Blog

How can we best support clients with issues related to Gender, Sexual and Relationship Diversity? How can we ensure that therapy doesn’t overlook guilt and shame – or foreclose pleasure and pride? Continuing her blog series, psychosexual therapist, supervisor and author Cate Campbell discusses some common client concerns relating to sexual identity, shares some helpful interventions, and emphasises the continued relevance of such learning when working with straight, cisgender clients.

How can we extend the benefits of EMDR to better support LGBTQ+ clients? Ahead of her PESI UK masterclass on Attachment-Focused EMDR, Dr. Laurel Parnell outlines the potential impact of stigma and discrimination on relationships to self and others, and explains why she now includes an attachment-repair orientation in all phases of this work.

Sexual issues are often bound up with relationship difficulties, and encouraging conversation can lead to rapid change. Continuing her blog series, psychosexual therapist, supervisor and author Cate Campbell considers some common dynamics that can play out in couples’ sex lives and be addressed in any therapy – including the pursuer-distancer pattern, the role of hormones, the myth of spontaneity and the spiralling impact of simple poor timing.

Questioning what gender and sexuality mean for us as individuals is an ordinary part of development. Yet for many young people engaged in this process, being mislabelled and misunderstood by professionals – and parents – is too often the response. Jeanine Connor, adolescent psychotherapist and author, delivers some pressing advice for anyone tempted to dismiss a young person’s contemplation of gender identity as ‘just a phase’.

How should we proceed when clients bring sexually related issues to therapy? What conditions should we be aware of, and which related services and specialist therapists might we refer to? In the second part of her blog series, psychosexual therapist, supervisor and author Cate Campbell discusses the assessment and referral process, including knowledge of the ‘sexual dysfunctions’ described in the DSM – and the importance of ascertaining our client’s own hopes for therapy.

Curiosity is an invaluable therapist tool. But it also has a shadow side. As therapist and sex educator Lucie Fielding explains, trans and gender expansive people are only the latest to experience invasive and objectifying questioning in the guise of clinical curiosity – especially when it comes to sex and bodies. Here, the author of Trans Sex proposes a new curiosity framework to benefit all clients, and shares three principles for practising with ‘ethical curiosity’.

When it comes to sexual issues, some of us may be avoiding the subject with clients while others are in danger of working beyond our competency. Where do the borders lie between ‘regular’ therapy and sex therapy? What kinds of physical difficulties and relational concerns can we listen out for? How might we make informed choices about professional development and referral? Beginning a new blog series, psychosexual therapist, supervisor and author Cate Campbell outlines the numerous ways that sexual issues may show up in therapy – or be lurking just out of sight.

How can we coax dormant motivation out of hiding? What part might compassion play when goals and momentum prove elusive? Susan Warren Warshow, author of The Therapist’s Handbook to Dissolve Shame and Defense and its forthcoming sequel, describes her work with one man whose sessions had become beset by vagueness – and shares three signs that a client’s motivation for change may be mobilising.

What particular dilemmas might we encounter, and what unconscious pressures might we experience, when working with individual clients on their relationship difficulties? In the final part of her series, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power reflects on some common quandaries, including abusive relationships, partners who are critical of the therapy, and a pull towards psycho-education.