SIT and Pastoral Care II
Next week I will be travelling to Asbury College and Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, for a series of talks. At Asbury I’ll be giving chapel addresses, meeting with Student Development staff, and participating in various panel discussions and coffee shop discussions.
The time as Asbury Theological Seminary will focus on pastoral care and applications of the three-tier distinction between same-sex attractions, homosexual orientation, and gay identity and how that distinction can be a helpful reference point in Sexual Identity Therapy. I will also contrast an emphasis on orientation with an emphasis on sexual identity, look at the potential benefits and drawbacks, as well as the importance of achieving personal congruence through pastoral care.
Applications of SIT to Pastoral Care
This past year I have had the opportunity to speak to several seminary students, and I have another similar talk coming up. For the most recent talk, I had been asked to provide two lectures. One was on the etiology of sexual orientation; the other lecture was on whether orientation can change. At the end of the second lecture, I introduced the Sexual Identity Therapy (SIT) approach to working with people in my clinical practice, and I was reflecting with them on how it might be adapted for pastoral care.
I assume that pastoral care is different than professional counseling in any number of ways, but one way would likely be that there is more direction, more of a sense of a normative endpoint or something toward which the person is to move. I don’t know if all pastoral care providers function in this way, but it is an assumption I have about the nature of pastoral care.
In any case, this reminded me of the difference between telic congruence and organismic congruence as defined in the APA Task Force background document on appropriate therapeutic responses to sexual orientation. Recall that telic congruence has to do with who the person wants to become and aligning one’s choices with that, while organismic congruence has to do with aligning one’s choices with who one experiences oneself to be.
It would seem to me that most pastoral care would rely more on telic congruence and have some say in what that congruence ought to look like. In contrast, much of mental health care has probably been based more on a sense of organismic congruence, but some clinicians may recognize the difference and may work with people who are interested in either type of congruence outcome.
An implication, then, might be that pastoral care ends up adapting SIT by not having as much of an open-ended quality to the various ways in which congruence might be experienced. Again, I don’t know that this is the case, but I would be interested in how pastoral care providers approach their work and consider these different ways of understanding congruence. It would seem to impact how sexual identity and religious identity conflicts are navigated.
SIT Framework and Working with Mixed Orientation Couples
I (Mark) will be presenting the SIT Framework at the American Association of Christian Counselor’s (AACC) World Conference in Nashville on Friday, September 18th. The title of the talk is “Working with Mixed Sexual Orientation Couples.” Mixed orientation couples are couples in which one partner experiences same-sex attraction and the other does not. This presentation is a conceptual paper based on our review of the literature (I am co-presenting with Jill Kays, a doctoral student in clinical psychology whose dissertation deals with this subject) and a previous five-year longitudinal study of ‘resilient couples,’ or couples in mixed orientation marriages who stayed together and reported marital satisfaction.
Sexual Identity Therapy (SIT) represents one stage in our four-stage approach to working with mixed orientation couples. In this context, SIT is provided to the sexual minority who is making decisions about his or her identity and behavior, as well as the unique considerations in that type of relationship. Other stages address the important relational considerations, such as dealing with disclosure or discovery and, for those couples who are interested in the relationship, clinicians can follow recommendations for improving the marriage.
The conference location is the Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville. The session is scheduled for 8:45-10:00am on Friday morning. I will post some of the PowerPoint slides on the site after the workshop.SIS
