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!
The Modern Love Language Approach to Relational Therapy
Feb. 3, 2025
This is the Colorado section of AASECT’s first luncheon of 2025!
Sex and relationship educator Anne Hodder-Shipp, CSE, has introduced an updated, expansive approach to love languages that helps dismantle common cultural expectations about sex, desire, and romance. Anne will introduce this approach, named Languages for Modern Love, how and why it was developed, and how it can be used by clinicians to help clients move through three common relational road blocks concerning sex, romance, attraction, and love. Attendees will also be walked through the 18 Languages for Modern Love outlined in her book, Speaking from the Heart: 18 Languages for Modern Love, and will provide ample time for Q&A.
Cost: $35 for members & guests
Includes lunch! Please send your payment of $35 via Venmo to @angelicamjackson (last four digits 3976) or bring a check/cash/card to the event. If you would like to donate to the Celebrity Speaker Fund, please add your $10 (or more) donation!
*Please also note that this group bases their space and catering needs on RSVP numbers. With that, they ask that you provide payment even if you are unable to attend the event, and thank you for your understanding.
The Modern Love Language Intensive
April 4-5, 2025
This is the *first* time that the Modern Love Language Intensive is being hosted in person!
The Modern Love Language Intensive offers clinicians, coaches, and sexuality professionals a deep dive into an updated and expansive approach to the popular "love language" relational theory. Join Speaking from the Heart: 18 Languages for Modern Love author Anne Hodder-Shipp for a friendly and engaging workshop that transforms the popular romance-centered theory into a valuable connection, communication, and rapport-building tool that clients can use in ALL their relationships - not just romantic ones. If you use the love language concept in your work, or your clients bring it up often, this workshop is for you.
This workshop includes interactive exercises, large and small group discussion, skills-building, and more active learning tools.
This workshop is right for you if:
You feel curious about how you or your clients relate to love — and if it could use an adjustment.
You are tired of the sex-and-romance relationship narrative and want to help people build loving relationships that are on THEIR terms.
Your clients need some help figuring out what those terms might be.
You want to explore various norms and social scripts around dating, love, and connection that commonly come up in your sessions.
You find tools like Attachment Theory or boundary work helpful.
You work with couples and notice that “desire discrepancy” and sexual entitlement issues come up frequently.
You want stronger competency in working with asexual and aromantic people, and anyone with a sexual orientation that might fall along those spectrums.
You want to help “undo” the harms of purity culture, gender roles, heteronormativity, and sexual pathology in your clients’ romantic and sexual relationships.
You want to expand your knowledge and understanding of platonic and queerplatonic relationships, and how important they are for building chosen family and community.
Bodily autonomy, consent culture, and reproductive justice (among other important values) are important to you and your work.
You feel inspired in communal learning (and unlearning) environments with like-minded people.
This program meets the requirements of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) and is approved for 10 CE credits. These CE credits may be applied toward AASECT certification and renewal of certification.
Here’s what past attendees had to say:
“This workshop was amazing and I am grateful for Anne’s generosity and time. I learned a lot about myself, and I appreciate new structures and avenues for feeling and thinking. THANK YOU!”
“I had such a meaningful and healing time. Thank you for creating this container of lovely folks and nourishing us with so much goodness, knowledge, and love.”
“My heart and brain are very full and I’m excited to continue to digest and apply all of this to my life!”
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 recreational 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.
Include discussion of alcohol use and sex.
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.
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.”
Thera…medium? Intuition development for the multi-dimensional sex therapist
March 11 + 25, 2025
2-5 p.m. PT
$199
6 AASECT CEs
Online Workshop
We receive communication from so much more than our thoughts in the therapy room. We are spoken to via our own memories, sensations, emotions, “gut” instincts, mental imagery, energy ,and beyond. What surfaces through these channels carries a wisdom that clinicians can, and often do, partner with as we uncover clues, make connections, and find break-through moments with our clients. How deeply can we trust it, even understand it, when it is often framed in clinical training programs as an intrusion, “counter-transference” to be managed, and something to keep out of therapeutic conversation, especially around sex?
Hosted by AASECT certified sex therapist and sex therapy supervisor Paula Leech, this course is designed to aid clinicians in tapping into and then gleaning understanding and utility from the information that other aspects of “self” communicate. In the place beyond our rational minds lives abstract wisdom and insight that we can develop, that can grow more sophisticated with time, and that can inspire trust in the greatest tool we have as clinicians — ourselves. Through personal reflection and case examination, participants will link the information and techniques shared back to the art of sex therapy. They will learn how to differentiate memories and experiences that are barriers to client connection (problematic counter-transference) from memories and experiences that illuminate valuable insight and pathways toward healing. Participants will leave with a greater appreciation for and connection with the dimensionality of their instrument.
EDSE programming is trauma-aware, expansive, intersectional, and affirming.