Who Can Sex Therapy Help and How?

Sex therapy can be thought of as a journey, an experience, a process, and an adventure.  In which case, I believe sex therapy can be helpful for anyone and just about anyone could benefit from it. I usually just say that anyone who is experiencing some type of distress around their sexual identity or experience, either personal or shared, could and should come to sex therapy. Some key concerns that may bring someone to sex therapy could be but are in no way limited to: low desire, mismatched desire, dissatisfying sex, miscommunication, out of control sexual behavior, infidelity, complicated relational dynamics, challenges with orgasm, delayed ejaculation, erectile difficulties, low self-confidence, body image challenges, experiences of religious constraints, experiences of trauma, painful sex and concerns of in some way questioning “normalcy” of one’s sexual experience.

How can it help?

Therapy is a very individualized and unique process for each person, and sex therapy is no different.  However, there are some common denominators in terms of ways the process could serve to help/support folks.                 

-        Sex therapy will help to outline your vision and hopes for how you want sexuality to play a part in your life. Not everyone wants the same relationship towards sex and sexuality, nor should that be the expectation.  Sex therapy can help you to sift through what values you feel aligned with as it relates to sex and sexual identity, including bringing curiosity and awareness towards social normal and societal biases we have learned since childhood in a nonjudgmental space. A lot of what we carry is learned, and so un-learning or un-packing some of the elements we don’t align with personally can be very powerful.  Noticing and building awareness of our own personal biases, beliefs and experiences can serve to support us in developing a healthier or more desired relationship to our sexual identities. 

-        Sex therapy can help to expand your vision of sex.  We often think of heterosexual intercourse when sex enters public discourse.  However, there is so much more to the world of sexuality than that! Sex therapy can provide a platform for psycho-education, physical education, and skill building as it relates to all elements of sexuality, including affection, connection, intimacy, self-love, touch, sensuality, play, eroticism, arousal, and orgasm.

-        Sex therapy assists in the discovery and re-discovery of pleasure, satisfaction, eroticism and desire.  There is a new wave of sex therapists who have begun to identify these factors as the core to a healthy sexual experience.  Historically, we worked from a more liner fashion, including excitement, arousal (plateau), orgasm, and resolution as outline by Master’s and Johnson’s 4 stage model of the sexual response.  However the study of love and bonding has proven to us in the field that viewing sex as a pass-fail intercourse test of orgasm and climax only leads to further dissatisfying sexual experiences.

-        Sex therapy, therefore, can help you to learn and re-learn techniques that may bring you closer to alignment with the aforementioned factors.  In sex education, we are not taught about pleasure or our desire, and we are certainly not taught how to identify satisfying sexual experiences and how to connect to our erotic selves.  Sex therapy can be an opportunity to begin building relationships with these elements of our sexual experiences which can be integrated both individually and with partners.

-        Sex therapy can empower a sense of risk and vulnerability through a secure attachment and bonding experience.  The therapeutic process is one of unconditional regard and non-judgement.  You have the opportunity to connect around many vulnerable places of your experience in a way that holds and contains instead of further isolating you.  It’s a wonderful way to practice building and noticing skills, feelings and emotions which can serve you in your relationship to yourself and others, both sexually and non-sexually.

-        Sex therapy supports an increased connection to the self and to others.  We are ultimately responsible for our own sexual selves, which includes self-care, self-connection, self-compassion and self-patience.  The journey of sex therapy can improve our experience to our own body and needs, learn identification, communication and articulation, and ultimately, support us in using those skills with others.  

-        Finally, sex therapy is an opportunity to experience and re-experience self-love.  Sexuality can be such a vulnerable place to explore, and so re-grounding in self-love is one of the most important and pivotal parts of the process.   Building off of this and creating a relationship to the self that is honored, valued and respected will in turn allow for folks to find moments of love, connection and pleasure with others.

In no way is this list exhaustive, but in some ways, it should serve as an outline for some of the ways in which a very complicated part of our identities can be explored in a holistic and integrated fashion.

Amy Bouvin