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Sex, God, and the Conservative Church: Erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
Sex, God, and the Conservative Church guides psychotherapy and sexology clinicians on how to treat clients who grew up in a conservative faith—mired in sexual shame and dysfunction—and who desire to both heal and hold on to their faith orientation. The author first walks clinicians and readers through a critique of Western culture and the conservative Christian Church, and their effects on intimate partnerships and sexual lives. The book provides clinicians a way to understand the faulty sexual ethic of the early church, while revealing the hidden mystical sex and body positive understanding of sexuality of the Hebrew people. The book also includes chapters on strategies for a new sexual ethic, on clinical steps to heal religious sexual shame, and on specific sex therapy interventions clinicians can use directly in their practice. Finally, it offers a four step model for healing religious sexual shame and actual touch and non-touch exercises to bring healing and intimacy into a person's life.
- ISBN-13978-1138674974
- Edition1st
- PublisherRoutledge
- Publication dateApril 21, 2017
- LanguageEnglish
- File size2268 KB
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- Shameless Parenting: Everything You Need to Raise Shame-free, Confident Kids and Heal Your Shame Too!Dr. Tina Schermer SellersKindle Edition
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers’ provocative book addresses the sex-negative doctrine in the conservative Christian church that instills in many people deep shame about their body and discomfort with the opposite sex, making them ill-prepared for marriage. Showing how notions of Christianity and sexuality are complementary, Dr. Sellers offers both therapist and lay reader examples of working with clients to heal the soul-body split, reduce shame, and deepen a couple’s loving connection.”―Stella Resnick, PhD, author, The Heart of Desire: Keys to the Pleasures of Love; couples and sex therapist, private practice, Beverly Hills, CA
“This book is powerful medicine for anyone who has ever suffered religious shame about sex. You will find compassion for your dilemmas of conscience, wisdom regarding the teachings of the church, and best of all―explicit practices for opening your mind, nurturing your heart, touching your body, and celebrating the spirit of all that is truly erotic.”―Gina Ogden, PhD, LMFT, author, Expanding the Practice of Sex Therapy and other books
"Masterfully integrating psychology and theology, Sellers gives us a groundbreaking, razor-sharp view into conservative Christian culture and its shame-inducing sexual ethic. As a psychologist, I am impressed by the precision, validity and robustness of her research. As a theologian, I am grateful for the Christian sexual ethic―rooted in justice, mutuality, and an infinitely relational God―that she introduces. As a millennial who grew up in the conservative Christian purity culture that Sellers describes, the practices in this book lit my pathway to greater freedom from shame and more authentic connection to God, myself, and others. I hope therapists and Christian leaders― pastors, parents, and youth workers―will read this insightful book with an open mind."―Christena Cleveland, PhD, Duke Divinity School
“This is an enlightening, well-written, and clinically useful book on the problems and potential of conservative Christianity for clients dealing with sexual problems. Tina Sellers is uniquely positioned to make this unique contribution to therapy for a population often misunderstood by clinicians. Whether you’re new to the field or highly experienced, I promise you'll learn a lot.”―William J. Doherty, PhD, professor, director, Minnesota Couples on the Brink Project, University of Minnesota; author, Take Back Your Marriage.
“Most clinical programs―whether they are based in psychology or marriage and family therapy, social work or medicine, pastoral counseling, or any number of other fields in the “helping professions”―do not adequately prepare trainees to work with individuals or couples who have been indoctrinated with Church-driven messages of sexual guilt and shame. As a therapist and educator, I have struggled to find resources that help guide clients on a path in healing and growth―and to do this in a way that simultaneously embraces their sexuality(ies) and religious/spiritual faith. The wisdom and counsel that Dr. Tina Sellers offers in this book should be in every training curriculum, on every providers’ bookshelf, and in every couple’s home.”--Tai J. Mendenhall, PhD, LMFT, Couple and Family Therapy Program, The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
"This book is a practical and yet deeply theological path towards healing for those wounded by a shame-based purity culture. Dr. Schermer Sellers researched and written a roadmap towards a sex-positive Gospel ethic of intimacy. I will be recommending it to pastors and counsellors and teachers everywhere.”―Sarah Bessey, author; Jesus Feminist and Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith
About the Author
Tina Schermer Sellers, PhD, is a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified sex therapist, as well as a professor of sexuality and medical family therapy in the graduate Family Therapy Department at Seattle Pacific University.
Product details
- ASIN : B07252M2H2
- Publisher : Routledge; 1st edition (April 21, 2017)
- Publication date : April 21, 2017
- Language : English
- File size : 2268 KB
- Simultaneous device usage : Up to 4 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 202 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #311,028 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers is a sex and gender feminist psychotherapist, professor emerita, and author of two best selling books Shameless Parenting - Everything You Need to Raise Shame-Free, Confident Kids & Heal Your Shame Too! and Sex, God and the Conservative Church – Erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy. She is a preeminent voice on the impact of sexual shame on sexual health and attachment. In her latest book, Shameless Sex – Everything You Need to Raise Shame-free, Confident Kids, and Heal Your Shame Too!, Dr. Sellers highlights the trickiest parts of each stage of parenting (birth to 18) that tend to trigger shame-based reactivity. It is the hardest part of parenting. It is from our own places of shame that we over-react, repeating patterns from our parent’s that we might otherwise have resisted. This is the book parents have been waiting for. Dr. Tina is also the founder and medical director of the Northwest Institute on Intimacy which provides training and supervision for therapists, medical providers and clergy in sexual health and confronting sexual bias. Frequently featured on podcasts, TV, documentaries, articles and radio, including Spirituality & Health magazine, Tina travels the country as a keynote speaker for organizations, parents and professionals helping them become competent teaching shame-free relational and sexual health. She can be reached at TinaSchermerSellers.com, and followed on Instagram @DrTinaShameless.
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The author clearly describes useful formulas for creating a “sex-positive” gospel meant to transform the damage that survives to this day from centuries of the all-too-prevalent “sex-negative” gospel. The decrees of early Christian leaders, warnings that amounted to sex is dirty and sinful and the road to ruin, have afflicted multitudes too long and in too many ways.
The therapist/author asks (and answers) such questions as:
“How has Christianity contributed to our culture’s ignorance about eros, sacred sexuality, and the human body?”
“How can people heal from years of religious sexual shame and faulty teaching, while still respecting their faith traditions?”
“What are actual, intimate sexual practices that couples can share that will build a sex life that is wholly integrated into their spirituality?”
Her insights on the history of the early church’s sex-negative messages, based on renouncing the flesh, were enlightening. She analyses the dualism of ancient philosophers in Plato’s era, the belief that the human spirit is separate from the body, as well as the false narrative that the human spirit is superior to the inferior human body.
The Apostle Paul and St. Augustine added their own distrust and suspicion of the body’s profane nature, which fueled an atmosphere of silence and shame resulting in sexual condemnation, unprecedented ignorance, profound levels of sexual dysfunction, and pervasive sexual illiteracy.
How sad that millions of people have experienced so much sorrow and suffering over the centuries, the very opposite of Jesus’ ministry of compassion, love and justice!
I appreciated how the author did not shy away from Eros, the idea that God gifted the world with the vital energy that animates every living thing. Rather than the tawdry meaning we tend to assign to Eros today, as being “pornographic,” Eros instead moves us out of our solitude toward closeness and union with others and brings forth “our passions, our deepest hopes and desires, and our creativity to experience the fullness of life.”
That’s good news. The truths that God created humans as erotic beings with sexual desires and designed us to experience pleasure should be shouted from the rooftops. We’re meant to be erotic.
The author also addresses the pop culture’s and secular media’s distortions that “the best sex is wild, spontaneous, risky, free, and unattached.” She asks, pointedly, “How can a couple cultivate a sexual relationship that is intimate, erotic, relationally nourishing, rooted in God’s love and mutuality, and bubbling over with pleasure and connection, when the highest virtue is either the church’s call toward sexual suffocation or the culture’s call to unrealistic, untrained sexual abandon?”
That’s the bind that traps many and which many frequently struggle to transcend.
To wrap up, A) has Tina Schermer Sellers demonstrated clear evidence that it’s time to erase religious sexual shame from sexual intimacy? And B), has she provided ample ways and useful therapeutic models of behavior and fresh attitudes for us to become the lovers God intended us to be? My answer, “Yes” to both!
When I picked up this book I wasn't sure what to expect, but I hadn't expected something that would finally answer many of the questions I have had all these years. I didn't expect to feel empowered and even more thankful to God for such a beautiful gift. If you're looking for answers without judgment and would like to learn some amazing history of how we reached the purity movement to begin with, then I highly recommend you read this book. It is just that good! Thank you Dr. Tina for writing this timely and important book!