What is a SAR and who does them? 👨🏼🎓🎓
Sexual Attitude Reassessment and Restructuring (SAR) is specialised training for sexological professionals. SAR training explores and challenges a person’s sexual values, attitudes, feelings, and beliefs through various expressive and reflective experiences. These experiences include engaging media, guest speaker presentations, small group discussions, reflective journaling, and significant group interactions. SAR is grounded in a sex-positive paradigm and built on inclusivity, respect for diversity, non-judgement, and general ethical principles. The training aims to develop participant’s sensitivity, knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the diversity and complexity of human sexuality and sexual expression.
The activities in an SAR are designed to be evocative, bringing awareness to participants’ knowledge gaps, boundaries, and their comfort or discomfort with the diversity of human sexuality. A SAR will often use Sexually Explicit Media (SEM), which is “not porn”, to promote a wide range of consensual, diverse, naturalistic human sexual behaviour. This process allows participants to learn more about themselves and integrate these realisations and insights into their personal and professional lives. It sets the foundations for professionals to work through difficulties in a non-clinical setting before applying themselves in real-world sexological practice. Advanced forms of SAR use somatic experiential learning, which can be found in certification programs like Sexological Bodywork.
Completion of SAR training is a prerequisite for credentialing as a sexology professional internationally and in Australia. This requirement applies to various fields such as sexology, somatic sexology, sex therapy, sex coaching and education, and sexological bodywork. It is highly recommended for all health and allied professionals, as it uniquely empowers them to provide better quality care in sexual health across the biopsychosocial spectrum. If you are seeking sex therapy or sex coaching, a SAR credential indicates that the practitioner is able to work with sexual inclusion and diversity.
