Couples Coping with COVID-19 “I can’t believe we’ve only been quarantined for two days and I already can’t stand being with my partner.” “I’m glad that we’re together, but we’ve been so distant for so long that I’m not sure what this is going to…
Why He Watches Porn Instead of Having Sex This is my fifth in my How Sexuality Works series. Prior entries can be found at links below: Sexuality Is a River What is Erotic and Why? Part I What is Erotic and Why? Part II Are…
This blog entry returns to my How Sexuality Works series which uses the metaphor of a river to help explain sexuality and eroticism. For prior posts in the series click the links below or skip below to read about sexual compatibility. Sexuality Is a River…
My Relationship is Bad. Exit Or Stick Around? “How long should I stay?” is a question that I get sometimes in individual therapy clients and a little less frequently in couple therapy too. As a therapist, I can’t answer for the client but I do…
Professional Achievements: Book, Article, Chapter, and Presentations I Wrote a Book! After 5 years of work on it, I can finally announce that my book, The Better Man: A Guide to Consent, Stronger Relationships, and Hotter Sex, is available for preorder. Learn more here. Publications Wall,…
Eight Ways to Avoid Holiday Arguments and Keep the Peace Every holiday all over social media I see snarky posts about the yearly tradition of arguing during the holidays. Maybe it is no surprise then that right after New Year’s Day couples therapist offices like…
How Sexuality Works: Part III This is the third post of my Sexuality is a River series and my second post applying the analogy of a river to Morin’s theories of eroticism. You can find the first post in the series here: Sexuality Is a River.…
How Sexuality Works, Part II This is the second blog post in my series describing what I understand about the subjective experience of sexuality using the analogy of a river. You can find my first post in the series here: Sexuality Is a River. That…
How Sexuality Works, Part 1: Sexuality is a River “They should teach this in schools.” This is a phrase that I hear repeatedly as a therapist. Most often this phrase comes after I have explained a principle of relationships or sexuality. It is one of…
Bored in Bed? Place an Order With This Sex Menu This is a little tool that I created to help couples stuck in a sexual rut. Follow these instructions so you can create your sex menu while you read along. Take regular sheet of paper,…
Befriending the Dragon: Decreasing Relationship Reactivity In attempting to help clients figure out how to decrease relationship reactivity during their relationships, I’ve come up with a metaphor that helps people begin practicing a more confident and peaceful responses. Before I get to that, I’ll describe…
The most common presenting issue I hear is a need for “communication skills”. From my perspective, having done this work for a number of years, is that communication problems are often a result of attachment challenges. That is, the couple is caught in a dance…
Frequently clients ask for help with their anger. I specialize in relationship and sexual issues so the context of this request frequently includes anger in a relationship. For that reason, I’ve decided to share a couple of my thoughts about different types of anger in…
How to Get Over Resentments Resentments can poison a relationship slowly over time. For that reason it is very important to remove past resentments and to stop the process that is creating new ones. Maybe it will come as no surprise that dealing with resentments…
Couples Counseling Works: When and Why It is common for people who haven’t been in couples therapy to wonder if it works or not. Given that the reason I love my job is the rewarding feeling I get when I help a couple improve their…
How to Thank Your Partner Increasing expressions of appreciation in members of a couple can help them repair old hurts and to create new connections. But especially in long term relationships, a simple thank you can sometimes fall flat. This post describes a simple way…
Treating Erectile Dysfunction Starting With Questions About Good Sex It is well known that many men experience sexual performance pressure. In my practice I often see men who want to become better lovers. These men often come to treatment because something has gotten in the…
Breakup Toolkit At the end of a relationship the routine of your life and the social circle that you built around the relationship are suddenly disrupted. Your thoughts can rapidly cycle back and forth between blaming your partner for all of their faults to blaming…
Do I Want to be in This Relationship? Part II In my last blog entry I talked about how to use your vision for your future as modified by the reality of a prospective partner to discern whether you would like to choose to continue…
Do I want to be in this relationship? Part I When to get into or whether to stay in a relationship or leave can be one of the biggest decisions in life. I have two discernment conversations that I often have with clients when this…
Sexual Health Principles My first posts for this blog were a series of articles about sexual values and how they might operate in therapy for sexual issues (see the first in the series here). At that time I was early in the development of steering…
From “one true love” to “happily ever after” we are inundated with images and storylines about love that don’t quite fit our experiences. Those stories can sometimes create expectations which cause us to be confused or dissatisfied with the reality of our relationships even when…
Two years after I bought my car it started exhibiting some eccentricities. Sometimes, when stopped, the RPMs will spike above 2000. To stop this, with on foot on the brake, I put the car into gear and gently let out the clutch until the gears…
For years I’ve been using this analogy to help my clients understand the difference between having unhealed trauma and healed trauma. I will bring this analogy up when I want to respond to a client who states that no amount of healing will eliminate the…
While equality in a relationship has a high value, sometimes manifesting equality around certain issues or decisions can feel impossible. For example, who gets to decide whether I take this promotion at work or not? The decision might affect everyone in the relationship but do…
One of the most common things that I teach members of my couples is how to be empathic towards each other. Once I help a couple establish an empathic connection, most of the other challenges are relatively easy to solve because empathy makes solutions much…
Emotional Relationships Need Empathy I’m going to go into a deeper description about empathy in a subsequent post but for now I’m going to identify that the keys to expressing empathy are (1) to demonstrate acceptance of the other person’s experience and (2) to demonstrate…
In my last blog post I presented 6 Essential Facts about emotions. These were intended to set the stage for this more advanced review of the role of emotions in relationships and how understanding emotions can help a relationship improve. Emotions are created by our…
People have emotions. Yet we receive very little education about our emotions, how they work, or how to manage them in this culture. So, as I work with clients I’m often conducting a certain about of education about the nature of emotions. This is especially…
Many of the negative emotional and communication cycles that I see when couples come to me can be summed up very simply. Two people who come into close relationship, start hurting each other in unconscious ways, and can’t stop. The efforts they take to stop…
As a therapist, I often find that questions are a more powerful tool than statements because questions allow us to discover what we don’t yet know. So, questions help clients learn more than me telling them things. In this blog entry I’m going to present…
What Does “Good Boundaries” Mean Anyway? It is almost cliché to say that mature people have “good boundaries”. But what does that even mean? Some people with “poor” boundaries let others take advantage of them, while other “poor” boundaried people take advantage of others. Yet…
Sometimes I hear from one member of a couple that their partner is making a mountain out of a mole hill. This usually is said dismissively. A justification is then given to cast the partner as unreasonable. I’m going to review some of those reasons…
When prior couples therapy failed and I am the next therapist, it is a different situation than when someone comes to me for individual therapy after prior individual therapy failed. While many therapists helping individuals have a specific therapeutic orientation (e.g., CBT or psychodynamic), there…
I have enjoyed celebrating successful completion of treatment with several clients who had been in therapy previously but who had not found success in that therapy. In this post, I’m going to describe what I do differently when a client comes to me for treatment…
Though the lament of the challenge of work-life balance is heard throughout the United States at this time, I feel that Silicon Valley has a particularly intense case of this affliction. Where start-ups are rampant and two or three year old companies are bought for…
This is the final installment in this three part series on the most common interventions that I use in couples therapy. In this blog post I present four final interventions: Attend to the Relationship Ecology, Nonviolent Communication, Forgiving Injuries, and Sensate Focus. Attend to the Relationship Ecology Especially given…
This post continues my previous post in identifying the most common interventions that I use in session to help clients in marriage therapy or couples therapy with me. Once I typed up the remaining seven common interventions, I found that they were too long for…
Sometimes when I speak with a potential client they ask how couples therapy helps. This blog entry is designed to give you an idea of what I actually do during my sessions and how each intervention helps the couple get out of the negative pattern…
The bay area has concentrated some of the most talented, intelligent, and high-performing people in the world. Often when people call me for therapy they are in that high-performing group. They often hesitate in the initial consult because they believe in many of the myths…
In this blog entry, I describe one of the core assumptions that informs my work with couples. Simply, the principle is that each member of the couple is 100% responsible for the problems in the relationship. But first, this entry requires a caveat. The applicability…
When I talk with potential clients in 15-20 minute phone consultations, they often want to know what to expect from me during therapy. This blog entry will answer that question in more detail than I get into over the phone and will focus on what…
I want to dedicate this entry of my blog to my polyamorous friends and clients. Most of my clients are monogamous and I happily support them in protecting and affirming the viability of their monogamy and I have also had some poly clients and this…
Having worked with clients with out of control sexual behavior (OCSB), and having spent several years during my training working with clients with chemical addictions, I have found the term sexual addiction is at best a misnomer and at worst a mistake. Sex Addiction V.…
I have alluded to the fact that my sexual values as a person and as a therapist have changed over time. I thought that it might spark interest to have me identify which values I have cut over the years. This may be of value…
Sexual adaptability is formed on the principle that no aspect of life stays the same forever. Just as our exercise routines might change as we age, so too might our sexuality. It is also based on the principle that no matter what fantasies a person…
Generativity is one of my favorite sexual values. It directly relates to my joy in helping clients with their sexual issues and it is the value that I see most easily left behind as people try to navigate their relationships and their sexuality. By generativity,…
Sexual Values: Sustainability In the last blog entry, I described the elements of the consent as a sexual value. In this entry, I am describing the value of sustainability. However, I realized that I have not explicitly stated the importance I place on whether or…
Sexual Values: Consent In this blog entry I will identify the elements that I think comprise full consent. Just remember, these values and my ways of understanding them are conversation starters only. I hold these values loosely and I could at any moment encounter something…
Sexual Values: One Therapist’s Provisional Set In the United States when the word “values” is used in the media, it is often being used by people with conservative religious or political values as a code word for “the way people who look like me and…