Sex Therapy Professional Skills
Zoe and Walt Sipe
Fall & Spring
This course emphasizes therapeutic stance related to sex therapy, working with eroticism in the clinical context, and practical demonstrations of common presenting issues in sex therapy. There will be training around participants' ongoing personal and professional development as sex therapists. We will integrate multiple theoretical orientations to sex therapy including behavioral, somatic, psychodynamic, gestalt, and attachment. As sex therapy often includes interaction with medical issues, we will also work with assessment, psychopharmacologic impacts, and working with interdisciplinary teams, including medical professionals.
Sexual Attitudes Reassessment
Bianca Laureano
Fall, Spring, & Summer
This course is designed to offer all students exposure in the form of facilitated discussion, small group activities, self-reflection, and media consumption along a range of sexual practices and experiences. The focus of the course utilizes an intersectional, justice-centered, and anti-oppression framework, to facilitate and address unexamined axiological assumptions we all hold about romantic orientations, bodies, gender, sexual exploration and attractions; and to consider and stay curious about them as a reflexive lifelong practice. This course is aligned to and is part of the AASECT sex educator and AASECT sex therapy certification and is considered one of the components of competency in core knowledge and experience in the field. The content will consist of a range of media with captions, that support various learning styles, and is presented by an experienced and certified facilitator.
Sex Therapy with Trans and Non-Binary Communities
Damon Constantinides
Fall, Spring, & Summer
This course provides an introduction to a framework for sex therapy with trans and non-binary clients that is rooted in narrative therapy, transfeminism, queer theory, intersectionality and in challenging the cissexist culture we are all living in. Nine principles for providing sex therapy to erotically marginalized clients will be discussed with case examples.
Relational Sex Therapy
Martha Kauppi
Fall & Spring
In this two-day workshop, Martha Kauppi will facilitate a learning process designed to help clinicians build a robust skillset for working with complex relational challenges that present concurrently with sex issues. From a sex positive and inclusive perspective, and through the theoretical lens of the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy (Bader/Pearson), Kauppi integrates concepts from attachment, differentiation, and neuroscience to create a cohesive clinical approach to relational sex therapy. Participants will leave with effective strategies for conceptualizing couples and relational therapy cases, and a robust set of treatment strategies for working with a broad range of relational and sex-related challenges.
Pleasure, Intimacy and Ergoerotics
Heather Howard
Fall & Spring
This course offers a variety of clinical solutions related to intimacy, pleasure, and physical comfort. Dr. Howard and guest speaker(s) who specialize in partner engagement and erotic trance share their clinical approaches to intimacy and pleasure, and Dr. Howard rounds out the course with practical adjustment strategies to promote sexual comfort for clients with health challenges.
Controversial Issues in Human Sexuality and Sex Therapy
Juan Camerena
Fall, Spring, & Summer
This thought-provoking course will take a critical and reflective approach to examine a range of sexual behaviors and expressions that may be, for various reasons, viewed as problematic. Such areas may include out of control sexual behaviors, rape culture, exploitation, sexuality & substances, and harassment. The course will consider issues of ethics, historical context, and various therapeutic approaches and interventions.
A separate portion of this course will highlight Dr. Camarena's expertise in working with models of gender and sexual identity, the intersections of race and sexuality, and sex therapy within the LGBTQQIA community.
Intersectionality in Sex Therapy
Estefanía Simich
Fall, Spring, & Summer
This course explores some of the intersections that might present in sex therapy
when working with clients from diverse backgrounds and from different parts of the world. It is through the exploration of these intersections (e.g., culture, religion, migration, intergenerational teachings), that the course will focus on providing a space for exploration of ways of approaching cases and learning new practical skills to use with diverse groups of clients in sex therapy. The course emphasizes on the impact of patriarchal systems, systems of oppression, gender violence, sexual rights, migration and how this presents itself in sex therapy.
