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.

About the Author
Gina Ogden PhD, LMFT is an award-winning sex therapist, supervisor, researcher, teacher, and author. She is founder of the ISIS Network, an international collaboration of practitioners whose mission is to expand the practice of sex therapy to include the full range of personal and relational issues: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

Reviews

'this publication certainly offers something 'extra' to the UK sex therapy community. This is achieved partly by describing non-UK perspectives and addressing contentious areas such as sex coaching and sex addiction, but largely by taking an integrative, inclusive and holistic approach to working with sexual issues, bridging analytic and behavioural models with the addition of spirit and soul...The overall message of this publication is to look beyond pathology and biology towards the essentially individual and complex sexual identities of each client, captured in the neat existential concepts of 'bracketing' and 'horizontalizing' (chapter 3) - that is, holding our client's map of the world distinct from and no less valuable than our own'-Julie Sale, Therapy Today, July 2015

Book Information
ISBN 9781138059689
Author Gina Ogden
Format Paperback
Page Count 140
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 263g