COUN5225 gives counseling students a clinically grounded framework for addressing sexuality — a dimension of human experience that touches nearly every client population, yet one that many counselors enter the field underprepared to discuss directly. The course treats sexuality developmentally and systemically, situating individual sexual concerns within the broader context of relationships and family systems.
Psychosexual development, assessment, and treatment
Core topics
- Systemic psychosexual development: How sexuality develops and changes across the lifespan, understood through a systemic lens that accounts for relational and family context rather than viewing sexuality in isolation
- Functionality of sexual behavior: Evaluating sexual behavior in terms of its function for individuals, couples, and families — what purpose it serves and how it interacts with overall relational and psychological wellbeing
- Theory of sexuality and identity: The major theoretical frameworks counselors use to understand sexual identity and sexuality-related concerns in clinical practice
- Assessment of sexuality-related concerns: Approaches for assessing sexual concerns that clients bring into counseling, sensitive to the diversity of sexual experience and identity
- Treatments and interventions: Evidence-informed treatment approaches and interventions for addressing sexuality-related concerns within individual, couple, and family counseling
COUN5225 assignments include psychosexual development case analyses, theory application papers, and intervention plans
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Development case analyses, theory papers, intervention plans.
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Frequently asked questions
Sexual concerns rarely exist in isolation from a client's relationships — a sexual difficulty, a question of identity, or a conflict around intimacy typically plays out within a couple or family system, shaping and being shaped by that system's dynamics. COUN5225 adopts a systemic psychosexual development framework because a counselor who only assesses the individual misses how a partner's response, a family's beliefs, or relational patterns established earlier in development are actively contributing to the concern a client brings into the room. By teaching students to evaluate sexual behavior in terms of its function within these larger relational systems, the course prepares counselors to design interventions that address the actual maintaining context of a sexual or identity-related concern, rather than offering an individually focused intervention that fails to account for the relational forces sustaining the problem.