What is sex therapy and how can it help?

What to expect in sessions

• Sex therapy and sex coaching sessions are collaborative spaces to access ongoing or short term support. They are led by you, which means what you want to talk about and the way you want to be supported are prioritised.

• The focus of sessions can include a deep dive and awareness into your experiences and identities, a place for developing skills, tools, strategies and practices, for nervous system resourcing, for connection and for sensory and emotional regulation,

• You do not have to arrive at a session knowing exactly what you want. Our role as practitioners is to ask useful questions and share our knowledge and perspectives so that we can guide you and clarify our intention and focus together so we have a direction and sense of purpose in our work.

• The way sessions unfold is usually non linear - this means on the surface it may look like all we have to do to for change to happen is x, y and z. In reality, a range of unexpected interconnected things will emerge and the process can be much slower.

• Reflecting and thinking about your process of change can be useful. Change is a process that happens overtime; it requires intention, it is relational, it happens within awareness and through practice, it often includes a combination of discomfort and sitting at the edges of your window of capacity as well as finding ways regulate and create safety to grow.

• Doing your practices and homework, thinking, reflecting, reading and connecting outside of sessions will support your work and change within a session.

• Our practitioners politicize therapy (see Decolonizing Therapy by Dr Jennifer Mullan). We acknowledge and attempt to mitigate power dynamics by not framing ourselves as the expert, through sharing our own experiences of vulnerability and humanity without centring ourselves and by being congruent, allowing you to lead, inviting you to share your wisdom and insight, asking you to let us know how you want to be supported and welcome and hold feedback and what isn’t working without consequences and giving you choices in this work.

• Unlike traditional therapy, our sessions are a place of support which includes care, curiosity, validation, new perspectives, sexual/pleasure/relational skills and education, a regular place of support, learning skills and practices for becoming more embodied and aware, expanding your capacity to stay with emotions and be with difficult experiences while also experiencing pleasure and connection.

• The goal of sessions is not to treat you, fix you or diagnose a “problem”, “disorder”, “dysfunction” or “mental illness”. Most of the difficulties that people face and why they arrive in therapy is not due to them failing as individuals. Nor is it because they are “broken”, “mentally ill”, “abnormal”, “pathological”, “lazy” or “that they just need to work or try a little bit harder to be better”, but because we live within systems that are deeply entrenched within white supremacy, colonisation, capitalism, patriarchy and that are racist, ableist, queerphobic throughout all structures of society.