15 Things to Avoid (and What to Look for Instead) When Hiring a Couples Sex Coach or Therapist
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Allowing a trained professional into your life to help you with your sex life is a huge decision for a couple, or any person for that matter. You want to do it right.
First, it’s a private and sensitive area of your lives that requires safety and trust. Second, your time and energy are precious and you want someone who has an approach that will bring you the results you seek, without spending years and money on something that’s marginally effective.
I write this post because I myself have had my fair share of bad sessions with both therapists and coaches.
At best, they were ineffective and a waste of time and money. At worst, they did not feel safe. I did not feel heard. I felt rushed. I was asked to override what is true for me to make things happen.
As a last resort for most of my clients, I know that my experience is far from unique. Most couples I’ve worked with spent years going through different couples therapists and coaches, often to find themselves exhausted and with little hope left of solving this issue because they either didn’t feel safe or the approach was ineffective. One couple who are thriving today thanks to our work were once told by two separate therapists that they should be divorced — all because these therapists failed to recognize this couple’s Negative Cycles and thought they were “unhelpable” (thing to avoid #3 below). Another couple spent years in classical analytical therapy analyzing what’s wrong in their marriage without ever getting a single tool to help them connect with each other today (thing to avoid #9). They lost years of their marriage to this intellectual pursuit, having rarely felt close or connected to each other.
With that, I’ve compiled a list of 15 things to avoid — and what to look for instead — in a professional who can help you come closer to each other in intimacy and sex. I know these elements have helped my clients transform not only their sex and intimacy, but create a loving, sexy and connected relationship that fed the rest of their lives.
The big marker of success in couples work is this: starting with the first conversation you have with them, each session and time spent with your counselor or guide, however challenging, should move you closer to feeling more connected, more safe, more hopeful, more at ease with each other, and more empowered. If your sessions are taking you further apart from each other, it is time to find a different guide.
Your time on this Earth and with each other is precious and should not be wasted on bad or even mediocre experiences that fail to help you get closer to each other. Your relationship deserves an affective approach to solving your challenge so you can spend he rest of your time enjoying each other and growing in love and desire. Don’t waste it on approaches that fail to deliver.
AVOID #1: Working with someone who gives you a book to read, leaving it up to you to figure out how to apply what/when/how to your situation.
Honestly, you are intelligent and capable of finding and reading a book on your own. Why pay someone to advise you to do that? The value of working with someone is that they create a tailor-made solution for what you’re going through, taking that burden away from you.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who will go into the trenches with you and really understand the intricacies of your situation to design exercises and an approach that works with your existing life and go at your pace. They break things down into small, manageable steps and help you feel proud of doing something with every session, every week that goes by. They single out concepts that are useful to your situation and offer more than any book can ever offer.
AVOID #2: They let you fight it out in sessions.
Why pay someone who lets you fight it out like you’re used to, when you can do that at home for free? You’re hiring someone to learn how to break out of these incessant patterns, so it’s important that you experience a new approach to your fights in sessions.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who is bold enough to interrupt your fight and help you take different and more effective steps to address the situation. You need someone who will model what you can say and do differently and guide you to repair the fight then and there in the session. They help you see your blindspots and create a different outcome than what you’re used to by modeling to you what to do to feel more heard, understood and closer, not further apart. You cannot do that on your own!
AVOID #3: They focus on troubleshooting surface problems without seeing the big picture with the Negative Cycles.
If you’re having the same argument or find yourselves in the same situation in the bedroom over and over, it means that you’re stuck in a Negative Cycle. If you only focus on the surface topic, you are going to end up running into the same argument or situation over and over again. With each new round of the same old, you feel like you’re failing and wonder why this is not working for you.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who understands the concept of the Negative Cycle and works to get to the underlying issue so that you don’t repeat the cycle again. You need someone who gets down to the emotional questions underneath so you can finally truly hear each other and understand each other’s perspectives to move to solving the issue. Each time you approach your argument in a new way, you feel more adept at working through it in a connected way.
AVOID #4: They make no distinction between how men and women experience emotional and physical needs or communicate them.
While we all share concerns and needs of being heard, feeling connected, valued and appreciated common to all humans, men and women do experience these differently. Ignoring these differences not only creates an imbalance where one person feels heard and the other feels left out or misunderstood; that also perpetuates conflicts and misunderstandings.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who understand that while men’s and women’s perspectives are different, both are equally valid. They will take time to learn about each person’s perspective and acknowledge the validity of each of them. They honor both people’s communication needs and styles by validating both’s perspectives. They act as translator between the man and the woman and help the couple understand and honor each other without compromising their own integrity.
AVOID #5: They either focus on the relationship and avoid the topic of sex OR they focus on sex without addressing emotional intimacy.
These two are sides of the same coin — namely, what makes for a fulfilling intimate relationship — and cannot be separated out. If you’re forced to see two separate professionals for each of these areas, you’re missing out on a holistic approach and wasting time and money. Incidentally, this schism maps to the differences of how men and women experience sexual desire and what they each need: women needing to focus on the emotional intimacy and connection first, and men needing the physical one. Both are equally important and need to be addressed together.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who gets sex and intimacy and helps you create progress in each area simultaneously. You need someone who understands the differences in what men and women need and brings both together. They will help you incorporate healthy habits in both emotional and physical intimacy into your daily interactions, making sex something that evolves out of your daily connection.
AVOID #6: When it comes to awakening sexual desire and working with differences in libido, they resort to over-used solutions such as scheduling sex or opening the marriage without tailoring the solutions to your unique situation and your true longings.
Scheduling sex is not a solution for everyone, especially if sex is has been fraught with stress and disappointment. Opening the relationship should be something you do because you both desire to experience it, not a last-resort solution to a problem. These over-used mainstream options point to a lack of true understanding of what it takes for creating sexual desire in a long-term monogamous relationship for women, and that often lead to more problems than the couples started with.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who understand what really happens in a long-term relationship and why women in particular lose interest in sex over the long haul. You need someone who will be curious enough to take time to get to know what you deeply long for and help you create that.
AVOID #7: They focus on what you need for your weekly date night to have sex, but ignore the quality of your daily interactions.
A weekly date night does not make up for a week of loneliness and disconnection. To make love like lovers, couples need to connect like lovers on a daily basis — which also happens to be a huge component of women’s sexual desire in a long-term relationship.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who holistically looks at a your daily routine to identify places where you can increase interaction or improve the quality of your connection. You need someone who will coach you remove the barriers to connecting daily and who teaches easy-to-do connection practices that bring you closer together.
AVOID #8: They focus on adding external elements such as toys, kink or masturbation as solutions for awakening women’s desire.
While these are nice additions to a sex life in and of themselves, they rarely impact a woman’s desire for sex in a long-term relationship. Because her desire for sex would a desire for sex with her partner (as opposed to wanting sex with anyone), what happens in the interaction between them that matters.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who focuses on the connection element of sex, who teaches both partners practices for emotional and physical connection, rather than mechanical ways to get the body “ready” for sex. You need someone who understands the unique aspects of women’s sexual desire and teaches you to work with it, instead of against it. You need someone who will provide a step-by-step plan that takes the guesswork out of knowing what to do. And if you’re a woman who is a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), you need someone who gets the unique pre-sex needs that bring out the best in you as a lover and helps you as a couple make them the norm in your relationship.
AVOID #9: They explain what you should be doing using intellectual concepts without giving you ways to do it differently.
You engage in intellectual conversations about terms and theories in sessions and you’re left to figure out how these apply to your particular situation on your own.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who provides the theoretical background and equally takes you through apply it to your specific situation step by step. You need someone who models different ways of approaching the topic to help you experience conflict resolution differently or to share your perspective vulnerably or model touch that will be more nourishing. This is done experientially, not intellectually. They take you through practical ways to do or say things differently right there with you in sessions, so that you don’t have to figure it out on your own.
AVOID #10: They offer you a session-by-session model where you show up to talk about what’s troubling you that week and wait for things to get better.
There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s ineffective in getting you to your goal as quickly as possible. The onus is placed on you to lead the process and know what new things you need to learn to move forward. You will occasionally stumble on important discoveries, but it will take you longer and with more delays to get to the matter of things.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who leads you through an intentional step-by-step process towards creating the results you desire. They expose you to new perspectives and ways of approaching topics such as intimacy, touch, communication and sex, among others — and help you try these out via small, manageable steps. They help you feel successful in trying new things so you feel motivated to do more. The focus on getting you to your greater goal, instead of merely troubleshooting what’s not working today.
AVOID #11: They go fast and push you to go outside of your comfort zone.
There is huge value in moving outside of your comfort zone to learn new things about yourself and do things differently. But when it’s done too quickly and it forces you to override or ignore your safeguards, it will backfire. If your counselor labels you as “resisting” the work, without getting curious as to what’s truly happening for you, it can re-traumatize your system and force you to take steps backwards.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who applies a trauma-based approach, working slowly to create a safe environment where they honor your pace and model to you what it looks like for you to honor it too. They pay attention to the subtle ways that you “resist” and get curious about what’s really happening. They build up to challenging things so that you feel good about taking risks. They teach you to listen to your discomfort and work with it, rather than override it.
AVOID #12: They teach you ways to calm down and “manage” your emotions.
Now, that might work in the session to stop the argument, but your anger or other activation in the body (such as a panic attack or shutdown response) comes right back when you’re back in the same situation at home.
The reality is that “managing” your anger or a shutdown reaction is a short-term solution with short-term results. You get back into your Negative Cycle as soon as you leave the session. Without getting to the root of the problem, you’ll be stuck managing it for the rest of your life. Overtime, this gets exhausting and cuts into your self confidence and hope that things can get better.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who attends to your nervous system to help you understand what is happening at the root level: why you get activated to begin with and what needs to happen to shift that. They work with your body and nervous system to help you regulate it, rather than merely soothe it on an mental level.
AVOID #13: They only meet with you in sessions and leave you on your own to figure things out in between.
Real problems show up between sessions, when you get stuck in an argument in the kitchen or do something new in the bedroom and get stuck not knowing what to do next. You can wait another two weeks to find out the answers, but that delays your progress — and creates more disappointment and less hope. The more support you have in real time, the faster you can move through stuck areas and do things in a new and positive way.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who is there to support you when things are actually happening in your life, which is between sessions. They are available by email and text to answer questions and to jump on a laser call to help guide you in the right direction when you’re stuck. You are empowered to try new things at the same time as you never feel alone to figure it out.
AVOID #14: They give you generic exercises that they learned in school.
Cookie-cutter approaches often are close-enough to your situation to give you some value. More often than not, they miss the nuances of your unique situation.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who tailors exercises to exactly where you are and what you’re going through. They help you move through barriers to accomplishing your goals. They pause and reassess to see if things are working to make sure that you get what you need.
AVOID #15: They focus on changing your sex life or desire for sex without looking at making any changes to your life.
The reality is that most couples lead incredibly busy and stressful lives that leave little room for them to connect romantically. Work schedules are demanding. Child care is hard to come by. Financial worries occupy their attention. And they crawl into bed exhausted, with little energy for anything other than sleep.
If your support does not involve looking at your situation holistically to find ways to make space for each other, all other ventures will fail. It’s like trying to build a new house on a foundation that is about to crash.
INSTEAD: Work with someone who looks at the situation from all angles, supporting you to strengthen the infrastructure that supports your relationship. Making room for your relationships sets you up for success in everything else you do. It might look like coaching you to find ways that you can improve self care. it could be coaching you to find child care so you and your partner can take time to be with each other. It might mean empowering you to set boundaries around work schedules that allow you more space for your own self care and for each other. It might mean making decisions to priortize some things over others to make your dreams come true.
