The World Health Organization recognizes sexuality as a human right. Sexual experiences (whether solo or partnered) are a part of our full humanity and are intertwined in our psychology of social engagement. By increasing knowledge and curiosity here we are creating safeness and empowerment to be authentic sexual beings.

My training in sexual health has given me an integrated understanding of sexuality as part of the definition of overall health and wellness. I am a Certified Sex Therapist through the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT), the accrediting body for sex therapists in the US. While I have focused my practice on all areas of sexuality and intimacy, I am also deeply committed to being an ally with culturally-unsupported peoples including the LGBTQ+, kink, and poly communities.  Let’s work to honor and compassionately express all of the identities we hold.

I work with individuals and couples to create tailored formulations that can capture current issues and maintenance cycles. I try to maintain a therapeutic stance of a helpful advisor on intimacy issues with clients rather than an authority on their own unique sexual identity. I see well-delivered sex therapy as aiding in navigating sexual concerns, shifting focus away from performance and onto pleasure, and increasing emotion regulation. Depending on what your treatment goals are, we can learn to care for areas of shame, fear, and anxiety, and to unwind inhibition and maladaptive thinking patterns. Common treatment goals in sex therapy often have to do with fostering more satisfying desire, arousal, and orgasm (both within ourselves and in our relationships); reducing pain and discomfort during sex; and increasing pleasure through communication and embodied empowerment.

I’ve found fostering an understanding of mindfulness in sex therapy helps people navigate their own emotional, sensual, and sexual selves.

Shifts in our attention to the experiences of our bodies can loosen up inherited repertoires of thinking and relating. In practicing as a sex therapist, my long-term training in meditation and compassion-focused techniques helps drive my clinical thinking around interventions. I strive to foster therapy goals that help clients find expansion in their own sexual experience and enough self-appreciation and regulation to be fully present.

In my thinking as a sex therapist, I’m heavily influenced by the work of Esther Perel, Lori Brotto, PhD, and Emily Nagoski, PhD. Perel’s brilliant work in her books Mating in Captivity and State of Affairs (as well as her illuminating podcast Where Shall We Begin?) have served to deepen my understanding of eroticism as aliveness itself. Perel is equally elegant and precise in how she discusses the meaning and avenues to true emotional and sensual intimacy. Captured in Brotto’s book, Better Sex Through Mindfulness, her research and writings on the integration of mind and body sexual responsiveness have pushed the field in effective and healing directions. Nagoski (a sex educator and the author of the best-selling book Come as You Are) has also applied a scientific and accurate model to responsive desire and how strongly inhibitions can suppress desire, which is particularly illuminating for the modern-day practice of sex therapy. Their work dovetail nicely with the unified experience that arises from practicing mindfulness.