Intimacy Partner Therapy

This team approach to sex therapy does more than alter your sex life, it can change your life.

As a psychotherapist working with and specializing in sex and sexuality, I have had the honor of working with and observing the highly effective and life changing therapeutic process known as Intimacy Partner Therapy.

What is Intimacy Partner Therapy, you ask? Well, you may have seen the movie The Sessions, and perhaps the Showtime series Masters of Sex, and if so, you might have a basic idea already of what it is, but as TV and film can be limited, it’s important to know there’s a lot more to the ideas behind this therapy.

Intimacy Partner Therapy (IPT) purports to help women and men who have had traumatic life or sexual experiences in their past, and/or people who have had trouble with sex, intercourse, or orgasm due to pain or other organic causes.

Intimacy Partner Therapy can help with painful intercourse for women, body image, and learning to become comfortable with your sexuality, body, and helps deal with specialties such as disabilities etc., but in my experience and observation, Intimacy Partner Therapy is so much more than just sex therapy.

Often seen as strange because the certified Intimacy Partner — who works in tandem with professionals like psychotherapists or psychologists — does get intimately involved with the client, and this, unfortunately, is seen as weird in our society, and in many cases downright unacceptable.

But if you were having intimacy issues and trouble getting off the ground in sexual relationships, wouldn’t you want to know about a solution that could really help? In a society where sexuality is already repressed, in the sense that we don’t quite feel comfortable talking about it, we’re constantly bombarded with sexy images, which leads to a nation of fetishizing, hiding, self-shaming, and more, SPT can help society to shed some of this subtle repression, and in this way I do see that IPT is gaining more and more acceptance as people become more aware of it and it’s purpose.

If I could, I would have the clients that I have worked with write testimonials, but I can’t. As a therapist, I’m bound by confidentiality laws, of course, but what I’ve seen is that many frustrated, lonely, scared single and coupled people have gone on to live fully functioning and fulfilling adult lives full of sex, intimacy, and all the other joys (and pitfalls, too) that go along with having satisfying long term relationships.

Intimacy Partner Therapy is not just about sex, it’s a process in which individuals can learn to have successful long term relationships not just with other, but with sex, and most of all with themselves. 

What makes IPT more effective than sex therapy alone? Sex therapy is generally talk-therapy based, and though many people achieve a lot of success via insight and have the ability to manifest and make changes on their own, some people find the limitations that brought them into therapy in the first place often prevent them from moving forward without some physical role modeling and practical experience.

Sex therapy via talk therapy focuses on theories, but putting them into practice is left solely up to the client. Another limitation of talk therapy is when individuals come into therapy alone. We as individuals are hard pressed to make changes by insight alone, coupled with the fact that often we may be blind to our own limitations.

We cannot properly disclose issues we are unaware of. Couples, family, and group therapy therefore provide the therapist with a bigger picture of the dynamic the client has in social, family, work and other settings in which he or she reports having concerns. Intimacy Partner Therapy provides the client with a one-on-one personal guide and partner towards healing.

Consider a woman who has pain during intercourse or painful intercourse.

This seemingly small yet significant fact prevents her from going on dates, it prevents her from even talking to men, it even prevents her in many cases from making eye contact or associating with men altogether. The fear is always there. She cannot close the deal because she’ll suffer in pain, and this brings a great deal of embarrassment, humiliation, and shame.

This, in turn, has a profound effect on her self-esteem. She doesn’t feel like a whole woman. She’s missing out on life experiences. After working with a certified Intimacy Partner who provided her a safe space to explore, expand, grow, and develop her interpersonal skills, whether they be sexual, physical, or emotional, she now not only experiences wetness, pleasure, and arousal during sex; she feels safe in her own skin. Intimacy Partner Therapy provided her with not only the corrective physical experience but the corrective emotional experience as well.

Consider the man who suffers from erectile dysfunction or premature/rapid ejaculation.

He’s very much affected in the same way to his core. It affects every aspect of his life from dating to meeting women, to having successful and satisfying relationships. It develops into low self-esteem, depression, and low confidence. IPT can alleviate all these symptoms by dealing with some core issues.

Intimacy Partner Therapy is not for social or sexual outcasts either, just about everyone I know, no matter how liberated and open minded, could probably benefit from IPT, or at least exposure to some of the concepts.

IPT combines concepts found in sex research — think Masters and Johnson’s Sensate Focus — a set of specific sexual exercises for couples or for individuals aimed at increasing personal and interpersonal awareness of self and the other’s needs, and to focus on their own varied sense experience, rather than to see orgasm as the sole goal of sex.

This is combined with some new age-styled and Eastern philosophies, such as mindfulness, meditation, and breathing, staying in the present moment, focusing on the breath and ultimately focusing on the body. The long-term effects of Intimacy Partner Therapy are not just that it improves your sex life and intimate relationships, but can improve your dating life, your relationships with friends, and family, your relationship with your career, and so on. By learning to become truly connected to your sexuality, through your mind and body you open doors that you never even knew were closed.

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and while I cannot directly provide Intimacy Partner Therapy, I’m part of a team that can.

Intimacy Partner Therapy is a team process facilitated by a certified Intimacy Partner in tandem with a licensed psychotherapist, such as myself. If you’re interested in more information, please don’t hesitate to contact Los Angeles Sex Therapy to discover the life-changing process known as Intimacy Partner Therapy.