CRASH Course: Foundations of Neurodiversity and Healthy Relationships (7 CE Hours)

Description:

 This seven-hour course will offer practitioners a solid foundation for working with neurodivergent clients, inclusive of all types of gender and sexual expression. The course encourages self-reflection on a range of topics within the neurodiversity therapy framework, including stigma, biases, and models of consent. Each hour will feature a new learning objective, including topical slides, input from self-advocates, videos, and activities to encourage contemporary approaches to working clients who may learn differently and experience relationships and sexuality in a variety of ways that, for many practitioners, has been previously unconsidered.

Learning Objectives:

• Explain what neurodiversity is
• Discuss how to compare neurodivergent and neurotypical relationships with self, family, friends, community, online, and romantic and/or sexual partners.
• Describe healthy versus unhealthy neurodivergent sexual exploration.
• Discuss three clinical examples of ways to help their neurodivergent clients feel less pathologized and more sexually self-actualized.
• Explain 2 models of consent
• Discuss trauma informed vulnerabilities
• Explain how couples where one is neurodivergent can have great sex

Schedule (7 hours):

INTRODUCTION: (1:20:46)

NEURODIVERSITY: (58:57)

FAMILY AND FRIENDS: (57:09)

COMMUNITY (stigma, spirituality, school, work, crisis, staff, ABA, politics): (1:12:34)

ONLINE (parental controls, social media research, representation, dating apps): (23:32)

GOOD SEX (4 models of consent, trauma informed vulnerabilities, disability rights and wrongs, eugenics, stigma and assumptions, ethical dilemmas) (1:12:58)

GREAT SEX and THRIVING (37:45)

Speaker Bio:

Kayla Concannon, MS, OTR/L (she/her/hers) is a neurodivergent and bisexual occupational therapist, educator, researcher, entrepreneur, accessibility analyst, and human rights advocate around Philadelphia, PA. She is a white, bisexual, neurodivergent, vegetarian, petite, redhead, cisgender woman. She anticipates earning her Doctorate of Education (EdD) in 2025 after defending her dissertation on neurodiverse healthy relationships, inspired by #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs (read: “hashtag nothing about us without us”). She is the founder and owner of Collaborative Relational and Sexual Health (CRASH) Consulting, LLC.