Love is Not a Pie: Helping Clients Navigating Consensual Nonmonogamy

CLIENTS WHO ENGAGE IN CONSENSUAL NONMONOGAMY are often exposed to bias, prejudice, and harm when working with mental health and healthcare professionals. The choice to pursue consensual nonmonogamy is frequently pathologized by professionals, or judged as unworkable, exposing clients to misleading information. Books like Jessica Fern’s Polysecure, Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity, and Molly Roden Winter’s More, among others, have opened up a culture-wide discussion about creative, adaptive possibilities for intimate relationships. In spite of this broader cultural awareness, many therapists report they have had little exposure to strengths-based, affirming frameworks for working with the challenges that come with this terrain.

All relationships present opportunities for imagination, creative adaptation, and mindful improvisation. This in person, scenario-driven workshop draws on contemporary neuroscience and attachment research, as well as the collective practice wisdom of participants, to improve therapists’ confidence and competence when working with clients in consensually nonmonogamous arrangements. Building on existing models of emotionally focused family therapy, the workshop focuses on maximizing the satisfactions of multiple attachments while also becoming more attuned to threats implicit in these arrangements and strategies clients can use to avoid or neutralize them.

OBJECTIVES

By the end of this in-person workshop, participants will be able to

1. Explain the damaging impacts of shame, especially mononormativity and cultural prejudice, on this client group, both individually and interpersonally;
2. Apply neuroscience and attachment research, especially information about the autonomic nervous system and human threat response, to the challenges clients in these relationships face;
3. Articulate interpersonal strategies to enhance safety and connection and to mitigate threat;
4. Explore their own biases and other effects of their cultural training and socialization and how these can interfere with ethical, clinically sound treatment; and
5. Embrace personal and cultural humility as a clinical strategy to center client voices, needs, and experiences.

SIX CONTINUING EDUCATION UNITS through the National Association of Social Workers.

BIPOC REPARATIONS DISCOUNT: If you identify as a BIPOC, you are entitled to a 25% discount.

MILITARY DISCOUNT: If you served in the military, either currently or in the past, or you are a military spouse, there is a 25% discount.

GRADUATE STUDENT DISCOUNT: If you are currently in graduate school in a clinical discipline and wish to register, there is a 25% discount.

Contact the EVENT ORGANIZER at the bottom of the page for discount codes.

Host or Publisher Wayne Scott, MA, LCSW