Let’s Talk About Sex (Therapeutically): Practical Skills for Every Clinician

This workshop is intended for all clinicians working with individuals and couples, to explore relationship issues around sexuality. We will review how to feel more confident assessing and intervening with desire issues, and the skills therapists need for common sexual complaints and long term erotic recovery.

We will begin with an overview of key clinical concepts related to sexual desire, eroticism, and intimacy, and then move into practical skills to help clients address concerns around connection and pleasure. The focus will be on helping both individuals and couples improve their intimate relationships in ways that are collaborative, respectful, and clinically grounded. The workshop will review skills to help clinicians feel more comfortable and skilled to have these conversations with our clients.

Talking about sex can evoke strong emotions for therapists and clients and this workshop will address therapist countertransference and projection, as well as the frustration and repetitive patterns individuals and couples may bring into the therapy room. We will review the basics of an integrative sex therapy model and explore how trauma, abuse, and affair recovery can shape desire, erotic expression, and the course of treatment.

Drawing on clinical practice, research, and case examples, we will highlight practical interventions and techniques that foster effective, ethical therapeutic relationships with clients struggling with desire and intimacy issues. We will also discuss how to integrate this work into ongoing clinical practice, using interventions that support promote positive treatment outcomes.