Sex Coaching & Therapy, Part 1: Diversity is Good

Sex coaching is still a new enough career that a lot of people don’t know what it is.

Specifically, there’s a lot of confusion between sex coaches, sex therapists, traditional psychotherapists, and marriage and family therapists (MFTs).

This article is the first in a four-part series to explore how we’re different from other helping professionals, how we’re similar, how we can work together, and how to celebrate each other’s contributions to the overarching fields of sexual healing and education.

Part One: Diversity is Good

Let’s look first at how we’re different. As sex coaches, it’s important to distinguish for our clients, for ourselves, for our credentialing bodies, and for those enforcing the laws that we are NOT therapists.

Now, if you have also completed training and earned licensure as a therapist, that’s one thing. But even then, you need to be clear about when you’re doing therapy and when you’re doing coaching.

Traditional psychotherapy delves deeply into the psyche and into a person’s past — their background and upbringing — in order to understand the problem the person is struggling with today. A psychotherapist analyzes and diagnoses based on that deep emotional and psychological excavation. Then the psychotherapist works with the client to devise a treatment plan to resolve the issue.

Psychotherapy is the journey to understanding of the self — what events in the past shaped your present reality. In many forms of psychotherapy, you deeply process thoughts and emotions to gain insight to help you understand how you got to where you are and why you act and react in certain ways.

Marriage and family therapy examines your relationships and the systems in which you’re embedded (neighborhood, medical, socioeconomic, etc.) and how those relationships and systems influence you and whatever it is you’re struggling with.

Sex therapy comes from the roots of behavioral psychotherapy, which is based on a medical model, and helps you understand how to fix whatever sexual issue is getting in the way of your pleasure and happiness. Sex therapists are therapists who have chosen to specialize in treating sexuality concerns.

Sex Coaching Works Differently

In sex coaching, we acknowledge your history, because it informs your present, and we lightly explore your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about sexuality, because sometimes those need some correction. However, sex coaching is more goal-oriented.

We want to help our clients move from where they are now to where they want to be in terms of their sexuality. As Charlie Glickman says, sometimes “you don’t need to take a long look backward.”

Coaching is collaborative and grounded in the present. A sex coach focuses on what’s already working and on where the client wants to be. Coaches help people visualize their ideal lives and they offer their clients tools that can help enhance their lives and ultimately achieve their vision.

Coaching is positive and solution focused. Sex coaching isn’t concerned with labels such as “sex addiction,” “sexual deviance,” or “gender dysphoria,” etc.

Instead, a sex coach works with their client to define goals, identify obstacles, and collaboratively create a plan to overcome those obstacles and achieve those goals.

Let us be clear: There is nothing wrong with therapy!

However, some people don’t respond well to that approach. And honestly, we’ve found that many psychotherapists would rather not address the topic of sexuality in their sessions. They’d prefer to refer out to a professional, such as a sex coach, who is a trained expert in that topic.

It’s also true that sometimes people show up in sex coaching who are struggling with something that would be better addressed in psychotherapy, something that a sex coach is not actually trained to handle (such as a mental health disorder or deep emotional trauma, for instance).

When this happens, it is the ethical responsibility of the sex coach to refer the client to a competent sex therapist or psychotherapist. This is why our collaborative professional networks are so essential!

Early on in Sex Coach U’s Core Certified Sex Coach™ training program, Dr. Patti Britton goes into much more detail comparing sex coaching to more traditional forms of psychotherapy and sex therapy.

Part Two: We’re More Alike (coming soon)

We’ll talk about more of this in future installments in this series. Our next essay, however, will focus on the similarities between sex coaches and therapists. Stay tuned!

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