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.
