Sexual Contextualism: Looking at sexuality through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

What’s in your sexual gumbo?

I’ve explored a LOT of different therapeutic lenses over the years, wanting to support myself and my clients struggling with sexuality. No lens has landed as profoundly and beautifully as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). This work doesn’t look at sexual struggles as a cluster of symptoms or pathology. It’s not here to judge what sex acts you do or don’t enjoy. ACT’s focus is on the fuller context of your suffering, rather than specific sex acts and practices, which gives it a solid home within progressive and sex positive clinical theory.

ACT is an action-based approach to sex therapy, getting clear on what really matters to you and moving in that direction. It teaches you how to hold hard thoughts and feelings more gently, while also engaging in behaviors that actually serve your deeper goals. Working with ACT, we traverse the good, bad, and ugly of our sexual histories, pivoting towards living out our own vision of sexual health and pleasure. Feeling sexually satisfied just as we are.

Sexual Emergence

Sexual emergence is a transition into a new felt sense of sexuality. It’s an awareness of some new aspect of our sexuality which results in a shift in our sexual self concept (who we think we are sexually).

I pulled the words sexual emergence from science and psychological research on how the change process happens.The word emergence comes from the Latin root word: emergere, or to "rise up", and is defined as “the fact of something becoming known or starting to exist”. It’s both an awakening and a noticing of this awakening.

Physicist Nate Barksdale defines a physical emergence as “the distinct patterns and behaviors that can arise out of complex systems”. If we look at our sexuality through this lens, sexual emergence could be seen as: the onset(s) of distinct sexual patterns and behaviors that can arise out of our unique and complex sexual systems. It’s a new understanding of your sexuality coming up through you and into your awareness. 

Context matters. -Steven C. Hayes

An understanding of “why” we do and feel things, our context, allows us to meet the needs beneath our feelings and behaviors. Our beliefs about who we are sexually (and what we think we need) come from our own unique historical context, or as I call it, our gumbo of sexual development. Creating the room needed for better choice making and moving towards sexual health is about unhooking from the unhelpful parts of our gumbo and moving towards cultivating what matters about our sexuality now.