Learning from Unwanted Behaviors: Helping Clients Understand the Meaning of Their Unwanted Sexual Choices as a Roadmap for Healing.
3 Continuing Education Units (CEUs)
Traditional approaches to compulsive sexual behaviors have primarily focused on providing clients with effective strategies to stop acting out, manage triggers, and exchange destructive patterns for healthy ones. What this paradigm largely misses is the critical task of inviting a client to understand the meaning of their unwanted sexual choices. Join licensed mental health counselor, researcher, and author Jay Stringer to learn how a client’s unwanted sexual behavior, like the use of pornography, extramarital affairs, and buying sex can become a roadmap to healing. Unwanted behaviors are not random: they reveal adverse childhood experiences and current problems facing their mental health.
Stringer’s research on nearly 4,000 men and women found that a person’s unwanted sexual behavior could be both shaped and predicted based on the parts of someone’s story that remain unaddressed. Through case studies, research, and clinical skills, you will learn how to give your clients:
- The ability to connect the dots between adverse childhood experiences and unwanted behaviors as adults.
- A way to learn what their unwanted behaviors are expressing rather being debilitated by shame.
- Ways to pursue behaviors that allow them to be fully alive in the present, instead of dissociating or reenacting destructive patterns.
- Hope for healing through mindful, spiritual awareness
Learning Objectives:
- Break down how adverse childhood experiences affect brain development, emotion regulation, and set clients on a trajectory for unwanted behaviors.
- Outline six core building blocks of unwanted behavior.
- Describe the neurobiology of shame.
- Teach clients to disempower shame through facing it.
- Understand empowerment and shame reduction through spiritual awareness.
- Explain methods that facilitate clients to voice their erotic longings and unwanted fantasies.
- Articulate three ways the brain develops and changes through self-care, relationships, and community.
Presenter: Jay Stringer LMHC, M.Div, MA
Jay Stringer is a licensed mental health counselor, researcher, and author of Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing. Unwanted is based on a multiyear research project on over 3,800 men and women to address the key drivers of unwanted sexual behavior, be that the use of pornography, infidelity, or buying sex. Unwanted was named Resource of the Year in Counseling and Relationships by Outreach Magazine.
Jay’s passion is to equip people with the resources they need to outgrow their unwanted behaviors. Towards that end, Jay created the Unwanted Sexual Behavior Self-Assessment and Journey into the Heart of Man, a 5 month online curriculum for faith-based small groups to explore how a person’s story shapes and predicts the unwanted sexual behaviors they pursue.
Stringer holds an MDiv and master in counseling psychology from the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and received post-graduate training under Dr. Dan Allender while serving as a Senior Fellow at the Allender Center for Trauma and Abuse. Jay lives in Seattle, WA with his wife Heather and their two children.
