WORKSHOPS, TRAININGS, & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

EDSE-created and EDSE-endorsed workshops, trainings, and professional development events provide education, research, perspective, and best practices related to some of the most talked-about and culturally relevant topics today. Unlike most other education organizations, EDSE ensures content centers justice, prioritizes critical thinking, and involves compassionate self-reflection in order to ensure attendees of all experience levels leave with an expanded mind, renewed curiosity, and invaluable confidence in their understanding of the subject matter. Each program is held online and provides CEs and training hours that can be used to fulfill licensure, renewal, and certification requirements.

Scroll below to view EDSE’s upcoming lineup, including additional workshops and trainings that EDSE highly recommends!

Advanced SAR: Sex & Drugs

Spring 2025

11 a.m.-4:30 p.m. PT

$395 (payment plans available)

10 AASECT CEs + 10 EDSE CEs

Online workshop

Bianca Laureano, PhD, MA, CSE, CSES, and Anne Hodder-Shipp, CSE, present this intensive, two-day training for practicing and emerging sexuality professionals as well as professionals working in addiction treatment and recovery. This unique Advanced Sexual Attitude Reassessment (SAR) is designed to help attendees identify, challenge, and explore their viewpoints, biases, knowledge gaps, and judgments about the various mind-altering substances present in our communities while expanding their understanding of the roles these substances might play in our clients’ (and our own) lives – especially our sex lives.

Trainings about sex and substance use are rare, and those that exist often center clinical or legal perspectives that do not realistically reflect our varied relationships to drugs and alcohol. As more U.S. states explore drug decriminalization, clinical use of psychedelics to treat trauma and mental illnesses, and legalization of cannabis/marijuana, professionals need and deserve up-to-date trainings that help them explore how to best serve their clients in this fast-changing field.

In this SAR, we will use a harm-reduction framework to explore ideas, experiences, and attitudes about sobriety and recovery; how money, power, ableism, and white supremacy may inform our biases and judgments; and how frameworks like abolition, disability justice, and liberation could shift and expand our perspectives. We will use multimedia, engaging small and large group discussion, introspective activities, and interactive exercises to allow participants to examine their feelings and values and process them with compassion.

This SAR will:

  • Expand ideas, perspectives, and attitudes about substance use beyond right/wrong, good/bad, legal/illegal, healthy/unhealthy binaries

  • Discuss substance use, sex, consent, and pleasure using a harm reduction lens

  • Feature perspectives and experiences that may challenge attendees’ feelings or values

  • Encourage clarity about professional values and limitations, and when to refer out

  • Discuss the medicalization of psychedelics for mental health treatment

This SAR will not:

  • Tell attendees how to think, feel, or talk about substance use, sex, and pleasure

  • Discuss substance use through the lens of addiction or abstinence

  • Instruct how to use substances to enhance sex or pleasure, or how to promote or discourage it with clients

  • Advocate for substance use

  • Advocate for sobriety or abstinence

Additional details, including AASECT Core Knowledge Areas and learning outcomes, are available at the signup link.

Here’s what past attendees had to say:

“Bianca and Anne are very skilled at creating content that is thought provoking and leading discussion that allow participants to feel brave, share, and discuss.”
“What worked for me: The trust placed in me to show up how I am able to in the moment; the mixture of discussion, viewing of content, and breakout group opportunity; the variety of content provided to challenge my biases and assumptions.”
“I really appreciated the effort put in to create an accessible and accommodating space which helped me feel safe to actively participate and integrate the discussions. I also enjoyed the variety in perspectives covered and how this revealed some of the more problematic assumptions that were actually behind some of my previous views on sexuality in relation to substance use. It was full of lovely ‘check yourself and whether you actually believe that’ moments! Thank you!”
“I really appreciated the accessible environment and the modeling of centering our access needs. I also appreciated the recognition of the social context in which we live as it relates to drugs (i.e., War on Drugs, systemic oppression/racism, etc.). There was also lots of time given to the conversations, so we could all share our thoughts.”
“I really loved this SAR and appreciated all the wisdom brought to the space. I am so grateful that there is a training like this to talk about sex, sexuality, and substances. There aren’t any others that I know of!”
“I (un)learned sooo soooo much and I am deeply grateful for this life changing experience. Thank you both for facilitating such an incredible and intentional container.”
“I appreciated how Zoom allowed me to take care of my access needs in a way in-person would not. And also that it allowed for a range in perspectives based on the differing geographic locations of participants.”
“I feel grateful to have access to so many online resources via this SAR, and to be able to connect with folks from all over. I think the value of having a virtual gathering in this context was really big, because of the way we got to see a lot of differences in how drug use is treated, and how sexuality is discussed in people’s communities.”

Other recommended trainings:

Advanced SAR: Youth Sexuality

Nov. 14-15 from 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. PT
$395
10 AASECT + EDSE CES

Bianca Laureano, PhD, MA, CSES and Cory Silverberg, MA, are a dream team and the co-presenters for this intensive, two-day training for practicing and emerging sexuality professionals. The Advanced ANTE UP! SAR: Youth Sexuality is vital because we will be guided by the goals of liberation with a focus on positive youth development, racial, reproductive, disability, gender, and media justice for an exploration about youth culture and youth experiences with their expanding sexuality!

 
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EDSE programming is trauma-aware, expansive, intersectional, and affirming.