Sociocultural Factors in Relation to Sexual Values and Behaviors (Ethnicity, Culture, Religion, Spirituality, Socioeconomic Status, Family Values)
This course examines how ethnicity, culture, religion, spirituality, socioeconomic status, and family values shape the way clients experience sexuality, relationships, and help-seeking. You'll walk through real clinical frameworks for working with sexual health and identity through a culturally responsive lens, not a one-size-fits-all model that assumes every client starts from the same place.
Across two days and 9 CE credits, you'll cover:
- How cultural background and family values shape sexual identity, behavior, and disclosure
- Clinical approaches for working with clients across different cultural, religious, and socioeconomic contexts
- Frameworks for recognizing your own cultural assumptions before they show up in the room
- Case examples drawn from a genuinely diverse client population, not hypothetical scenarios
By the end, you'll have language and tools you can use in session the next day, not just a certificate.
Led by Dr. Christine Romano, PhD, LMHC, AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist & Supervisor, EMDR-Trained Clinician
Dr. Romano isn't just delivering content, she's bringing a career's worth of clinical and academic work on identity, culture, and sexuality into the room. As a member of the MENA community, her perspective is shaped by lived experience as much as research. Her clinical background spans LGBTQ+ individuals, couples, and families navigating gender identity, coming out, and relationship structures outside the traditional mold, alongside deep experience with immigrant, first-generation, and racially and ethnically diverse populations across the age and socioeconomic spectrum.
She also trains the next generation of therapists as a professor in graduate counseling programs, and her research keeps landing where clinical practice meets real cultural complexity: multicultural counseling, sex therapy training, intergenerational trauma in immigrant communities, LGBTQ+ experiences in supervision, and what actually builds a strong therapeutic alliance.
About This CE Program
Next Level MHC is a Type I AASECT CE provider. Clinical effectiveness and cultural competency aren't separate tracks for us, they're the same track, and that's true in our practice before it's true in our classroom.
We're based in New York and work with a genuinely diverse client base. Our clinicians collectively speak Arabic, Creole, Spanish, Greek, Polish, English, and Tagalog. That's not a marketing detail, it's the day-to-day reality of who we see and how we work. This CE program comes out of that same environment: content pulls from scholars and clinicians of color, queer and trans theorists, disability-informed frameworks, and multicultural literature, so the case examples and language reflect the populations sex therapists are actually working with.