Sexual Attitude Reassessment · Capstone Exercise

Fifteen Years

One person, eight appointments, fifteen years. Every clinician in her history was competent, and none of them was the problem on their own.

Before you start

This is the longest exercise in the chapter and the only one that follows a single person from nineteen to thirty-four. Every written response in it is required, and the Continue button stays locked until you have written something substantive.

Set aside enough time to finish in one sitting. There is no way to save your place.

Estimated time to complete this exercise: 40 minutes

1The letter
2The years
3The ledger
4Again
5The session
6Close

Before you begin

How this one works

This is the longest exercise in the chapter and the only one that follows a single person. It is built to be difficult in a particular way, and the difficulty is not intellectual.
Every written response in this exercise is required. The Continue button stays locked until you have written something substantive, because the exercise does not work if it is read rather than answered.
Nothing you type leaves your browser. There is no submission, reloading discards everything, and you can copy your own responses at the end.
Mara is a composite rather than a real client. Every encounter in her history is drawn from the cases in this chapter, which means she has met each of the clinicians you have already read about.

Set aside enough time to finish in one sitting. There is no way to save, and stopping halfway through somebody’s life is a poor way to spend the first half of it.

References

  1. Brotto, L. A., & Yule, M. (2017). Asexuality: Sexual orientation, paraphilia, sexual dysfunction, or none of the above? Archives of Sexual Behavior, 46(3), 619–627. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-016-0802-7
  2. Cassidy, T., & Wong, G. (2018). Consensually nonmonogamous clients and the impact of mononormativity in therapy. Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy, 52(2), 119–139. https://cjc-rcc.ucalgary.ca/article/view/61124
  3. Eubanks, C. F., Muran, J. C., & Safran, J. D. (2018). Alliance rupture repair: A meta-analysis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 508–519. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000185
  4. Nixon, B., & Quinlan, E. (2022). Asking the hard questions: Psychologists’ discomfort with inquiring about sexual abuse histories. Violence Against Women, 28(5), 1358–1376. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012211014558
  5. van Anders, S. M., Herbenick, D., Brotto, L. A., Harris, E. A., & Chadwick, S. B. (2022). The heteronormativity theory of low sexual desire in women partnered with men. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 51(1), 391–415. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02100-x