"The two main problems people have about sexuality are fear and ignorance," says Liz Sherry, a training consultant with a particular expertise in sexuality training. Both women and men are taught, she says, to suppress their feelings. Sex is still seen as something uncontrollable which has to be held in check.

Sherry's work with individuals and companies over the past 16 years has convinced her that our sexuality is often the part of ourselves we know least about and are most fearful of. But these days, many professionals - competent or not - are expected to deal with sexual issues. What we suppress leaks out in darker ways: "The pornographic industry is the biggest money earner in the world; it feeds on secret, shameful stuff. Men are its biggest consumers, so it's an industry which exploits men who exploit women," she says.

We also distance ourselves from sexuality, she suggests, by demonising known abusers: "We think we know sex abusers, they're the monsters, they look in a particular way, and so we say `that's not me, not my Dad, not my husband, not my son. It's out there. It's nothing to do with me.' But if we really care about children, we will want to rehabilitate these people, who are someone's husband, father, son."

Sherry and her co-trainer, Nigel Woods, have devised a programme for professionals who find themselves confronted with sexual issues. "Towards a Healthy Model of Sexuality" aims to help participants become more aware of sexual attitudes and behaviour, more fluent with the language involved, and more knowledgeable and comfortable in exploring their own and others' sexuality. Ethical and legal issues are also clarified.

"The original approach came from therapists who find sexual issues coming up in their work which they are not necessarily trained to deal with," says Sherry. "I have also been approached by prison staff who work with sexual abusers, and by sex therapists who have nowhere to send victims of sexual abuse after individual therapy to build on what has been done. Many teachers feel they don't have enough training to deliver the RSE programmes in schools, and the medical profession is another which could do with training in this area."

The course begins with a film, The Ballroom of Romance, in which a single daughter marries a man she detests in order to keep her smallholding: "On my last course, one woman said: `that's why I left home'," says Sherry. "There's a huge response to the film which evokes a lot of folk memories of where many of us came from. In the past, sex was sometimes bartered in despair for land."

Later in the course, participants are invited to explore their own sexual identity by filling in a questionnaire which looks at their family and personal history: "It's about learning how you formed your own sexual identity, like a new map," she says. "People take the questionnaire away and do it on their own. They return to small discussion groups and can choose to share at the level they want. However, the response is usually phenomenal."

The course also discusses the sexual response-cycle from arousal to orgasm and gives participants an opportunity to discuss such issues as masturbation and sexual fantasies: "Masturbation can be a difficulty in care settings, and raises the whole issue of whether physically or mentally handicapped people are allowed to have a sexual identity and how this should be acknowledged," says Sherry. "People are often disturbed about their sexual fantasies, but having a fantasy doesn't mean we have to act on it. Suppressing it gives it more power; dissecting it makes it more ordinary."

Sherry suggests that being more at ease with sexuality issues gives professionals both self-protective boundaries in, say, expressing any disquiet they experience when working with rape offenders and, conversely, being more open to discuss sexual problems with clients in general.

Fiona Neary, national co-ordinator of the Network of Rape Crisis Centres has participated in the sexuality training: "Liz made it very, very safe for us to work. The workshops explored the oppression that we either lived through ourselves in the 1950s and 1960s or inherited from our parents and helped us see what messages we had taken on.

"Now in my work with clients who are recovering from sexual violence I am much more aware," she adds. "You're not able to work through with clients what you haven't worked through yourself."

Towards A Healthy Model of Sexuality is held one day a week over four weeks. Cost £450 per programme. Contact Liz Sherry Consultancy, Sisceal, Annamore, Co Wicklow (0404-45254)