Working With Sexual Challenges For Penis Owners with Attachment-Informed Focus (3.5 CE Hours)
$140.00
Presented by: Mike Cotayo, LCSW
3.5 CE Hours
Distance Learning – Recorded workshop available via video on demand
AASECT Category: Sex Therapy, Section C.
Description
Sexual challenges among penis owners are frequently framed through narrow models focused on performance, physiology, or pathology. These approaches often overlook the emotional, relational, developmental, and sociocultural factors that shape sexual experience. This workshop offers a broader, compassionate framework by examining male sexual challenges through an attachment-style informed lens.
Participants will explore how early attachment patterns influence desire, arousal, emotional availability, performance anxiety, intimacy, avoidance, and communication around sex. Common concerns—including erectile difficulties, low or fluctuating desire, rapid or delayed ejaculation, compulsive or avoidant sexual behaviors, and intimacy struggles—are reframed not as individual deficits or moral failures, but as adaptive responses shaped by attachment history, nervous system regulation, trauma exposure, and relational safety.
This workshop emphasizes understanding over fixing. Rather than promoting prescriptive sexual norms, participants are invited to develop curiosity about how attachment styles—secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized—manifest in sexual thoughts, behaviors, fantasies, and relationships. Attention is given to how masculinity socialization, disability, trauma, minority stress, and cultural narratives intersect with attachment and sexual functioning.
The tone of the workshop is educational, reflective, and affirming. Content is presented in a non-explicit, non-shaming manner and is accessible to clinicians, educators, and non-clinicians alike. Trauma-informed and kink-aware principles are integrated throughout, emphasizing consent, safety, autonomy, and respect for diverse sexual expression. Participants are encouraged to engage in private reflection in their own lives, and to look for opportunities to heal their own traumas and help their clients to identify and heal their own.
Learning Objectives
At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Explain how attachment styles influence male sexual functioning, including desire, arousal, intimacy, and communication patterns, using an attachment-informed framework.
- Identify the biopsychosocial and trauma-related factors that contribute to common sexual challenges among penis owners, recognizing sexual symptoms as adaptive responses rather than personal or moral failures.
- Apply trauma-informed and kink-aware principles to clinical and educational discussions of male sexuality, emphasizing consent, safety, and non-pathologizing interpretations of sexual expression.
- Evaluate the impact of societal norms, masculinity scripts, disability, and cultural narratives on male sexual health, and integrate inclusive, shame-reducing strategies that support relational safety and help-seeking.
Activity Schedule
5 minutes: Introduction
30 minutes: Understanding Attachment Theory
30 minutes: Common Sexual Challenges affecting Penis Owners
30 minutes: Attachment & Fluidity
30 minutes: Attachment, Male Sexuality, Trauma & Kink
30 minutes: Society’s Views of Men & Male Sexuality
30 minutes: Trauma & Male Sexuality
Speaker Bio
Mike Cotayo is a licensed clinical social worker, stand-up comedian, educator, and PhD candidate at the Modern Sex Therapy Institute (MSTI). With over 20 years of clinical experience, he specializes in attachment-informed, trauma-aware approaches to sexuality, personality disorders, and relational dynamics. Mike has taught nationally and internationally on working with Borderline Personality Disorder and on the therapeutic use of humor in clinical practice. Drawing from both professional expertise and lived experience as a person with a physical disability, he brings a compassionate, non-pathologizing, and engaging approach to conversations about male sexuality, attachment, and shame reduction.
Class originally recorded: 1/10/2026.
Social workers completing this course receive 3.5 general continuing education credits.
MSTI is an approved CE organizational provider for IBOSP, AASECT, and ASWB. Modern Sex Therapy Institutes is part of the Advanced Mental Health Training Institute. The Advanced Mental Health Training Institute has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No.6901. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. The Advanced Mental Health Training Institute is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.
MSTI is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for Psychologists. The Modern Sex Therapy Institutes maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
Modern Sex Therapy Institutes (MSTI), provider #1787, is approved to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: [1/7/22-1/7/26].
Attendees must attend the entire course and complete a course evaluation to be eligible for CE credit
For Live Courses: To obtain CE credits, attendees must attend the entire course and complete an evaluation to receive credit.
For asynchronous/recorded courses, Attendees must pass the multiple choice posttest with a minimum score of 80% in 3 attempts to be eligible for CE credit.
Certificates of completion can be downloaded immediately upon course completion.