Intimacy Over Time: Navigating Sexuality Across the Lifespan with EFT

Date: November 7-8, 2025 | Time: 9am - 5pm MST both days, Arizona time (MST)

Location: Franciscan Renewal Center

Certificate of Attendance: 14 hours (7 hours of instruction per day; 1-hour lunch not included)

**CE certificates are available for purchase if a free certificate of attendance is not sufficient (psychologists and out-of-town participants may be interested in this option).

ABOUT THE TRAINING

Description:

Join us for an engaging and transformative workshop with Dr. Laurie Watson, a nationally recognized sex therapist, author, and expert in integrating sexuality and attachment science. This training is designed for marriage therapists looking to deepen their understanding of how sexual dynamics evolve across the lifespan and how Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) can help couples navigate these changes.

Dr. Watson will guide participants through the intersection of emotional and sexual intimacy, offering practical tools to address common challenges in sexual connection while strengthening secure bonds between partners. Whether addressing the passion of newlyweds, the complexities of midlife, or the shifts in later years, this workshop provides a comprehensive framework to help couples rediscover desire and intimacy at every stage of life.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from a leading expert and enhance your clinical skills in fostering emotional and sexual connection!

Learning Objectives:

1. Three key couple developmental crises and their impact on sexual attachment

• Transition to Parenthood – Shifts in roles, fatigue, and child-centered focus can reduce erotic connection; often one partner feels rejected or abandoned, which strains secure sexual attachment.
• Midlife / Aging Changes – Bodily changes (e.g., menopause, erectile changes) may threaten confidence and desirability, leading to withdrawal or overcompensation in sexual pursuit.
• Illness / Trauma / Loss – Chronic illness, grief, or trauma often disrupts sexual intimacy, and partners may interpret decreased desire or function as rejection, heightening insecure attachment responses.

2. Differentiating between low libido and lower libido

• Low libido – A clinical or enduring pattern of reduced sexual desire, potentially across contexts, not just in the couple dynamic.
• Lower libido – A relative difference between partners’ levels of desire; one partner desires sex less frequently than the other.
• Gender nuances –- Male-bodied: Lower libido often carries stigma against cultural expectations; can trigger shame.- Female-bodied: Low or lower libido is more socially normalized but can still lead to feelings of defectiveness or pressure.

3. Key assumptions of attachment theory applied to adult sexuality

• Sexuality is not separate from attachment—it is one of the key ways adults seek closeness, reassurance, and security.
• Secure attachment supports openness, curiosity, playfulness, and emotional attunement in sex.
• Insecurity (anxiety or avoidance) shapes sexual motives: anxious partners may seek sex to confirm worth/connection, avoidant partners may detach to protect from vulnerability.

4. Two examples each of hypoactive and hyperactive insecure strategies in the negative sexual cycle

• Hypoactive strategies (withdrawal/avoidance):- Avoiding sexual initiation out of fear of rejection.- Minimizing or numbing sexual needs to avoid conflict.
• Hyperactive strategies (pursuit/anxiety):- Pressuring or demanding sex as proof of love.- Interpreting any sexual decline as abandonment, escalating protest.

5. Using specificity in describing sexual encounters to deepen emotional experience

• Ask for detailed, moment-by-moment accounts of what happens in a sexual encounter (e.g., “When you turned away, what did you feel in your body?”).
• Assemble: Gather concrete details about touch, initiation, pacing, responses.
• Deepen: Explore underlying emotions tied to those behaviors.
• Distill: Name the core longings (e.g., “I want to feel chosen”).
• Share: Facilitate partners voicing these distilled needs to each other.

6. Typical sexual response sequences

• Male-bodied people: Desire → arousal (erection) → plateau → orgasm → resolution (with refractory period).
• Female-bodied people: More variable; may begin with arousal before desire (responsive desire), with multiple peaks possible; resolution does not necessarily require orgasm.

7. One possible block to therapist comfort in processing sexual content

• Therapist’s own unexamined beliefs, values, or sexual history (e.g., discomfort with direct language about sexual acts, internalized cultural/religious shame).

8. Strategy to deal with sexual flashback to increase safety

• Grounding and pacing interventions: help the triggered partner pause, orient to the present (e.g., naming surroundings, feeling feet on the ground), and create pre-agreed signals so that the sexual encounter can stop safely and be renegotiated without shame.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Laurie Watson, LMFT, has her PhD in Sexology, is an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist and is further certified in and a supervisor for Couples Emotionally Focused Therapy. She has focused for 24 years exclusively on couples and sexual problems in her clinical work.

As an educator, she has taught sexual attachment to therapists world-wide and for physicians at Duke and UNC Chapel Hill’s medical schools. She’s an expert advisor for many NC Ob/GYN and Urological practices in her home state. She owns and directs Awakenings Center for Couples and Sex Therapy in NC and oversees over 38 clinicians, who she has trained in the integration of sex and couples therapy. Her doctoral dissertation was on using EFT to repair the sexual connection in couples who are experiencing one partner’s breast cancer and its devastation and the sundry ravages of treatment on the sexual relationship.

In addition to the podcast, Laurie is a content creator on sexuality as author of Wanting Sex Again – How to Rediscover Desire and Heal a Sexless Marriage (Berkley Books of Penguin, USA, 2012) and as a blogger at Psychology Today and WebMD with >40 million downloads. Eight years ago, she started the popular weekly podcast Foreplay Radio - Couples and Sex Therapy and for the past five years has been cohost with George Faller, gaining approximately 12.6 million downloads.

​Diversity Statement: This presentation is informed by the ICEEFT statement and commitment to anti-racism. Specifically, this training includes an assessment focus on the CARE model outlined by Johnson & Campbell (2022), which guides therapist to evaluate attachment, emotion, and therapist alliance issues within the context of ethnicity, culture, and social location of families. Various examples are used through the training to illustrate the application of EFFT to families representing different social contexts.

Cancellation / Refund Policy: In the event that you have paid for an upcoming event but are not able to attend, you may request a refund up to 30 days prior to the event. Refund requests must be received in writing via email to: azeftcommunity@gmail.com. Requests received at least 60 days prior to the start of the event will receive a full refund of the registration minus the Eventbrite refund fee. Requests received between 30-59 days prior to the start of the event will receive a 50% refund of the registration minus the Eventbrite refund fee. No refunds will be issued for cancellations received less than 30 days prior to the start of the event.