Overcoming Anxiety in Sex and Relationships: A Comprehensive Guide to Intimate and Emotional Freedom

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 10 years. She mentors sex therapists-in-training, and teaches at various institutes across the US and Canada.