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How A California Psychology Student Exposed The Dark Side Of Therapy Education
When Naomi Best began a counseling psychology master’s program last year at Santa Clara University, she did not expect her professor to ask her what she disliked about her genitals.
As a required part of Professor Chongzheng Wei’s “Human Sexuality” class, students were asked to submit a “sexual autobiography” that could include talking about their genitals, sharing when they first began masturbating, or discussing their “personal sexual aspirations,” Best said.
The syllabus said students need not answer questions that “make you feel extremely uncomfortable,” but that was easier said than done.
At one point, a trans-identifying male psychologist was invited to be a guest speaker for the class, she said. When Best asked him what he meant by “gender euphoria,” he allegedly told her that he “almost came” when he saw himself in the mirror as a woman for the first time, she said.
The trans-identifying psychologist also allegedly told students, “trans women have the only p***ies that can blow up the world,” Best said.
Then there was the day when Professor Wei, who goes by “he/they/ta” pronouns, allegedly shared that he had bought a device at a kink festival to elongate his foreskin, Best said. The professor also allegedly showed the class an instructional video on how to tie someone up who was wearing a slave “gimp suit” to an X-shaped cross.
He also allegedly had students watch a video of a BDSM dungeon tour that featured a female influencer being flogged, electroshocked, ball-gagged, put in a guillotine, subjected to knife “play,” and wrapped in plastic and made to jump up and down as a “humiliation tactic,” all with no warning, Best said.
Afterwards, Wei smiled and asked if students wanted to try it themselves. Best walked out of class that day, and ended up dropping the class altogether.
“There’s an argument to be made that therapists should be aware of the breadth of human sexual practices, including BDSM, and I am not contesting that, but the manner in which this material was presented was promotional,” Best told The Daily Wire.
“There was no clinical framing,” Best said. “I want to be able to talk with clients about sex if they want to talk about it. If a client comes to me and brings it up that they get sexual gratification from inflicting pain upon somebody, I think that therapists should be trained to have curiosity about that association … not for the reason of telling them they’re a bad person. Therapists don’t do that. But to have a conversation about it, if they bring it up.”
She had dropped the “Human Sexuality” class once before when she was asked — and declined — to discuss her “masturbation history” in a group of four students that included a man, she said.
Best, a 26-year-old married mother of a toddler, believed that revealing her personal sexual history would be a violation of her Christian beliefs. So, she requested the same accommodation she had heard female Muslim students were offered, which was to take the course remotely. Instead, Professor Wei asked to meet with her and promised there would be no personal sexual disclosure in his class, but that turned out to be wrong, she said.
“It’s just clearly a hostile learning environment, and I don’t know how to explain that to somebody who just doesn’t inherently understand it,” she said.
Best took her complaints about the course all the way up the chain at Santa Clara University, exhausting every official avenue from the Title IX office to the school’s president. She explained her issues with the class — the invasive sexual autobiography, a swath of “gratuitous” sexually titillating course material, and alleged unprofessional behavior from the professor and guest speakers.
But she said her concerns were not taken seriously. The school dismissed her Title IX claim, and when she asked for a refund for the class, a school representative called her request “astonishing,” according to emails shared with The Daily Wire.
The time is now to take on ideological capture of therapy. I’m just getting started. pic.twitter.com/BTm4OrHUFM
— Naomi Best (@naomieppsbest) June 18, 2025
Ideological capture is near complete in the field of psychology. Schools, training grounds, accreditation bodies, and professional guilds are all complicit.
— Naomi Best (@naomieppsbest) June 18, 2025
Blew the whistle in @WSJopinion on ideological rigidity in therapy training. A week later, I am fired from my internship with the regret of my boss. This field is in crisis. The public needs to know. pic.twitter.com/EldOjq0hOG
— Naomi Best (@naomieppsbest) June 12, 2025
Last week, Best received a letter from Sabrina Zirkel, dean of the School of Education and Counseling Psychology telling her that, “we do not agree with your interpretation or characterization of what the syllabus required” and “based on input from others who were present, we also do not agree with your assertions about and characterization of what occurred during the class.”
The dean argued that “the class requires internal self-reflection which is the type of work that therapists ask of their clients,” but that “under no circumstances were you required to disclose sexual memories, sexual experiences, or any other personal information that you did not wish to share.”
The school said Best still has the opportunity to “complete this content through approved continuing education classes offered by a third-party provider.”
Professor Wei and the heads of the Education and Counseling Psychology school all referred requests for comment to Santa Clara University’s media office.
In a statement to The Daily Wire, Santa Clara University said that “no student is expected to or required to reveal or disclose private sexual information they do not want to share” and “self-disclosure of an intensely personal nature is not required.”
The school said the class has been taught with a similar approach and similar assignments since the mid-1990s.
“We do not agree with many of the student’s public assertions about the class,” the university said. “People who were present dispute statements being made by the student and her characterization of classroom discussions and course content, including the readings, speakers, and assignments.”
Best says one of the books the class studied was “The Guide To Getting It On,” a book with explicit cartoons of sexual acts, whose author said he wrote the book as “revenge for eight years in Catholic school.” Santa Clara University is a Catholic Jesuit school.
The school said it could not comment on the details of Best’s complaint but said the Title IX office may sometimes conclude that “course requirements or classroom content are protected by the principles of academic freedom.”
Best believes her experience points to a deeper problem in the counseling psychology world.
“What happened at Santa Clara University was unethical and will be remedied,” she said. “I want to bring awareness to the fact that psychology and counseling has been ideologically captured. That means that there is one permissible worldview for upcoming therapists to hold, and it is grounded in critical theory.”
Earlier this month, Best came out publicly with her concerns and published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.
After her op-ed ran, Best said she was fired from her required therapy internship — unrelated to the school — after she was called into a meeting with over a dozen colleagues where she said she was “attacked for what I wrote.”
“I think I just blew up my career,” she told The Daily Wire.
However, since going public with her allegations, Best has received an outpouring of support.
An alumnus of Santa Clara University called Best’s experience with her graduate class “gobsmacking, sordid and sad” in a letter to the editor The Journal published.
Her social media videos discussing the situation have been viewed millions of times, and many people have reached out in support, including lawyers and other students with similar experiences, she said.
“Two weeks ago, I was living a private life with a great career path,” Best said. “I am putting that on the line to bring this issue to the public’s attention because I think it is important and I think people will be harmed if it is not addressed.”
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