CLINICAL CERTIFICATION
Become the Practitioner People Trust With Their Relationships
The Relational Intelligence™ certification is a 5-month program that teaches practitioners to hold the room when two nervous systems are active to address the relational dynamics that are actually driving your clients' patterns.
6 credits toward our MA, Integrative Psychology.
Next Cohort Starts: September 1, 2026
➳ International Certification: Relational Intelligence Practitioner™
➳ Live session options for US & Asia Timezones
➳ 5-7 Hours Weekly, Asynchronous + Live Mentor Sessions
The relational dimension your training didn't cover
You're already doing good work with clients. But you've noticed something.
The anxiety that brought someone in? It's about their marriage. The coaching client who keeps self-sabotaging? There's a relational pattern underneath. The individual who cycles through the same conflict no matter who they're with? They need someone who can work with the dynamic itself, not just their side of it.
Every practitioner eventually runs into this. Whether you planned for it or not, your clients' deepest patterns live in their relationships. The problem is that most training only gives you tools for one person in a room. The moment a second nervous system enters the picture, the rules change. Cognitive strategies collapse when someone is activated. Communication frameworks fall apart when the prefrontal cortex goes offline.
What's missing are somatic and relational tools that work below the level of language, where the actual patterns live. That's what this training teaches.
Did You know?
Relationship support is the most in-demand and most underserved category in mental health.
Every month, over 1.2 million people search for a relationship practitioner — more than double any other specialty — while fewer therapists work in this niche than any other.
For new professionals, the gap creates a significant career opportunity.
Who this training is for
This training is designed for practitioners who are already working with clients and want to add relational work, or deepen the relational work they're already doing.
You might be a somatic practitioner, life coach, therapist, or wellness professional who keeps bumping into relational dynamics in individual sessions. Or you might already be working with couples informally and want the framework and supervision to do it with confidence.
You don't need a license to enroll. But you do need to be willing to run this material through your own relationships first. Module 1 asks you to understand your own relational patterns, your own nervous system behavior in connection, and your own attachment strategies before you try to facilitate anyone else's. You can't coach what you haven't lived.
What is an RI™ Practitioner?
An RI Practitioner works with couples, families, and individuals on the relational dynamics that drive their patterns. In practice, that means you're the person in the room when two people are activated, stuck in a loop they can't break, and need someone who can hold the space steady enough for something to shift.
A typical session might look like this: a couple comes in, stuck in a familiar argument. Instead of mediating the content of the disagreement, you read the room. One partner is in sympathetic activation; defensive, voice rising. The other has gone dorsal; shut down, checked out. You regulate the field first. Slow things down. Help each person land in their body before asking them to meet each other. Only then do you work with what's actually underneath the fight.
This is different from traditional couples counseling, which tends to stay cognitive. It's different from mediation, which focuses on resolving the specific dispute. And it's different from individual therapy, which works with one person's side of the story. RI practice works with the relationship itself as a living system, one that has its own nervous system patterns, its own trauma history, and its own capacity for repair.
What this training gives you
This is a 5-month certification that teaches working practitioners a four-phase method (Presence & Attune, Reveal, Resource, Integrate) for facilitating relational work. You'll learn to read nervous system states in real time, regulate the relational field before doing any content work, and facilitate genuine contact rather than managed conversation.
The training integrates Emotionally Focused Therapy, Gottman's research, Tatkin's PACT model, Hendricks' Conscious Loving framework, and Nonviolent Communication, all through a somatic, nervous-system-first lens.
By the end, you'll be able to:
Guide couples through live conflict — identifying the Four Horsemen as they happen, calling physiological time-outs, and facilitating repair attempts.
Read the basic nervous system states that show up in relational conflict — ventral vagal, sympathetic activation, dorsal vagal — and know why cognitive interventions fail when someone has left their window of tolerance.
Work with individuals using their relationship patterns as a growth edge, shifting from blame and reactivity toward curiosity and radical responsibility.
Hold space for grief and relational loss without fixing, and recognize when a client needs clinical referral rather than coaching.
Make clean scope-of-practice decisions — knowing when the work is yours and when it isn't.
This is not a theoretical training. Module 2 is supervised practice: real sessions with peers, video review, group supervision, and direct feedback on your facilitation.
Program Overview:
Certification: Relational Intelligence Practitioner™
5 months total. 4-5 hours weekly
Online Training with self-paced & live Zoom session.
Option for in-person retreat in Arizona (first week of June or December).
All live sessions have multiple time options (Saturday, 10 am PST, Thursday, 5PM PST).
For the full curriculum outline and live session schedule, request more info to receive our PDF
Key Considerations:
$3,950 total. Payment plans available ($750 / month)
All credit hours ($3,125) apply towards our degree programs.
Integrative Psychology is an approved secondary education provider with the Integrative Therapists Association™ (ITA). ITA is an independent credentialing body that approves standards for mental health practitioners and educators in somatic, body-based, and alternative mental health practice. Integrative Psychology has been approved to provide up to 400 hours of professional training, meeting the secondary education requirements for the Certified Integrative Therapist (CIT) credential.
For more information, visit itatherapy.org.
Course Instructors & Mentors
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Cara Behan, LMFT
Licensed Marriage and Family Counselor
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Dr Arielle Schwartz
PHD, Somatic Therapist
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Niki Wikstrom
Integrative Therapist
Join our weekly info call: Every Wed. 11 AM PST
Weekly Info Call: Clinical Certifications
Learn about our certifications on our weekly info call.
ENROLL NOW
Start your training journey with us.
Enrollment Includes:
Asynchronous content, practice library, and 16 live sessions over 5 months.
Clinical Certification as a Relational IntelligencePractitioner™
1 year of free access to our Group Therapy Platform
6 credit hours ($3,120) towards our MA Degree.
Option 1: Pay in full
$3,950
$550 Discount
Payment Plan: 3 Months
$1,400 x 3
$4,200 total
Payment Plan: 6 Months
$750 x 6
$4,500 total
4-day in-person intensive retreat
Come learn with us in person twice a year in Scottsdale, Arizona. All students receive access to our in-person immersions, where we prepare to launch group somatic healing containers.
In-Person Immersion Module
June 3-7, 2026 | Scottsdale, AZ
December 2-6, 2026 | Scottsdale, AZ