Overcoming Anxiety in Sex and Relationships

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.

Paula Leech, LMFT, CST-S, is a certified sex therapist who has worked with individuals, relationships, and families in private practice for over ten years. She mentors sex therapists in training, and teaches at various institutes across the USA and Canada.

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 12 Insecurity and Confidence (Your Relationship to You) 13 Sexual Prowess and Inexperience 14 Sex and Aging, Sex and Death, Grief in Sex 15 Sexual Trauma 16 Sex as Pathology (Fantasy, Porn, Kink) 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

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