My approach is sex and pleasure positive, somatic, person-centred, political, trauma-informed and anti-oppressive.

What does it mean to be pleasure centred? 

Being pleasure centred acknowledges that pleasure is a beneficial, valuable and necessary part of many peoples’ lives. It means recognising that pleasure is central to physical wellbeing and mental and emotional health. It means knowing that great power, liberation and resistance can be found through pleasure.

Pleasure is everyone’s right despite the obstacles, oppression and injustice that exist and limit access and opportunities to a pleasurable existence. Being pleasure-centred does not mean focusing on pleasure will be for everyone, but that everyone is free to make this decision for themselves.

Our approach

• Kass, Coby & Ari all work as person-centred practitioners and respect you as the expert in your own life. Our sessions will be lead by you with ongoing guidance and choices. We will reflect this through recognising and drawing on your awareness, strengths, skills, knowledge and addressing the areas of support and change that are important to you. Sessions are intentional and deciding the focus of each one is a collaborative process or informed by what you bring to work on.

• We are no-touch practitioners and sessions are narrative or somatic talk therapy. There are several incredible one-way and two-way touch practitioners our team can refer you to so please enquire if this is for you.

• We work from trauma-informed frameworks and prioritise social justice, anti-oppression and make space for all your emotions and experiences. We allow these lenses to inform our work together as recognise the potential for trauma, oppression, injustice and difficult, complex or unfelt feelings that intersect with your mind, body, wellbeing, pleasure and intimacy. A social justice and non-patholygisng lens also means we will not hold you (as an individual) responsible for systemic challenges, nor will we pathologise diversity or diagnose your reasonable and expected responses to difficult, traumatic or distressing situations.

• We do not provide treatment and do not work from a medical-model or individual approach to therapy. We provide support, hold space for you and witness your experience with congruence, empathy and positive-regard. We work collaboratively to bring awareness to all of your experience, sensations and emotions; to process, challenge, explore, unpack the narratives and scripts surrounding you; and together we develop curiosity, understand, learn, find new perspectives and practices that we integrate over the course of our sessions to support the change you want to see. We identify the systems of oppression that are at the core of your experiences and move towards community care, activism and challenging systems in response.

• We practice from embodiment and neuroscience lens. Embodiment is the moment to moment awareness of our sensations, emotions and thoughts. Neuroscience is the science of the brain and nervous system. Our work together will prioritise somatic and embodiment practices to get curious about whats happening in your body-brain connection, support you to check in with yourself, become aware of what’s happening in your nervous system so you can explore all parts of your experience, find ways to self and co-regulate, expand your window of tolerance and develop your capacity to be in the present moment - practices critically for intimacy and pleasure.

• We believe pleasure, intimacy, sex, sexuality and many life experiences are multidimensional and interconnected; occurring in the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions. Our work together will consider how each event in your life intersects, maintains or supports other experiences or challenges you may face.

• We address the psychological and social factors that exacerbate, maintain or intersect with emotional and physiological elements. This may include exploring challenging, hurtful or harmful family or relationship dynamics; narrow societal expectations; stereotypes; mental or emotional illness; microaggressions; inequity; social discrimination; systemic oppression; or current, intergenerational and historical trauma.

• Because sexual and intimacy difficulties are also maintained at a systemic level through cultural, political and economic structures, our work may explore these barriers and realise that they cannot be resolved by individuals alone but through collaborative, community and structural support and healing, guided by those who are impacted by them.

Sexual support is safe for every body

• We are LGBTQIA+ affirming 

• We are sex worker inclusive 

• We support chronically ill people and disabled people

• Kass is neurodivergent and we both align with the neurodiversity paradigm

• We are inclusive of people with mental illness, those who use medications or other drugs 

• Kass works with individuals, couples and other relationship types and Ari works with individuals only

• We are fat inclusive and value and respect people of all sizes and body shapes

• We are kink aware

At Pleasure Centred Sexology you will not be discriminated against because of any of your qualities, disabilities or appearances.  

We are cognisant of the impact of discrimination in health care, the barriers it enacts and its impact on wellbeing. Discrimination within health services is upheld by oppressive systems based on race, ethnicity, disability, physical illness, mental illness, neurodiversity, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation and identity, body size and weight, age, income, education, occupation, medication use, drug use or medical history. The health care system (amongst other systems in society) is notoriously anti-Black, fatphobic, ableist, perpetuates gender-based violence and other forms of oppression.  

These many forms of oppression have direct and significant consequence on mental, physical and emotional wellbeing and present numerous barriers to accessing resources, support and care.  

We remain accountable in my personal and professional work via the lifelong journey of practicing anti-oppression through constant reflection, feedback and continuing to unlearn the messages, biases and stereotypes that we are all socialised into and which hurt everyone. 

What can you expect from a session with us?

It is your right to experience support that:  

• is respectful, ethical and confidential 

• is congruent, curious, empathetic, suspends judgement and holds positive-regard

• witnesses you in your full experience and welcomes all parts of of you

• is political - systemic oppression within your experiences is recognised and named

• values community care over individual self care

• is informed by current evidence-based research

• recognises your lived experience, felt experience and prioritises your values

• uses gender-neutral and inclusive language

• welcomes all your feelings, even the hard ones

• is reliable, consistent and authentic

• encourages honest, authentic communication, including disagreement and feedback

• values transparency and authenticity

• gives you permission not to know or not have all the answers

• encourages curiosity and self-compassion

What we can’t offer

It’s imperative to understand therapy cannot solve systemic oppression. Neither is it about helping people tolerate further oppression. This is why the support you receive must be political and name the systems and structures of oppression that contribute to the pain, fear, anxiety, rage, anger, grief, shame, loneliness, sadness, violence and trauma surrounding why you’re here as well as contributing to being disembodied, disconnected from your pleasure, desire and sexuality.

Sex therapy is rarely about helping you to have more or better sex and it isn’t about helping one person conform to another’s expectations, standard of desire or ideas of good sex - it’s just as valid to have a lower desire, to not want or enjoy sex as it is to want, enjoy or pursue these things. I do not give advice or tell you what you need to do, rather we collaborate - choices, options, pathways are offered and we work together to support you with tools, knowledge and practices that are most useful to you.

We do not work from a medical model and therefore the intention of our sessions is support and is not about being fixed, treated or cured. Treatment and pathologising approaches are tools of oppression and the medical model, where significant power imbalances are present and collaboration and choice are absent.

Attempting to fix or cure yourself or your experience which is natural, diverse or an expected response is erasure, pathologising the diversity of lived experience; something incredibly harmful and ableist. Author Devon Price names this in his book Unmasking Autism when he says “the social model of disability applies to many of the struggles Autistic people experience. Each of us has been repeatedly overlooked and excluded because society views our differences as shameful defects rather than basic human realities to accept. Often, we are disabled for completely arbitrary reasons, just as Deaf people are. A world where everyone uses sign language is possible, but because hearing people have greater numbers and more social power than Deaf people do, spoken language gets prioritized.”

You are not broken, abnormal, in-need of fixing, nor are you bad, wrong or defective. The support you’ll receive here is about assisting you to recognise the sociocultural expectations (misogynist, misogynoir, sexist, ableist, cis-heteronormative, ageist, transphobic and gender-based rules) that you have internalised that tell us sex and pleasure (that only looks one way and where only certain people are allowed to participate) is a compulsory part of maintaining a relationship. If you want sex too little or too much then there must be something wrong with you.