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 Intensive

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:

Thera…medium? Intuition development for the multi-dimensional sex therapist

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.

Advanced SAR: Sex & Drugs

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: