Integrally Informed Sex Therapy

Modern marriage is built on three foundations: friendship, love affair, and abilities to resolve conflicts. If any of the three foundations are wounded or faltering, they need loving attention. If your love affair is wounded or faltering, an intentional improving romantic love and eroticism is what it needs, and sex therapy is often the way to get there.

Integrally informed sex therapy is sex therapy enacted from a therapist understanding each partner from the Integral AQAL (all quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types) set of perspectives. Since Integrally informed psychotherapy is a meta-therapy, including all approaches, Integrally informed sex therapy is a meta-sex-therapy that includes all current approaches to helping couples thrive romantically and erotically

In 2004 I took a 70-page monograph on Integrally informed sex therapy to the first Integral psychotherapy conference. I showed it to the Burt Parlee who was conducting the conference, and he was encouraging. The monograph eventually became chapters in my textbook on Integrally Informed Therapy, Waking Up: Psychotherapy as Art, Spirituality, and Science. Since then, my understanding has grown as the field has grown. Most of my ten books available on Amazon and on my website have elements of Integrally informed sex therapy woven into the different areas.

Integrally informed sex therapy blends naturally with other systems. Tom Habid just presented his five relational stages to our Soultank group last month (July of 2024), and I’ve expanded his material to include erotic issues and capacities particularly relevant to each of Tom’s stages. 

Tom Habid’s five relational stages and Integrally informed sex therapy.

Tom’s stages all involve couples managing friendship, love affair, and problem solving—better or worse at every stage. What are the signature eroticisms of the five stages?

1. Safety and attraction. Hot hormone-amplified romance.
2. Roles. Who am I and who are you in our love affair?
3. Relational. Sex is tangled up in conflict, history, stress, and longing.
4. First love. Intentional love affair is maintained where sex is a garden tended with care and humor.
5. Spiritual. Sex as celebration, shared joyful love, and spiritual connectedness.

All sex therapy systems fit together in an Integral embrace.

There are wonderful sex therapy systems which have evolved over the last eighty years. The ones I like the best are all practical – they do what it takes to help the couple or individual move forward in psychosexual development and romantic/erotic fulfillment.

Some of my favorite practical systems include:

• Practical romantic. Esther Perel. Modern couples are challenged to reconcile their dual hungers for security and adventure with sacred commitments to each other.
• Practical scientific. Stan Tatkin and John Gottman. Tatkin combines attachment theory with interpersonal neurobiology to help couples restructure their relationships towards more affection, care, and pleasure. John Gottman has studied the characteristics of couples with thriving love affairs and teaches those characteristics to individuals and couples.
• Practical moralistic. Susan Johnson and David Schnarch. Susan Johnson sees secure attachment as a sacred and virtuous center that naturally leads to improving relationships. David Schnarch sees individual autonomy through differentiation as the sine qua non of eroticism and agency. 
• Practical practical. Terry Real, Keith Witt. Terry Real confronts individuals and couples with their nature, problems, patterns, and cultural programming, and challenges them to grow. I ask people what they want from eroticism, themselves, and their partners, and then work with them to move in those directions
• Practical spiritual. Tantric teachers, Keith Witt. The sexual tantric traditions offer energetic and physical practices to clarify and intensify erotic energy in a context of the sacred. In my work I source myself in the Other World and fully commit to helping my clients grow throughout each session. I trust the perspectives and techniques that emerge from this intimate intersubjectivity.

Practical Integral cocreates a new sex therapy for every person. An Integrally Informed Sex Therapy embraces all the systems both sequentially and simultaneously. The therapist opens up a channel to the other world and maintains it, letting the structures and images from all previous learning, experience, and energetic connections flow into the healing work. The orientation is consistently moving towards fulfilling love affairs and post-issue relationships (relationships where couples resolve almost all issues quickly and effortlessly).

Where to start? When a couple walks into a therapist’s office with sexual complaints where does the therapist start after exploring history, health, AQAL address, and romantic/sexual experiences and yearnings? A few initial guidelines and orientations are:

• PLISSIT – Therapists offer permission, limited information, specific suggestions, and intensive therapy, often in that order.
• Post-issue compass. Integrally informed sex therapists are always influencing couples to feel like romantic partners, relaxed in the dialectic, serving the world. There are lots of territories that therapists guide clients through—many represented by the above practical systems—but all systems lead towards the promised land of post-issue relating.
• It’s all love making. I tell couples, “It’s all love making. You are either in warm connection or not. As lovers we want to always exist for each other, always organized to please and love each other in healthy ways.”

Learn it and live it.

If you’re a therapist wanting to do Integrally informed sex therapy, make sure you know the territory of fulfilling love affairs and post-issue relationships. Therapists need to know the territory to guide people through the territory. Learn it and live it.