My work as a sex therapist includes helping people to know and enjoy their sensual and erotic selves. This comes with information, activity, and self-attunement, all of which I will teach you about and lead you through. I also help people in dealing with the shame we are almost universally saddled with by implicit/explicit messaging throughout development, culture/media, and trauma. Sex therapy tackles the extensive misinformation we are all given that leads to negative beliefs about our sexual selves, and perpetuation of negative sexual experiences.
I will guide you through learning how to be attuned to your physical self, how to cope with a noisy brain, and how to shift states toward the erotic. I will help you to understand your arousal template, as well as that of others, to consider the role of desire, and to learn about what sex is for you and why it is important in your life. I can teach you about psychological arousal, use of visual, auditory, and imaginative stimuli. Most importantly, I will help you to learn that you are in the driver’s seat of this exploration, and you will not be asked to do anything that doesn’t sound good to you. Sex therapy isn’t about turning you inside out or making you change in some fundamental way, unless that is what you’re looking for! It’s about learning exactly who you are, becoming more confident in that, and feeling worthy of pleasure, joy, and acceptance. I help with erection and ejaculation concerns, orgasm concerns, desire discrepancy, re-establishing sexual connection after a period of distance or rupture, healing from sexual trauma, painful intercourse, and sexual anxiety.
I help couples to talk about sex. As sexually fluent as we may seem in Western culture, we don’t actually have positive, accurate, and detailed language to properly and effectively communicate with each other about sex. This leads to feelings of inadequacy, shame, fear, and resentment. I help couples develop a shared language with a partner or partners to allow for learning and growth together as lovers. It is ok for your sex to look different than what you thought it was supposed to be. I help couples to identify their sex script, to expand on it in ways that feel good to everyone, and to use elements such as the sexual menu, the dual control model, and current models of sexual functioning to help demystify their sexual experience and promote a sense of agency within the sexual realm.
Sexual issues are often complicated by multiple factors. Developmental and cultural experiences that teach us inaccuracies about our bodies and our sexuality get jumbled with trauma and compounded from one experience to the next, creating a tangled snowball effect that can feel hopeless. This is where we begin our journey of untangling, making sense of things, and discovering who we really are.