Sexual Healing: Helping Our Clients Have Healthy Sex Lives after Trauma

6 CEs Recorded: Spring, 2023

As clinicians, most of us are aware that trauma greatly impacts the lives of our clients. However, a large majority of clinicians don’t know how to talk to their clients about sexuality, and subsequently, aren’t able to help their clients with trauma that has influenced their sex lives. Because of the shame-filled way our society treats sexuality, most people have a complicated relationship with it.

Experiencing attachment wounds can also be a major barrier to healthy sexual relationships. In addition, many people have been victims of sexual assault, and these experiences have a staggering impact on one’s sexuality.

Whether your client has experienced shame, infidelity, or relational/sexual trauma, their sex lives are likely impacted, and they may need our support to help them achieve the healthy relationship with sex that they’d like to have.

This course will go over the basics of human sexuality, including sexual and gender identities, as well as the roles of desire, arousal, and libido. This course will also explore how certain types of traumas may affect your clients sexually and how to intervene in supportive, sex-positive ways.

Objectives

• Understand the process of human sexuality and development
• Recognize and describe how people develop healthy sexuality
• Identify the ways that historical experiences can impact sexual tastes and interests
• Clarify the differences between sexual and gender identity
• Discern the components of desire, arousal, and libido
• Describe the process of healthy sexual arousal
• Clarify how different types of traumas manifest in various impacts on one’s sexuality and sex life
• Realize and recognize what it means to be a sex-positive clinician
• Feel comfortable taking practical actionable steps to have a sex-positive practice
• Learn and implement practical interventions for sexual recovery

EPDC CE Hours: 6

Presenter: B. Lourenco, LMHC

B Lourenco is a licensed mental health counselor, educator, advocate, and activist. B has been working in community support for 15 years and is committed to social change on all system levels. Seeing mental health as a way to serve the community, she earned a Master of Arts degree in Clinical Psychology, with a Systems Emphasis, in 2015 and began her private practice in 2017. B has also worked in the public school system, providing support to students with behavioral issues that made attending school challenging for them. Highly trained in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), B became a district-wide expert in supporting neurodivergent students. It was during this work that she began to be critical of the current models of support for neurodivergence, including ABA. Making the shift from the medical to the affirming model has allowed her to finally identify her own neurodivergence, including Autism and ADHD. Combining her lived experience of neurodivergence, along with years of anti-oppression work, B is passionate about helping others untangle themselves from harmful practices and align themselves with those that instead support marginalized communities. In addition to her work in neurodiversity, B is also a sex and relationship therapist, specializing in ethical non-monogamy and kink exploration. She has been a speaker on panels and podcasts, as well as facilitating therapeutic workshops in her area of Washington State.