Relational Safety & Engagement with LGBTQ+ Clients
A Workshop for Social Workers and Mental Health Professionals
Date: To be announced
CPD points pending
Limited seating
Why this workshop?
The safety an LGBTQ+ client feels in your room has less to do with what you know about gender identity and sexual orientation than with how you meet them.
Humility. Respect. Curiosity. The absence of judgment. These are the things a young person is reading in the first three minutes — long before you say anything about terminology.
That is good news, because those are skills social workers already have. What this workshop offers is not a body of specialist knowledge you’re missing. It is a chance to turn skills you use every day toward a group of clients you may have been approaching more carefully, and more anxiously, than you need to.
Who this is for
This workshop was built for practitioners who do not consider themselves experts in this area — and who would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
If you have ever hesitated over a pronoun, worried about causing offence, or found yourself being careful in a way that made the room feel a little more distant, this session is for you. That hesitation is common, it is well-intentioned, and it is worth working with directly. Clients notice caution. They read it, often, as something else.
You will find this most useful if you work in:
- School and youth social work
- Child and family services, where family acceptance or rejection is often the central issue
- Mental health, counselling, and casework settings across the lifespan
- Faith-based, community, or rural settings where cultural and religious dynamics are live
- Supervision, where you are shaping how a whole team practises
The focus is on LGBTQ+ clients generally, with particular attention to adolescents — where the stakes around confidentiality, family, school, and disclosure are sharpest.
What this workshop is not
It is not about treating gender- or sexuality-related “conditions.” There are none to treat.
It is not a terminology test. You will not be caught out.
It is not a lecture. Only about 15% of the session is presentation. The rest is discussion, mapping, and scenario practice.
What you’ll be able to do afterwards
By the end of the session, you should be able to:
- Use a basic shared vocabulary — sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation — with enough confidence to quiet the anxiety about saying the wrong thing
- Notice the heteronormative and cisnormative defaults hiding in your intake forms, your language, and your expectations
- Name the concrete things that make a therapeutic space feel safe or unsafe to an LGBTQ+ adolescent
- Open a session in a way that follows the client’s lead and lets them define themselves
- Recover from a misstep without centring your own discomfort — and avoid the opposite error of tokenism
- Navigate adolescent-specific realities: confidentiality, the risk of outing, and family, school, and faith contexts, in the South African setting
- Stay anchored in professional values when public opinion and political discourse around these issues shift
How the session runs
Because the subject is sensitive, we open by co-creating a “brave space” agreement together: confidentiality among participants, curiosity over judgment, and explicit permission to be imperfect and to ask the questions you have been reluctant to ask.
We work on a shared Mural board rather than through slides, so you are contributing to the thinking rather than watching it happen. There are breakout rooms, scenario-based practice with a guarded, referred adolescent, and reflections harvested from the group in real time.
The facilitators convene and structure the exploration rather than instruct from the front. This is deliberate. It models the stance the workshop is arguing for: you do not need to be an expert to be safe, trustworthy, and genuinely helpful.
Ethics run through it
Not as a compliance box, but as the substance of the work. We give dedicated time to the questions that actually arise in practice: self-determination and the line between holding your own convictions and imposing them; confidentiality and the real harm of outing a young person; the limits of your competence and when to refer — without ever withdrawing the relational safety you can always offer; and cultural humility that engages respectfully with culture and religion without allowing either to justify discriminatory treatment.
These are explored together, as dilemmas to reason through, rather than delivered as conclusions.
Why the South African context matters here
Our Constitution offers among the strongest protections in the world against unfair discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. The lived reality for many LGBTQ+ young people includes family rejection, stigma, bullying, cultural and religious tension, and in some communities the threat of violence.
Social workers stand at exactly the meeting point of that protection and that reality. And the public mood around these issues moves — sometimes considerably — which is precisely why a stable professional anchor matters more, not less.
Your Facilitators
Werner van der Westhuizen has a special interest in relational practice and has authored numerous journal articles and book chapters on the subject. He is a clinical social worker registered with SACSSP, and holds master’s degrees in both psychology and clinical social work.
Lara Hayward has a special interest in working with the LGBTQ+ community and substantial experience working with adolescents in this area. Lara holds a bachelor’s degree in social work and is registered with SACSSP. She is in full time private practice.
Both facilitators hold relevant expertise. For the purposes of this session, they set it aside in favour of the role of knowledgeable guide — because the workshop’s argument is that expertise is not the thing standing between you and a client’s sense of safety.
Logistics and Investment
Cost: Free
Duration: 135 minutes (2 hours 15 minutes), single session
Format: Fully online, live on Zoom
Date: Coming Soon
Places Available: 25
Why so few seats?
This session depends on people speaking honestly about their own assumptions in front of others. That does not happen in a webinar with three hundred attendees. Twenty-five is the number at which breakout rooms work, the Mural board stays legible, and a facilitator can actually circulate. We would rather turn people away than dilute the session.
CPD: Accreditation has been applied for with SACSSP.
What participation requires:
We ask for real engagement, and the CPD process requires evidence of it:
- Attendance for the full session. Zoom generates a record of each participant’s total online time. Partial attendance cannot be credited.
- Camera on for the duration. This is a discussion, not a broadcast.
- A short written assignment after the session. You will reflect on an assumption you noticed in yourself, describe how you would set up the therapeutic relationship with an LGBTQ+ adolescent, work through one adolescent-specific ethical consideration in your own practice context, and reflect on staying professionally centred. This is emailed to the facilitator.
Certificates and CPD points, once accreditation is confirmed, depend on all three.
Consider this…
For a young person whose family, school, or community has made their identity a problem to be managed, one adult who does not do that can matter enormously. That adult does not need to be an expert.
It could be you, in a session that starts on an ordinary day.
Before you register…
Yes, it’s free, and there are CPD points attached once accreditation comes through. But we’d ask you to check your calendar carefully before you register rather than after.
There are only 25 places. When someone books a seat because it costs nothing and then doesn’t arrive, that seat can’t be given to the person who was ready to use it. If the date doesn’t work, please leave it for someone the date does work for.