Main description:

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.

Contents:

1. Introduction: Are We Asking Questions that Help Our Clients? Gina Ogden 2. Sexotic therapy: embracing the exotic, irrational and paradoxical experience of living and loving Alireza Tabatabaie 3. Extraordinary interventions for extraordinary clients: existential sex therapy and open non-monogamy Michael D. Berry and Meg Barker 3. In search of Aphrodite: working with archetypes and an inner cast of characters in women with low sexual desire Chelsea Wakefield 4. An integrative medicine approach to the treatment of HSDD: introducing the HURT ModelTM Keesha Ewers 5. Compassionate authenticity: a treatment model for working with women with low libido Lindsay B. Jernigan 6. Sex addiction - an extraordinarily contentious problem Paula Hall 7. Calming the tempest, bridging the gorge: healing in couples ruptured by "sex addiction" Ruth Cohn 8. Getting in touch with touch: a use of caressing exercises to enrich sensual connection and evoke ecstatic experience in couples Linda De Villers 9. "Extraordinary" sex coaching: an inside look Patti Britton and Sarah Rose Bright 10. Sexual healing with Amazonian plant teachers: a heuristic inquiry of women's spiritual-erotic awakenings Yalila Espinoza 11. Reclaiming women's sexuality: the intersection of Shamanic practices and sex therapy Linda E. Savage 12. In praise of "ordinary" sex therapy Pam Henderson