Designing and Leading a Successful SAR

A Guide for Sex Therapists, Sexuality Educators, and Sexologists

Patti Britton, Robert E. Dunlap

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315301099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This professional guidebook and training manual introduces the Sexual Attitudes Reassessment and Restructuring (SAR) training program for professionals working in the broad field of sexology. The authors, who have led 43 SAR training programs in seven different countries, provide an overview of the history and modern day context of SARs in the first part of the book. In Part II, they provide a toolkit for creating your own SAR, using 21 photocopiable workbook pages, handy checklists, and practical tips. Part III focuses on lessons learned from past SARs and future predictions for cutting-edge SARs. This book is necessary reading for clinicians and educators who wish to offer SAR training programs or integrate "The SAR Approach" into their practice.

Part One

The Story of SAR

1

What Is a SAR?

“We are the recorders and reporters of facts … not the judges of the behaviors we describe”

—Alfred Kinsey

Read This First!

This book is going to take you on a journey of self-exploration. We are eager to train you as a professional as you seek to carry out your own dreams to design and lead a successful SAR. Offering and leading a SAR can be a challenging path, like hiking up a steep mountain edge and reaching the top (panting all the way), to find the light at the pinnacle of a difficult climb. Maybe you are seeking information, or your own inspiration, to craft a profitable or memorable SAR experience for your tribe. Maybe you are just curious about how SAR works and feel intrigued to explore it further. Either way, this book is your guide (think recipes) for success. To bring you to that apex of expertise and readiness for SAR leadership, we have built this book using a variety of teaching methods.

Adult Learning Styles

Adults learn in different ways, accessing different mechanisms for gaining knowledge and acquiring skills. You may be a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic (somatic/sensory) learner. Right brain people tend to have to feel or sense their way to knowing; left brain people need a calculated, linear approach to feel competent to complete the tasks ahead (UCMAS, 2016). Since the late 1980s, research has been deconstructing what were assumed to be reliable means for determining pathways to learning, showing that learners possess what are often termed eight multiple intelligences (Armstrong, 2016). They include:

• Linguistic intelligence (“word smart”)
• Logical-mathematical intelligence (“number/reasoning smart”)
• Spatial intelligence (“picture smart”)
• Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (“body smart”)
• Musical intelligence (“music smart”)
• Interpersonal intelligence (“people smart”)
• Intrapersonal intelligence (“self smart”)
• Naturalist intelligence (“nature smart”)

Social science teaches us that often we learn better from the telling or reading of a story rather than just a presentation of facts (Bair, 2016). In a fascinating study on the use of storytelling as pedagogy, Eck states, “A variety of educational researchers offer learning theories that support storytelling from a number of perspectives, including brain-based learning theories, experiential learning theories, reflective learning theories and transformational learning theories… . Furthermore, neuroscience research reports that the human brain is naturally wired to receive and remember every human experience within the structure of a story” (Eck & Lee, 2006, pp. 2–3). In this book, we use many stories (some humorous) to role-model for you the myriad elements of a SAR and reveal our own SAR Lived Experience. We use a variety of learning modalities to engage different types of adult learners, as you will also need to do. We bring you inside our SAR doors and let you peek behind the curtain of how our SARs got made. We recount the history of SARs and how others manage theirs. We share our tips and recommendations as we go along. Then we show you, step by step, how to make a SAR flourish for you. We hope you enjoy this book!

What Is a SAR?

SAR is the essential experiential training that challenges sexual values, attitudes, and beliefs. As a real-life couple and SAR co-leaders, we have provided SAR programs for the past nine years to over 900 individuals in seven different countries. SAR, considered to be the sensitivity training of the field of sexology, has never failed to move us personally for its power to expand lives. Our programs have been populated over the years with diverse and passionate speakers, including some of the most famous names in sex history: Adult film star Nina Hartley is one example, as is Xaviera Hollander, the most famous madame of the world’s oldest profession and author of over 25 books on sexuality. All of our speakers share from their Lived Experience as a pathway to promote greater understanding of their sexual evolution and sometimes their role in sexual revolution. We always curate a melee of mixed media from films, television shows, and downloads from the Internet. Often we delight in showing the newest of our treasured finds from our international travels to the darkest corners of sexual entertainment. Most of all we have been impressed by the presence of the most courageous, open-minded, heart-centered, and hungry SAR participants, who are eagerly seeking to explore the landscape of human sexuality, and, ultimately, themselves as emerging sexual humans.

Our speakers have ranged from trans persons of unique origins as MTF, FTM, Gender Queer, and in between, with shared visions for their proclaiming their authentic sexual selves; to black leather-clad BDSM masters wielding a cat o’ nine tails or sparking electric knives; to garden-variety, plain-looking, free-love-seeking, polyamorous lifestylers. We have had the privilege of hosting SAR programs in some of the most beautiful cities of the world, such as Prague, with its world class Sex Machine Museum, as well as in some of the most historically conservative cultural venues, such as in Poland. There we have led SAR programs for the past four years to crowds of practitioners and therapists yearning for a more positive approach to viewing the human sexual experience. Our SAR programs have spanned some of the most liberal sites for optimal sexual expression (think Berlin), where even our own mental constructs of eroticism have shifted, thanks to our experience of alternative sexual-cultural norms or demonstrations of fresh formats for kink/fetish play.

Our programs have served people from all aspects of the field of sexology and other helping professions, including physicians, nurses, sex workers, therapists, counselors, shamanic healers, tantric educators, sexologists, and more. We even have had a few real-life couples join our SARs just to expand their erotic possibilities for personal exploration. Our joy has been elevated as we host these events, in setting up a safe container that promotes a personal and professional transformative experience for our participants—one that lasts a lifetime. We have never been disappointed by what SAR can bring to the lives of our participants, whether it’s a first-timer consensually being flogged; a therian (more about that later, we promise) wearing her full wolf costume and prancing with furry paws, tail, and ears; or a field trip to an Amsterdam sex shop with demonstrations of rope suspension of naked women in bondage that fill the viewer with compassion, shock, and awe. You are about to enter the world of SAR, so buckle up and prepare to be a change agent as you change yourself.

Defining a SAR

SAR is defined as a training event for professionals seeking credentials or just learning about themselves or the field of sexology. SAR consists of material and experiences that push the adult learner to confront his or her values, attitudes, and beliefs (VABs) about a wide range of issues within the broad field of human sexuality. We like to look at this process as getting to know who you are—what you believe, feel, and think—and then enticing you to explore the vast world of human sexual expression.

SAR is a requirement for certification at the esteemed American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT, 2016), the premier credentialing organization in sexology in the United States and internationally. AASECT also serves as a model for other organizations worldwide in establishing best practice criteria. At our own online training organizations, Sex Coach University and Sexology University, SAR is also a requirement prior to earning certification after a rigorous, extensive training of over 200 hours is completed as a sex coach.

SAR is regarded as the sensitivity training for the broad, overarching field or discipline of sexology: the study of human sexual behavior and its impact on self, others, and the environment. Reverend Dr. Ted, founder of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (IASHS), an approved graduate education provider in the state of California since 1976, offers that sexology is “What people do sexually and how they think and feel about it” (McIlvenna, 1989). As fellow Academic Deans and graduates of this institute, we believe that this notion of sexology is a theme that also informs SAR itself.

On our websites (SAR, 2016), we define SAR as follows:

Sexual Attitude Reassessment and Restructuring or SAR is a highly provocative, experiential, cognitive and affective experience, which is designed to push comfort levels, elicit feelings and confront attitudes, beliefs and values about sexuality. Presentations encompass media, (including contemporary film, television and art), along with presentations and panels of live speakers/demonstrations showing the potential range of human sexual expression today. Topics will be revealed at the course itself; the element of surprise and the psychological state of non-expectation form part of the basis for this course. [No nudity or touch is ever required of participants.]

Small group process drives the understanding and impact of the elements of the presentations in this course. SAR is not a clinical training in sex therapy nor is it traditional sex education; rather, it enables the participant to move emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and psychologically into a zone of greater knowing, acceptance, and tolerance of human sexuality in all of its possible dimensions.

This SAR fulfills the 10-hour requirement toward AASECT Certification and earns 16 CEUs. Dr. Britton is a national AASECT-approved provider of CEU.

SAR Significance Today: Trends and the Crying Need

Do you know the terms non-vanilla, CNM, hetero-normative, sexually inclusive, erotic intelligence, and cross-culturally aware? If not, then this book is for you. As we view the world and witness trends, we recognize that there are several shifts taking place. We all feel a threat from the effects of terrorism, or uncertainty in the economic markets, or a sense that things are changing all around us and we’ll never keep up. The same holds true in the broad field of sexology; students and SAR participants exhibit angst about becoming competent at what they do to meet the burgeoning sexual needs of clients, students, or other audiences. A series of tidal waves affects us all: lack of ample training in sexuality among health care professionals; emerging tools of technology that could create virtual sex that replaces human skin contact; advancing brain studies and other scientific breakthroughs, like 3-D printing of human organs or functional extremities, including genitals; a wash of sexually explicit media that influences our creative minds; trends to live larger, with more sexual self-expression, in bigger, more global, online venues—juxtaposed with a movement toward tiny houses, which surely have an impact on sex. In some ways, our SAR programs reflect the escalation of extremes, with increasingly risky or intense depictions of sexual styles through images and behaviors shown on tiny glass screens in front of our eyes and seeping into our sensibilities every day. SAR is the foundational model to address the changes and expressions that exist in our world today. It also is the template for future sexual expression and a roadmap toward sexual liberation, if done well.

Porn for All

The contemporary world is filled with opportunities for viewing and consuming pornography. It is ubiquitous. In a recent Google search engine report, the term porn yielded 145 million results (Get the Latest Pornography Statistics, 2013). Even young children with Internet access, when proper parental filters are not in place, can view explicit sexual imagery if they have the deftness to get online and push the right keys on the family computer. Porn dependency, as we call it (rather than the more pejorative term of porn addiction), is a common complaint among sexless couples seeking sexual therapy or coaching. In our own clinical practice, we observe male clients who report that they simply cannot stop themselves from the solo practice of using pornography online to self-soothe, reduce anxiety, avoid intimacy, or express their erotic desires through this sexual outlet. “Various international studies have put porn consumption rates at 50 percent to 99 percent among men, and 30 percent to 86 percent among women, according to Gert Martin Hald, PhD, and colleagues” (2014).

Another source cites that 66% of young men and 16% of young women view porn online at least once a week (Weir, 2014). Those statistics are staggering when you consider that, as a counselor for these teens later in life, especially when they may find themselves sexually bankrupt in partnered relationships, you are going to need the comfort, sensitivity, and skills to direct them to more healthy, sexually affirming outlets for their libidos.

Despite the 24/7 availability of adult entertainment found in sexually explicit materials (online or in other forms, such as magazines, books, or DVDs), viewing an array of adult porn in a setting with a group of total strangers and noticing your own response is not the same as sitting at your own computer fantasizing about your erotic object of desire. SAR provides a unique experience that no other means does, as many of our SAR participants state in their SAR evaluations. One participant notes, “I had a totally different experience watching porn with my peers.”

Dearth of Professional Medical Training

Another phenomenon present today is the lack of training in human sexuality among key professionals serving the physical and mental health care needs of individuals. The reality is that medical school education is perilously underserving the needs of their students. “In … 2003, Solursh et al reported … most medical schools provide only 3–10 hours of instruction. Of 101 medical schools who responded to their survey, human sexuality was taught as a course in only 31 schools and was required by 26 of them” (Brewster & Wylie, 2008, p. 385; Sexual Medicine Society of North America, 2016). In a significant journal article about sexually explicit materials used in the UK for medical education, Brewster and Wylie (2008, p. 385) discuss inhibiting factors for medical professionals, including “lack of expertise, complexity and time constraints as well as reticence to address the subject” (see also Gott, Galena, Hinchliff, & Elford, 2004).

The data applies to obstetricians, gynecologists (GYNs), and urologists in training, all specialists in the sexual body parts and functions of their patients. Disappointingly, having been a Sexual Health Educator who trained 30 to 50 such GYN residents at Stanford Medical School in the late 1990s, Britton found that even then there were few programs that taught about the sexuality-related care that patients deserve. Aspects of gynecological discussions avoided asking about the quality of a patient’s sex life, sexual desire, or sexual function. Residents did not know how to administer a proper breast, pelvic, and bimanual exam of both the vagina and rectum, which Britton and others taught them by using themselves as real-life models. This type of program was crucial for learning how to address sex openly in the context of sexual health care; furthermore, in Britton’s experience in Stanford’s accolade-winning program, half of the GYN students were women and the majority of them had never had a pap smear test or a gynecological exam! Such is the sorry state of medical school comfort with explicit sexuality.

Mental Health Care Deficit

The late Jeanne Shaw, a luminary in sex therapy, talks about the therapist’s comfort zone and the maturation of the therapist him/herself by saying “Bowen (1974), and numerous others, reminds us that the most effective therapy is practiced by therapists who have explored their own issues … claimed their own projections, reinforced their own integrity and self-respect, and moved forward in their own living and personal development” (2012, p. 191).

In the state of California, a leader in the preparation and density of qualified psychotherapists and especially Marriage and Family Therapists (MFTs), the California Board of Behavioral Sciences (2016), the credentialing body that regulates this industry, requires a mere 10 hours total of education in Human Sexuality. In fact, as an Adjunct Faculty leading the California State Certificate Program (2007–2010) for what was the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: The Story of SAR
• Part Two: Designing Your SAR
• Part Three: Reflections: Looking Back, Looking Forward
• Index