.
It took me many years and hundreds of clients before I started to develop the frameworks I use today to help my clients experience transformative healing in their relationship to their gender and body, and often within just a few sessions.Â
My personal experience as a non-binary trans person informs the depth of care I bring to this work, but it is the many thousands of hours of conversations with trans people and their families that has built much of the purpose and content of our programs.
I am grateful to all the people I have worked with, who have taught me many things; not least the imperative and courage of authenticity and connection.
Course Preview
Trans Affirming Frameworks for Healing
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Module 0 - Getting Started
4 lessons- Make it easy
- Downloads
- Handy Articles & Links
- Let us know how you go!
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Module 1 - From Questioning to Integration: Supporting the Gender Identity Formation Process
8 lessons- 1.1 | Welcome & Overview
- 1.2 | The Functions of Gender Identity
- 1.3 | Reflection
- 1.4 | Interpellation
- 1.5 | The Role of Interpellation in Identify Formation
- 1.6 | The Gender Identity Formation Process Model - Part 1
- 1.7 | The Gender Identity Formation Process Model - Part 2
- Module 1 - Quiz
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Module 2 | Working With Dysphoria
11 lessons- 2.1 Welcome Overview
- 2.2 What we know already
- 2.3 Minority Stress
- 2.4 External Stressors
- 2.5 Interpellation recap
- 2.6 The Cause of Dysphoria
- 2.7 Relief Stage 1 - Remediation
- 2.8 Relief Stage 2 - Mitigation
- 2.9 Relief Stage 3 - Healing
- 2.10 The Dysphoria Relief Framework Summary
- Module 2 Quiz
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Module 3 - Emotional Safety & Responding to Experiences of Transphobia
9 lessons- 3.1 - Welcome
- 3.2 - Safety in the Gender Id Formation Process
- 3.3 - External Stressors and Their Impacts
- 3.4 - Talking About Safety With Clients
- 3.5 - The Greatest Source of Risk and Safety
- 3.6 - Experiences of Protection and Response
- 3.7 - Responding to Direct Transphobia
- 3.8 - Case Study
- Module 3 Quiz
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Module 4 - A Return to Self: Supporting Gender Affirmation Decision Making
7 lessons- 4.1 - Overview
- 4.2 - Key Misconceptions
- 4.3 - Re-framing the Purpose of Gender Affirmation
- 4.4 - Making Choices
- 4.5 - Disclosure
- 4.6 - Summary
- Module 4 - Quiz
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Module 5 - Healing Internalised Transphobia
8 lessons- 5.1 - Overview
- 5.2 - Stages of Healing
- 5.3 - The Internal Process of Dysphoria
- 5.4 - Disrupting the Dysphoria Process
- 5.5 - Mitigating Dysphoria
- 5.6 - Representation
- 5.7 - Healing internalised transphobia
- Module 5 - Quiz
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Q&A
15 lessons- Q: Grief regarding upcoming surgery
- Q: Working w/ parents - When they say, 'But there were no signs'
- Q: Working w/ skeptical parents to use the child's chosen name/pronouns
- Q: Speaking with clients about internalised transphobia - when and how?
- Q - Disclosure as necessary
- Q: Young clients who give 1 word answers
- Q- How to integrate model of gender affirmation in how I speak to clients
- Q -Decision making when there is anxiety re misgendering, but otherwise experience body satisfaction
- Q- Overvaluation of Gender
- Q - What developmental stage is the content based on
- Q - How to help a client with dypshoria who is pre-affirmation
- Q - How to help a client with dysphoria who is pre-affirmation
- Q - Client doesn't want being trans to not be 'front and centre' of one's experience
- Q - Political Climate
- Q - When transition means it's harder to date