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Let's work together
and discover a safe, empowered, and pleasurable relationship with your sexuality.
Sexuality
Even though our culture is flooded with sexualized marketing campaigns, expectations, and social pressure, rarely do people learn how to discuss sex in the connection to attachment and intimacy. Not talking about one’s sexual desires, needs, feelings, and problems prevents having intimate, healthy, exciting and fufilling sex lives.
Culture has an unquestionalbe impact on one’s sense of sexual self. It is important that individuals examine the impact of their particular cultural heritage on their sexual identities, attitudes, behaviors, and health.
The relationship between identity and intimacy as well as the individual’s needs for autonomy versus belonging are topics that also require exploration.
The experience
While being surrounded by unrealistic images of sexuality, we live in a sexually isolating culture. We learn about sex and intimacy with very little room for open communication, self-acceptance, and respect. Many struggle with eroticism because sex and intimacy, choosing the right partners and navigating romantic relationships are rarely taught or explained to us while growing up. Healthy relattional sexuality was often not modeled by our parents. So, we’re stuck with figuring it out on our own through painful trial-and-error as we go.
Men (everyone who identifies with this gender) have typically been expected to learn about sex through "locker room talk" and through pornography. Men in heterosexual relationships are expected to be the initiators and leaders in a sexual interaction, supposed to stay hard enough, last long enough, and perform well enough. The culture inadvertently pressures men to be ready willing and able to have sex whenever a partner expresses the interest and consent. In committed relationships, the anxiety to fulfill what a partner desires and to assure the partner is satisfied, can have a domino effect over time often leading to sexual avoidance. Men aren’t socially supported to ask questions like how to bring their partners to orgasm. All of this pressure and expectation can leave the individual feeling distracted and disconnected during sex.
Women (everyone who identifies with this gender) are constantly surrounded with mixed messages about body image and sex, which can lead to a never-ending desire to change and look and act in a way that is associated with the ideal according to the culture. The media and our celebrity culture put pressure on women to fit a strict model of “sexy.” These messages lead women to feel shame and inadequancy that prevents them from getting in touch with true pleasure and experience what authentic ‘sexy’ feels like in their bodies.
My approach
Therapy is a place to create a new vision of sexual health, which inspires the individual to find a way to integrate personal values and pleasure.
The definition of sexual health assumes a congruence between one’s ethical, spiritual, and moral beliefs and one’s sexual behaviors and values. By connecting with your authentic self, you’ll discover how to welcome, understand and accept what really turns you on. You’ll finally learn how to approach your partner in a way that will elicit the kind of expression, release, and pleasure you (both) have been craving. Positive sexuality includes appropriate experimentation, affirming sensuality, attaining sexual competence through the ability to get and give sexual pleasure, and setting sexual boundaries based on what one prefers, as well as what one knows is safe and responsible.
Culture colors one’s sexuality and sense of sexual self. It is important that individuals examine the impact of their particular cultural heritage on their sexual identities, attitudes, behaviors, and health. The relationship between identity and intimacy should be explored, recognizing each individual’s needs for autonomy (to be unique, feel special, and have privacy) versus belonging (to fit in, feel connected, and be loved). In a culture with so many sexual images focused on a type of physical beauty unattainable for many, a positive body image is an important aspect of sexual health. Challenging the notion of one narrow standard of beauty and encouraging self‐acceptance is relevant to all populations.
My areas of specialty include issues surrounding sexuality and sexual dysfunction, body image, gender identity, and the LGBTQIA+ population. I aim to meet my clients where they are, holding space for exploration of self, through empowerment for growth, autonomy, sexual exploration, and consent.