How Talking About Sex Will Change Your Relationship Dynamics
I wish that I had a cool answer to the question, “What made you decide to be a sex therapist?”
The honest answer is that I had been working at a private practice in Quincy for about four years. I knew that I wanted to specialize in couples therapy, and my boss, Stephen Duclos, encouraged me to get extended training.
I shopped around in the emotionally focused couples therapy and internal family systems communities; those were theories that my graduate school specialized in. Stephen discouraged me from becoming too engaged in those programs, suggesting that these models very easily turn into individual therapy in the presence of a partner, missing the relational dynamics that are going on. (At some point, I’ll write in another article why he’s right.)
He told me that he was starting a training program for certified sex therapists, and explained why having this extended training makes me uniquely marketable.
Plus, he told me that, as his employee, I could get a stipend. As a person who grew up somewhat poor, subsidizing products is a fantastic marketing ploy. That’s how I became a sex therapist.
However, the first class that I took changed my perspective about sexuality and relationships forever.
I began training at South Shore Sexual Health Center’s certified sex therapy program in March, 2017; I was actually part of the inaugural cohort, and thrilled to go back to school, so to speak. (Classes are every Tuesday evening for a year, with a few week-long intensives along the way.)
The first class that I took was in the ethics of sex therapy, where Stephen talked about the six sexual health principles that we’re currently discussing on Sexvangelicals, as well as the PLISSIT model for engaging conversations about sex. PLISSIT is an acronym for a process to discuss difficult topics with people:
Permission: Always ask if it’s okay to talk about a certain topic, i.e. sex.
Limited Information: Only talk about the subject at hand. If a client changes topics, make sure to track that in the therapeutic dialogue.
Specific Suggestions: If you give feedback, make sure that it’s about a particular, focused dynamic.
Intensive Therapy: Should the specific suggestions that you encourage need more exploration, include other factors, such as family of origin, biology, etc.
I left the initial class in a daze. My initial thought was, “Holy shit! I’ve been doing sexuality without asking for permission.” As I would learn through my training, the absence of sex education, and the implementation of abstinence-only education has long-term negative implications on communication.
Check out Episode #77 to learn about how the panic attacks that my ex, also a Purity Culture participant, experienced around sexuality, combined with an absence in sex education, contributed to a myriad of avoidant communication.
I was determined to change the way that I talked about sexuality. I started asking more questions of my ex. I initiated conversations about sexuality with friends, and encouraged our church leadership to find ways to talk more effectively about sexuality and orientation.
The sex therapy training program introduced new values—honesty, intentionality, curiosity—and when I practiced them, the systems that I participated in engaged with me differently. (More on that next week.)
Our guest this week, Jimmy Bridges, refers to this process as value conversion. We talk about the process of value conversion and the role that psychotherapy and counseling training programs play in shifts of perspectives.
As Jimmy writes in his paper, “Navigating the Moral Realm of Counseling: Counselor’s Expressed Role Within and Awareness of Value Conversion,” in reference to the work of David Rosenthal,
“Over the course of successful individual therapy, the moral values of clients change to align closer to the values of their counselors. When therapy was unsuccessful, the moral values of clients diverged from moral values of their counselors.”
Jimmy’s article is an invitation for therapists to consider the influence that they have over their clients. He uses the example of “commitment” as a value, or guiding principle, for couples therapists, and encourages practitioners to ask the following questions, knowing that this framework can be used to evaluate any kind of value:
Do I consider commitment to be a moral value of mine?
If so, is my moral value of commitment congruent or incongruent with my clients’?
Do my clients understand how I view commitment?
Is my belief of commitment flexible enough to consider cultural nuance?
As sex therapists, the values of openness, comprehensiveness, creativity, and curiosity conflict with EMPish (Evangelical, Mormon, Pentecostal) values of faith, commitment, order, and hierarchy. This is not to say that the roles of faith, commitment, order, and hierarchy are unimportant; from our perspective, in order for a couple to have as open and forthcoming of a dialogue as possible, the values of openness, comprehensiveness, etc. are given more priority.
To answer question number 4, when it comes to sexual health, which encompasses biological, psychological, and sociological components, our beliefs in these values are not typically flexible enough to consider the cultural nuances of religiously conservative communities. Julia and I, given our understandings and experiences of Evangelical culture, are likely to have more empathy for folks who grow up in religious communities, and as such, have the skill set to work slower and more patiently than other sexual health professionals.
However, sexual health has a Pandora’s Box component to it; once you open the box and talk about masturbation and fantasy and porn use and desire, it’s incredibly difficult to put that information back in the box and continue with business as usual.
People who grow up in sex-negative households and attend sex therapy with someone like me, Julia, Jimmy, or a host of other therapists who hold a more comprehensive view of sexuality will inherently experience some sort of value shift throughout the course of therapy.
Value conversions lead to shifts in communication patterns and power structures within larger family systems.
And remember, the goal of a system is homeostasis—to maintain the status quo, the replicate itself.
In a best case scenario, two people will be able to talk effectively, curiously, and non-judgmentally about the ways that they see the world differently. The value conversion process comes with a lot of growing pains, but if embraced with a desire to learn more about the other person and celebrate the evolution of their partner, can also bring joy and excitement.
In a worst case scenario, the value conversion process can lead to the dissolution of the family system, which Julia, Jimmy, and I will talk about next week. Typically speaking, when value conversion happens in one person at a significantly different rate than the other person, the other person will exhibit repressing types of behavior—criticism, avoidance, etc.—as a way to get the person experiencing value conversion to return to familiar behaviors.