Relationship and Sex Therapists:

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1. Help facilitate effect communication including exercises such as active listening, expressing thoughts and feeling clearly, and avoiding negative escalation communication. 

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2.  Helps couples identify the root causes of their conflicts.

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3.  Helps couples develop problem-solving tools and skill to handle disagreements, including how to negotiate reasonable compromises more effectively. 

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4. Helps couples rebuild emotional and physical intimacy. 

 

5. Help people understand if specific sexual difficulties have mostly a psychological or physical cause.  Sex therapists put a plan together to address both components.

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6. Help people manage desire discrepancies, when one partner has a higher drive than the other.

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7.  Teach specific behavioral interventions for different sexual difficulties (for example, with erectile dysfunction, painful sex, delayed orgasm, etc).

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8. Provide sex education to minimize misconceptions about sex, allowing people to have realistic expectations and less arguments when they engage intimately.

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9. When people haven’t engaged in some time, offer specific suggestions to help patients add in intimacy in a way that allows them to be successful. Many people approach this in ways that actually make it worse or create other problems. For example, people pull back and stop engaging all together, or they “white-knuckle” through pain or situations that are not positive.

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10. Help people learn to think of themselves as sexual people and conversely learn to think of their partners as sexual.  This can be more difficult for some due to illness.  Other times couples relate more as friends, or people have ingrained thoughts around sexuality from religion, societal norms or family.

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11. Help people work on body image and self image along with other areas that relate to feeling desirable. Many people go outside their relationships to feel that someone other than their partner desires them.  To many, this reassurance seems more powerful when it is someone from the outside, demonstrating that they have worth.

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12. Help those who have Out of Control Sexual Behaviors. People often do this for many reasons, but sometimes to feel and know they are desirable and to feel they have worth and value. 

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13. Provide more effective marital therapy. Relationships include both emotional and physical intimacy, and sex is a part of every relationship whether people are sexually active or not.

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14. Help and find solutions for couples to facilitate effective communication around intimacy which often times lead to arguments between partners within separate area of their lives.

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15. Process feelings of shame and anxiety associated with sex and sexuality. The feeling that sharing your desire, kinks or fetishes will be met with a negative, or disgusted, reaction from your spouse.

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16. Help people understand, accept and navigate their fetishes or erotic interests that cause anxiety or distress in their relationship. 

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17.  Help patients work through grief and loss due to the change in sexual functioning, that naturally occur with the aging process.  While I help patients accept and adjust to their new sexual normal and help them shift their mindset, we also address what things might allow them to engage in an intimate way.

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18.  Help navigate open, poly, consensual non-monogamous relationships if those interest are present.

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