Sexual and relationship therapy: 2023 reviewer of the year and best article of the year award

Happy 2024! We are in our third year of annual journal-related honours and awards, specifically an award for Reviewer of the Year and an award for Best Article of the Year, as well as an award for honourable mention for Best Article of the Year.

Of the 76 people who served as reviewers in the year of 2023 (all of which are listed in this issue on a standalone page of appreciation), we had one person who reviewed more submissions than anyone else and in the timeliest manner. Hence, this reviewer is being honoured with the 2023 Sexual and Relationship Therapy Reviewer of the Year award. This reviewer is Ari C. Bonagofski, LMFT, ecotherapist, doctoral student at Antioch University New England in the Couple and Family Therapy program in Keene, New Hampshire, USA. We are beyond grateful for this reviewer’s incredible efforts, which were instrumental in the journal’s success this last year!

Of the 47 scholarly articles published in print in the journal of Sexual and Relationship Therapy in 2023, eight were selected to be considered for this year’s Sexual and Relationship Therapy Best Article of the Year award.¹ We are now sharing the winners formally in this—the first issue of the year in 2024. The 2023 Sexual and Relationship Therapy (SRT) Best Article of the Year award goes to first author, Cory J. Cascalheira, (and coauthors Ellen E. Ijebor, Yelena Salkowitz, Tracie L. Hitter, and Allison Boyce), for their article, “Curative kink: Survivors of early abuse transform trauma through BDSM.” This article was published in Volume 38, Issue 3, which was a special issue focused on sexuality, trauma, and abuse. In this article, Cascalheira et al. (2023) shared their thematic model of trauma recovery through kink, which was derived via the use of a critical realist, inductive approach to inquiry derived from the six superordinate themes they found from conducting semi-structured interviews with 20 participants from five countries. This study was the first of its kind in that the focus was on challenging the idea that bondage and domination/dominance and submission/sadism and masochism/sadomasochism (BDSM) is retraumatizing to survivors of abuse and related traumas. Cascalheira et al.’s (2023) findings not only challenge this supposed tenet, their findings also provide significant implications for working with erotically diverse clinical participations with trauma histories, in that they may benefit from Kink/BDSM-affirming psychosexual and relational therapists who encourage evoking insight between BDSM, early abuse experiences, and pathways to recovery from such abuse and related traumas.

Below is a comment from one of the SRT Editorial Board members regarding this outstanding contribution to our journal, and the larger field of psychosexual and relation therapy, in general:

This article is essential in advancing kink studies, and, more broadly, erotic diversity from a sex-positive and de-pathologising perspective. It is particularly important because kink is still misunderstood especially in the area of past trauma and its relationship with kink. This article gives some clarity on the subject and is a welcome addition to the literature on kink studies.

Of the eight nominated articles, we also recognized one article with an honourable mention award. Indeed, the 2023 Sexual and Relationship Therapy (SRT) Best Article of the Year Honourable Mention award goes to author Tania Glyde for their article, “How can therapists and other healthcare practitioners best support and validate their queer menopausal clients?” This article was published in Volume 38, Issue 4, In this article, Glyde (2023) shared their qualitative findings in the form of emergent themes from semi-structured interviews they conducted with 12 queer-identifying participants. Identified emergent themes included the following suggestions for psychosexual and relational therapists to apply in their work with queer menopausal clinical participants in practice: listen to the clients and do not make assumptions, recognize that the bulk of these clients have had previous negative experiences with healthcare practitioners, understand that therapists and their clinical participants alike likely have inadequate information about menopause, including that menopause can be a positive experience for some, and lastly, therapists and other healthcare providers need more training around working with health-related concerns involving menopause and hormones, particularly when working with clinical participants of gender, sexual, erotic, and/or relationally diverse (GSERD) identities, backgrounds, and experiences (Glyde, 2023).

As you can see, we have a lot to be proud of here at SRT! For instance, it is telling of the high-quality nature of the submissions we receive and publish that our award-winning articles of this year, as well as the years since implementation—2021 (Fuller & Riggs, 2021), 2022 (Grunt-Mejer & Łyś, 2022), and 2023—have all been focused on cutting-edge GSERD intersectional considerations and related clinical applications in psychosexual and relational therapy practices. GSERD considerations have been a key area of focus of our journal since before I (MLCT) became Editor-in-Chief (EIC) and remains an area we have continued to give thoughtful attention and will only continue to do so. For example, the first special issue I oversaw in my role as EIC at SRT was focused on GSERD (Twist, 2018). In addition, the organization that houses the journal, the College of Sexual and Relational Therapists (COSRT), also has a history of attending to GSERD-aware practices. For instance, COSRT’s spring 2022 conference (Twist, 2022b) was specifically focused on gender, sexual, and relationship diversity in modern therapy (GSRD; Davies & Barker, 2015). With ongoing outstanding scholarship, such as our award winners, we are looking forward to the absolutely stellar work to come from our journal in 2024!

Markie L. C. Twist
Antioch University New England, Keene, New Hampshire, USA
[email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a full overview of the selection and award reviewing process see the editorial introduction (Twist, 2022a) in which the first awards were announced and shared.