1st Edition
Overcoming Anxiety in Sex and Relationships A Comprehensive Guide to Intimate and Emotional Freedom
This book gives readers an accessible and comprehensive understanding of how anxiety, stress, and pressure can have a profound impact on pleasure, connection, and sexual functioning, offering practical tips and techniques for resolving common sexual struggles.
Anxiety can influence a multitude of aspects that make us who we are, changing how we move through, make meaning of, and interact with the world around us. Paula Leech begins by defining anxiety and how it affects our physiology before guiding readers to identify some of the primary sources of anxiety in their lives, such as family, gender, culture, religion, relationship dynamics, and sexual trauma. Encouraging clients to take responsibility, she offers alternative ways of conceptualizing and defining sex, sexuality, sexual values, and a client’s ongoing sexual development as a way of addressing some of the emotional, social, and psychological barriers to intimacy. Practical and engaging, this book includes mindfulness and embodiment exercises to help clients release stored tension, work through specific sexual struggles and “dysfunctions,” and deepen their connections with their body.
This guide is essential reading for established and training sex therapists as well as for those who experience anxiety-based sexual challenges with their partner.
Introduction: What Sex Asks from Us
Part 1: Anxiety and Sex
1 What is Anxiety?
2 Sex as Natural Function
3 Physiology and Sexual Functioning (Vaguely Defined)
4 Performance, Goal Orientation, Strive Mindset
5 Mind/Body Connection and Disconnection
6 Emotion, Prediction, and Association
7 Putting it All Together: A Word About Pleasure
Part 2: What is My Anxiety Trying to Teach Me?
8 Arrested Development
9 Family Matters
10 Your Relationships
11 Disconnection
“What Did My Ancestors Hope for Me?” Serena Payan-Hazelwood, MAIS, CSE
12 Insecurity and Confidence (Your Relationship to You)
Gay Men and Body Categorization/Celebration, Dr. Israel Martinez, LCSW, CST
13 Sexual Prowess and Inexperience
14 Sex and Aging, Sex and Death, Grief in Sex
15 Sexual Trauma
Racism, Trauma, Worthiness, and Sexuality, Dr. Candice Hargons
16 Sex as Pathology (Fantasy, Porn, Kink)
Kink as Shame, Kink as Cure, Abbie Nederhoed, LCSW
17 Sex “Addiction”
Part 3: Divorcing Anxiety from Your Sex Life: Actionable Steps
18 Taking Responsibility
19 Identifying and Managing Distancing Strategies
20 Mindfulness and Sensate Focus
21 Basic Practice
22 Advanced Practice: Erectile Dysfunction and Vaginismus
Conclusion: Trust Fall
Biography
Paula Leech, LMFT, CST-S, is a certified sex therapist who has worked with individuals, relationships, and families in private practice for over 10 years. She mentors sex therapists-in-training, and teaches at various institutes across the US and Canada.
“Overcoming Anxiety in Sex and Relationships is a refreshing resource that teaches readers how to build a more compassionate, mindful, and empowered relationship to the very human experience of anxiety so they can make more space for play and pleasure in their lives - something we all need and deserve more of.”
- Anne Hodder-Shipp, CSE, award-winning sex and relationship educator, instructor, and author of Speaking from the Heart: 18 Languages for Modern Love
"Overcoming Anxiety in Sex and Relationships is a right-on-the-mark resource at a couldn't-be-more perfect time! In a post-quarantine, COVID world with volatile, global geo-political violence, a domestic epidemic of daily shootings, and an unprecedented erosion of reproductive rights and sexual freedoms, it seems anxiety, stress and worry have become the societal norm, impacting individuals and couples in profound ways. This easy-reading book is invaluable -- not just a great resource for sex therapists and counselors, but for anyone looking to understand how emotion, physiology and socialization combine to create obstacles to the kind of sex we want -- and most importantly, it helps us find our way through them. Paula has taken her years of training in sex therapy and deftly condensed and simplified complex therapeutic topics, making her advice to readers approachable, relatable and actionable."
- Dr. Richard Siegel, PhD, sex therapist & supervisor, educator & trainer, author & researcher, and Co-Director of Modern Sex Therapy Institutes
