Extraordinary Sex Therapy: Creative Approaches for Clinicians

How do we help our clients discover the depth and breadth of sexual healing? Extraordinary Sex Therapy offers a range of innovative health-based approaches and models to explore the complexities inherent in sexual pleasure and potential as well as in trauma, pain, and dysfunction. The practitioners whose work is represented here expand the clinical conversation about sex beyond performance goals and tread courageously into unquantifiable realms of sexual and relational desire, health, and transformation.

All of these practitioners describe work that embodies therapeutic collaboration with their clients as they confront sexual concerns that include body image, emotions, meanings, and nuances of partner interactions along with the influence of neurobiology, language, gender, addiction, socioeconomics, and cultural conditioning about pleasure. Their interventions range from education, visualization, and role-play to identifying erotic archetypes, coaching about sensual touch, and using plant spirit medicines to activate imagination and spiritual connection. Their descriptions ring with singular authenticity, depending on their training and the particular clients and issues they address. Each practitioner provides clinical examples and techniques in enough detail so that readers can incorporate elements of these approaches into their own practices.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Sexual and Relationship Therapy.