Description: by Sharon Lamb

Praise for Sex, Therapy, and Kids:

"[T]his book is a candle in the darkness of a very neglected area." —PsycCRITIQUES

“This is a wonderful book—an open and refreshing guide for therapists about how to work with children and families around issues of sexuality. Sharon Lamb presents a positive and integrative view of healthy and normative sexual development while exploring issues of sexual play, sexual abuse, and sexual confusion. Her respectful and lucid account of practical ways to work with sexual issues provides an inviting and reassuring guide that will shift the thinking of mental health professionals struggling with how to help children and teens in this important area of development.”

– Rachel T. Hare-Mustin, Ph.D., co-author of Making A Difference: Psychology and the Construction of Gender

“This is a rich and rare book that will one day be considered a classic text on the therapeutic process of addressing the sexual concerns of children and adolescents. Every practitioner who has ever been unsure about how to respond to the questions, vulnerabilities, and traumas of children and adolescents regarding sex will discover that Sex, Therapy, and Kids is an invaluable addition to their personal libraries.”

– Mark S. Kiselica, Ph.D., HSPP, NCC, LPC, Professor of Counselor Education at The College of New Jersey, Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and co-editor of Handbook of Counseling Boys and Adolescent Males

Overview –

A responsible, realistic, and sex-positive to sexuality in youth. In Sex, Therapy, and Kids, Lamb demonstrates how to be sex-positive in a way that’s responsive to the developmental stage of the child or teen and thus promotes honest conversations and successful therapy. Over the course of the book, she guides therapists through such core issues as recognizing and responding to the sexual play of children who have not been abused, distinguishing sexual abuse from normal play, understanding common worries of adolescent boys and girls, and helping gay and lesbian youth who are grappling with their sexual identity. There are also chapters on working with youth who have been abused, helping developmentally delayed teens, and collaborating with parents and families around the themes of sexuality and sexual behavior.

From Sex, Therapy, and Kids

Because I have been trained in humanistic, existential, psychoanalytic, family systems, and cognitive-behavioral strategies, my work represents a combination of these modalities. But an underlying focus of mine when working with children and adolescents is attending to the affect and affective sense surrounding a topic or play activity. This is particularly useful when working with sexual material in that sexual material in therapy can be overstimulating. . . . It is good to train oneself to observe this affective sense underlying talk or play, because if such overstimulating play is happening in the therapy session, you can bet it’s happening outside the room. Therapy is the place in which these emotions, even bodily feelings, can be experienced in the safe presence of another who will protect and allow the time and space to process them and get some reflective distance.

But how do therapists make stimulating material unstimulating to the child without simply pushing the child to leave the material alone and move on to more pleasant things, more manageable topics and emotions? This is crucial to my approach. Therapists can model a neutral, distanced reflective process with their clients that allows them to stay with the material. And therapists can help clients to distance themselves from it in order to talk about it and continue playing in a way that is productive. . . . [O]ver time it is good to develop a sense of what question will bring teens or children to a place where they can recover a therapeutic attitude toward these events and acts I’ve called approach displacement, but it means very literally displacing one’s feelings from one’s mind and body into the play.

Contents –

Preface

Introduction: Knowing What’s Normative

1. General Principles and Guidelines

2. Sexual Issues in Play with Nonabused Children

3. Working With Children Who Have Been Abused

4. Acting-Out and Sexually Abusive Children

5. Teenage Girls in Therapy

6. Teenage Boys in Therapy

7. Working with Parents of Teens

8. Coming Out During the Teen Years

9. Working With Developmentally Disabled Teens 10. Sexual and Moral Feelings in the Therapy Hour

About the Author –

Sharon Lamb, Ed.D., is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Shelburne, Vermont, and is Professor of Psychology at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. Her most recent books are The Secret Lives of Girls and Packaging Girlhood: Saving Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes.

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