Mayor Bob Filner’s willingness to admit he has a problem is key as he starts treatment to end his boorish behavior toward women, psychologists and social workers said Friday.

Come next month, when he begins a behavioral treatment program, Filner will be taught about empathy, what triggers his unwelcome overtures, and why they’re wrong. He’ll also learn tools for controlling himself when he feels the urge to make an inappropriate move on an unsuspecting woman.

Those are some of the significant lessons experts say he’ll see beginning Aug. 5, when he starts two weeks at a residential treatment facility to address behavior that he now admits was wrong.

“You can’t do treatment unless somebody acknowledges they have a problem,” said Rob Weiss, vice president of a Los Angeles treatment center. “Our job is to help them understand the nature of the problem.”

There are various forms of treatment for sexual harassment. Whichever is chosen, psychologists say two weeks is just a start.

“Treatment for sexual harassment needs to be very intensive and very comprehensive,” said Nadine Kaslow, a psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “It goes for a while; it’s not like something you can do in a week or something like that. The better treatment programs are relatively long and so sometimes people do it multiple days a week over an eight-week period of time, but you need to do a lot of hours of this treatment.”

The negative effects of Filner’s behavior are evidenced by the comments made by the seven women who came forward in the last week. Kaslow said the effect on others isn’t usually a concern to an offender.

“Often times people think about meeting their own needs and not really how it’s affecting the person they’re harassing,” she said. “People somehow have these beliefs that they’re powerful and they have the right to do this.”

Treatment is aimed at making an offender examine his past, admit he has a problem, and give him the inner-alarm to hold himself back when he’s alone with a woman, psychologists said.

Weiss, senior vice president of clinical development for Elements Behavioral Health in West Los Angeles, described a two-week treatment plan his institution offers. He said the first 10 days make a patient feel remorseful, at which time they are given skills to improve their lives after the program.

“People aren’t cured in treatment. They’ve had a lifetime or many years of the same behavior. What happens is we create a tremendous amount of awareness,” he said. “We give them the tools to figure out how they’re going to handle those situations because the tools they had in the past weren’t good ones.”

Weiss said his organization offers treatment programs for addictions, including sex, alcohol and drugs. He said he has about 60 to 70 patients at a time, and a celebrity comes in about every three months.

Richard Levak, a clinical psychologist in Del Mar, said Filner’s public status will be reduced when he joins the program.