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CAN YOU TRUST A THERAPIST WITH YOUR SEX LIFE?


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I get so many emails requesting advice on SexyPrime  that I have started a regular Monday column answering them:  Ask Auntie Sue.  (Think of me as your Auntie Mame of Sex; and don't expect the traditional response to your questions.)

Often someone, usually the female half of a couple, asks:  “Should we see a sex [or marital or couples or relationship] therapist?”

I tell them:  Fix the sex first.  Then, if you still want professional help, go to a therapist to hash out all that stuff about your mother, his mother and the problems with your nagging and  his dirty socks and tightie whities on the bedroom floor.  With a few exceptions, a therapist is the last  person I would trust with my  sex life.

First, consider the research on the success of couples therapy in general.  A big study reported a decade ago in the Journal of Consulting and Clincial Psychlogy  found that two years after therapy 25 percent of couples were "worse off" than they had been when starting therapy--and 38% were divorced.  Writing in The New York Times  in 2005, author Susan Gilbert also found that counseling wasn't working.  The only professionals who do make claims for astonishing success are the individual counselors and therapists themselves. Their websites make me nauseous. Generally, therapy does not work!

Second, most therapists, even sex therapists, are not well-educated on sexuality.  A prominent male sex therapist once told me that "technique isn't important; passion is what matters."  Oh, really?  And does not passion die within a woman when her man fumbles her clitoris as if it were a little part in a home repair job he's botching?  Recently a prominent female sex therapist told me that she has never used a vibrator and is "a little suspicous of them."  A vibe is a woman's sure path toward orgasm, her teaching toy for learning her own body.  Sadly, many therapists are judgmental and even prudish.  They are fixated on the model of heterosexual, monogamous "vanilla" couple.

Third, therapists talk .  They encourage you to talk.  Therapy is all about talk.

While verbal communication is certainly part of sex—it’s not the whole story.  Understanding your past histories and getting to the nitty gritty of the WHY just gives you a framework for assigning blame.  So you leave a counseling session with the satisfaction of “discovering” that his mother was “too sexual” and your parents “cold and withholding“—and yet go home to a bedroom where your orgasm rarely happens and his comes too soon.  I can tell you how to fix those technical issues—as can other talented sex writers, a few good sex therapists and the growning number of sex coaches.  Why can we do what talk therapists can’t do?

We study the science of sex—of arousal and orgasm—and we believe that technique does matter.

Past President of American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT), my friend Dr. Patti Britton, author of The Art of Sex Coaching,  invented the field of sex coaching.  In her classes, she says, "The word 'why' is banished.  We don't need to know about a client's relationship with her mother or past lovers.  I believe in the bulls eye theory:  You aim for the sex issue in the middle, fix that--and the good feelings radiate outward to the circles surrounding the center of the target."

If you have a garden variety sex problem, buy a good book; and see if you can makeover your sex life yourself.  No?  Find a sex coach, preferably one certified by Patti.

Don’t trust your sex life to a sex, marital, couples or relationship counselor unless that person is also a coach.

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