This interactive workshop invites non-monogamous folks to look hard at the dominant scripts still shaping our intimate lives, even inside the relationships we've built to resist them. We'll trace how capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy show up in whose needs get prioritized, which connections get legitimized and which get minimized, and the patterns that keep showing up even when we're trying to do things differently. Through narrative practices of externalizing and re-authoring, guided values-mapping, and small-group witnessing, participants will untangle the relational stories they've inherited from the ones they've actively chosen. They'll leave clearer on which beliefs about love and partnership are genuinely theirs, and which they've absorbed from systems never built with their liberation in mind.
CE Eligible
What We Inherited, What We Choose
Reclaiming Our Narratives About Love and Consensual Non-Monogamy
Saturday, August 22nd
12:45 pm
Room: Long's Peak
Dr. Sara Al-Khedairy (she/her) is a therapist and an Assistant Professor in the Counseling Department at Palo Alto University. In her clinical practice, she specializes in working with consensually non-monogamous, neurodivergent, LGBTQIA2S+, and second-generation immigrant clients, and draws on decolonial and anti-oppressive frameworks to interrogate the systems shaping how we love, partner, and build kinship. She teaches her students about minoritized relationship structures from an inclusive and intersectional lens, and has also written for the Feeld blog on sexuality and consensual non-monogamy. When she’s not teaching, writing, or in session, you can find Sara on a dance floor at an EDM festival, deep in a bell hooks reread, or being lovingly bossed around by her cat, Noor (“light” in Arabic).