Shame and the Sexual Life Course: New perspectives and clinical applications (2 CE Hours, 2024)

Individuals and couples who seek therapy for sexual issues often assume there is something “broken” about them, especially if they have childhood or adolescent histories of physical, emotional, or sexual maltreatment.  Such clients may hope that therapy will repair whatever is “damaged” and help them return to a state of normal/healthy functioning – akin to going back in time before “the trouble” started.  Yet this view can be a potent obstacle to clients’ own healing, because it might inadvertently reinforce the notion that there is something fundamentally wrong with them (as opposed to something distressing that they want to change). A growing body of research suggests that both sexual responsivity and stress responsivity are calibrated and re-calibrated over the life course by individuals’ experiences of threat and safety.  Accordingly, each adult’s sexual patterning represents their nervous system’s “best attempt” to meet the fundamental human need for social nourishment (pleasure and social connectedness) while avoiding social unsafety (rejection, shame, threat). Accordingly, individuals who have been exposed to chronic unsafety in their lives – whether because of childhood experiences, current stigmatization, or coercive family environments – are not “broken,” but stress-adapted. Their sexual histories do not need to be “undone,” but re-adapted, and this can only occur in a shame-free context.

Lisa M. Diamond is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah and president-elect of the International Academy for Sex Research. For nearly 3 decades, she has studied the development and expression of gender and sexuality across the life course.Her current work focuses on the biobehavioral mechanisms through which social stigma, social stress, and social safety shape the health and well-being of sexually-diverse and gender-diverse individuals at different stages of development.  Dr. Diamond is best known for her research on sexual fluidity, which describes the capacity for individuals to experience unexpected shifts in sexual identity and expression over time.  Her 2008 book, Sexual Fluidity, published by Harvard University Press, has been awarded the Distinguished Book Award from the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Study of LGBTQ Issues.

Dr. Diamond is also co-editor of the first-ever APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology, published in 2014, and is a fellow of two divisions of the APA.  She has published over 140 articles and book chapters and has been invited to present her research at over 150 national and international Universities and conferences. Dr. Diamond has received awards for her work from the Developmental Psychology and LGBT Psychology Divisions of the APA, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the International Association for Relationship Research, the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Her current work focuses on the importance of social safety (unconditional social connection, inclusion, and protection) for the human immune system and the negative long-term health implications of living with chronic unsafety in one’s day-to-day life. Dr. Diamond also studies religious trauma among sexually-diverse and gender-diverse individuals raised in the Mormon church and the factors that promote adjustment and acceptance among this population and their families.