SIT and the Multicultural Movement
On Friday, November 6th, I’ll be heading up to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, for the Christian Association for Psychological Studies East Region Conference. The conference theme is actually on marriage and family, but I will be giving a presentation with two team members from the Institute for the Study of Sexual Identity (ISSI) on the topic of multicultural competence and clinical practice with sexual minorities. The multicultural movement has emerged as a significant reference point for working with diversity issues in clinical practice, and the services that are provided to sexual minorities are also included in that discussion.
The presentation we will be giving will offer Sexual Identity Therapy (SIT) as an alternative to the often-polarized therapy options under consideration with religious sexual minorities: gay affirmative therapy and reorientation therapy. We will note the inherent limitations in both of these models and offer a third option, SIT. The presentation will then explore (and briefly critique) the multicultural movement and its approach to sexual minorities, as well as the place of SIT as a client-centered, identity-focused approach that is consistent with what is best about the multicultural movement as applied to multiple aspects of diversity, as is often found when working with religious sexual minorities.
An Introduction to SIT in Virginia Beach
The student chapter of Chi Sigma Iota in the School of Psychology and Counseling at Regent University has asked me to give a presentation, and I am going to speak on Sexual Identity Therapy (SIT). The presentation is Friday, October 30th, from noon to 1pm on the Regent University campus (CRB 227) for those in the area.
What I’ll be saying by way of introduction is that SIT is an approach to sexual identity in counseling that is a “third way” model that is an alternative to the often-polarized models of gay affirmative therapy and reorientation therapy. Also, the SIT Framework is itself an approach that fills a void identified by the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) task force on appropriate therapeutic responses to sexual orientation. That is, in their recently released background document the task force encouraged alternative models that were affirmative but not gay affirmative. Affirmative models would be client-centered and identity-focused; they would also emphasize social support and coping skills. The SIT Framework was identified as one such appropriate approach, as was the narrative sexual identity therapy model that I previously published in American Journal of Family Therapy.
For this initial presentation, rather than go into narrative sexual identity therapy, I will just review the four main concepts in how I provide SIT: (1) the three-tier distinction (between same-sex attraction, homosexual orientation, and gay identity), (2) weighted aspects of identity, (3) ‘attributional search’ for identity, and (4) congruence.
