Awaken Your Sexuality Workbook: A Guide to Connection and Intimacy After Addiction and Trauma

This compassionate, comprehensive workbook is a guide that offers hope for those seeking to reconnect--or connect for the first time--with their sexual selves.

Addiction, trauma, and shame can deeply impact your ability to experience intimacy and sexual joy. But healing is possible--and you are not alone.

This workbook will guide you through the complex intersections of trauma, addiction, and sexual recovery with sensitivity and care. Used alone or as a companion to Awaken Your Sexuality: A Guide to Intimacy and Connection after Addiction and Trauma, it offers practical tools and exercises to help you unlock the path to pleasure, intimacy, and connection.

Inside, you’ll discover activities to help you:

Process Your Sexual History
Reflect on past experiences and begin healing from old wounds. Explore Pleasure Without Judgment
Learn how to embrace your body and desires with curiosity and self-compassion. Build Healthier Relationships
Develop skills for creating deeper, more fulfilling intimate connections.

Research shows that 1 in 6 women experience sexual violence, with many turning to substances or compulsive behaviors as a way to cope. Here, you can read real-life stories of recovery from those who have walked the path of sexual healing and reclaim your sexual agency, joy, and power.

Sexuality is an integral part of what it means to be whole and well.

You deserve pleasure. You deserve healing. You deserve connection.

A must-read for survivors, therapists, counselors, and anyone committed to sexual recovery and empowerment.

Stephanie S. Covington, PhD, LCSW, is an internationally recognized clinician, organizational consultant, lecturer, author, and pioneer in the fields of addiction and trauma. For more than thirty-five years, she has created gender-responsive and trauma-informed programs and curricula for use in public, private, and criminal-legal settings, across the US and globally.

Dr. Covington’s experience with addiction began with her own life. She has been in recovery forty-five years and counting, which has fixed her on a goal of helping other women reclaim their lives as she has.

Her extensive experience includes consulting for and developing programs for numerous US and international agencies and designing women’s services at the Betty Ford Center. She has published extensively, including twelve gender-responsive, trauma-informed treatment curricula and the first manualized treatment program for substance use disorder. Educated at Columbia University and the Union Institute, Dr. Covington is the codirector of both the Institute for Relational Development and the Center for Gender & Justice, which are located in Del Mar, California.