Re-Imagining Intimacy Queer-Affirming, Trauma-Informed Approaches to Sexuality and Pleasure

Title of Event: Re-Imagining Intimacy - Queer-Affirming, Trauma-Informed Approaches to Sexuality and Pleasure

Description of Event:

This experiential and clinically grounded training invites clinicians to re-imagine intimacy, sexuality, and pleasure through queer, kink-affirming, trauma-informed, and decolonial lenses. Drawing from sex therapy, queer theory, somatic awareness, and community-based knowledge, this workshop challenges genital-centric, heteronormative, and performance-driven narratives of sex. Participants will explore how colonialism, gender norms, sexual stigma, and trauma shape clients’ relationships to their bodies, desire, and erotic expression.

Through case examples, reflective exercises, and practical tools, clinicians will learn how kink, consent practices, and pleasure-centered frameworks can support healing, agency, and intimacy, particularly for queer, trans, neurodivergent, and marginalized clients. Emphasis is placed on moving from survival-based sexual narratives toward embodied curiosity, choice, and pleasure, while maintaining ethical, trauma-informed clinical care. This training supports clinicians in expanding their conceptualization of intimacy and integrating affirming, pleasure-positive interventions into therapeutic practice.

Learning Objectives:
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

-Identify the impact of cultural, historical, and systemic factors such as colonialism, heteronormativity, and sexual stigma on clients’ experiences of intimacy, sexuality, and pleasure.
-Describe trauma-informed and consent-based clinical frameworks that support agency, safety, and embodied awareness in work with queer, trans, and gender-diverse clients.
-Apply pleasure-centered and kink-affirming clinical tools, including consent negotiation strategies and de-centering orgasm-based outcomes, to support clients’ sexual well-being and relational goals within ethical clinical boundaries.

Date of Event: 3/25/26

Time of Event: 12-1:30 PM (EST)

Location: Online Synchronous (zoom)

Presenter/Speaker: Nikita Fernandes, LMHC

Contact Name: Alisa Zarrin

Contact Telephone Number: (929) 612-3962

Contact Email: azarrin@ackerman.org

Event Website: https://www.ackerman.org/events/re-imagining-intimacy/?

AASECT Approved CEs: 1.5