Annual Symposium in Los Angeles, California on September 25-26, 2026

This presentation takes a real look at how erotic injury gets misunderstood in clinical spaces that are shaped by bias, moral narratives, and limited ideas about sexuality. Instead of automatically framing sexual behavior as pathology, we’ll slow things down and ask what these patterns were actually doing for the person. How they formed, what they protected, and why they make sense in context.

We’ll explore erotic injury as a kind of misattunement between the body, the self, and relational experiences over time. Not something broken, but something shaped. We’ll also look at how clinicians, often unintentionally, bring in assumptions about what is “healthy,” “normal,” or “too much,” and how that can lead to mislabeling, increased shame, and treatment that misses the mark.

There will be a focus on compulsive sexual behavior, especially how often it’s interpreted without enough curiosity about function, meaning, or adaptation. We’ll work through how to tell the difference between dysregulation and adaptation, and how treatment can sometimes reinforce pathology instead of supporting integration.

This is really about shifting from correction to presence. Learning how to sit with the erotic self without rushing to define or contain it. Themes will include the limits of diagnostic frameworks, the impact of moral incongruence, and the ways culture and systems shape how we understand sexuality in treatment.
The goal is to expand how we think, soften where we’ve become rigid, and build a more nuanced, human approach to this work. One that can hold complexity, tolerate ambiguity, and actually meet people where they are, especially in the parts of themselves they’ve been taught to hide.

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Educational Learning Objectives:

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1. Identify at least three ways clinical bias can influence the interpretation and treatment of erotic injury in therapeutic settings.

2.  Differentiate between erotic injury as an adaptive response and as a pathologized clinical presentation using case-based examples.

3. Apply at least two sex-positive, trauma-informed interventions that support working with erotic material without reinforcing shame or bias in treatment.