Decolonizing your Private Practice while Promoting Pleasure Activism:  Tools, interventions, and models for working with multi-marginalized individuals

Decolonizing your private practice while promoting pleasure is a training to help therapists diversify the therapeutic tools, interventions, and assessments used when working with BIPOC identified clients.  This training will discuss the historical foundations of systemic oppression and examine how it may show up in therapy sessions. The session will also focus on assessments that are useful when encountering clients that may or may not be aware of colonization and oppression-based traumas. While exploring the importance of pleasure activism, this training provides the tools towards doing so. Overall, the training will equip individuals with more culturally inclusive ways of addressing and acknowledging the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, of individuals in the clinical and/or therapeutic setting. Training participants will also review their own individual practices and develop additional ways to further decolonize the way they engage with BIPOC identified clients.

Learning Objectives

1. Explain Pleasure Activism and the role it plays in the promotion of sex positivity.
2. List two assessments tools that measure racial trauma and how these tools can be beneficial when working with closed or resistant clients.
3. Explain the difference with therapeutic comfort vs therapeutic safety.
4. Describe 2 components of working with Black clients in a therapeutic setting.
5. List 3 factors that contribute to the disproportionate rates of violence against Black trans women.

Decolonizing your PP while Promoting Pleasure Activism (by sections)

1. Introduction and feelings check
2. Historical foundations of systemic oppression and mistrust
3. Terms, theories, and concepts
4. Barriers to access and treatment
5. The Intersectionality of multi-marginalized identities
6. The Power of Pleasure Activism
7. The Clinical Process and your role as the clinician
8. Assessment tools and resources

Speaker Bio:

Cortina Peters aka The Girlfriend Therapist TM, is an EMDR trained Licensed Mental Health Counselor who specialized in Sex
therapy, International Life Coach, Best Selling Author, Motivational Strategist, and Mentor who motivates people to win every area of their life. She completed both her Master’s in Mental Health Counseling and her Bachelor’s in Psychology at Nova Southeastern University. She also holds a certificate in Women’s Entrepreneurship from Cornell University. Cortina is a current Ph.D. student, studying Clinical Sexology.

Cortina started her career in the field of sexual health education and overall wellness over 20 years ago. She has been providing professional counseling services since 2009. She is dually licensed in Florida and Georgia. In 2020, she was nominated as the first black president-elect for the Mental Health Counselors of Central Florida, which covers Lake, Orange, Osceola, and Seminole county.

As The Girlfriend TherapistTM, she helps to dispel the myths of what it means to see a therapist. She has received numerous awards and has been recognized by professional peers, colleagues, and community organizations as a result of the positive work she has done with her patients, clients, and community. Her experience ranges from providing individual counseling sessions to speaking on conference stages in front of large audiences. Be it big or small, she motivates all.