Couples, Relationships & Sex
Many clients come to therapy grappling with love, desire, intimacy, sexual identity, and relationships. These issues shape almost every aspect of their life, including how they communicate and connect. After all, humans are relational creatures, and our relationships are central to our well-being. These articles focus on common relationship challenges that have long brought clients to the therapy room: divorce, breakups, infidelity, and loneliness. They also explore more contemporary subjects like consensual nonmonogamy, the challenges of modern dating, current issues facing LGBTQIA+ clients, and critical perspectives around sexual trauma and intimate partner violence. Learn from Esther Perel, Sue Johnson, John and Julie Gottman, Terry Real, Tammy Nelson, Alexandra Solomon, Ellyn Bader, Emily Nagoski, and others.
The Couples' Work We Weren't Trained For
Grief, Resilience, and Intimacy in Long-Term LoveAttachment Styles
The relationships we have with our caregivers establish patterns we carry throughout our lives. These articles explore how insecure attachment patterns play out in friendships, romantic partnerships, and the therapy room. Topics in this category range from identifying trauma bonds to exploring new frameworks for visualizing attachment and avoiding pathologization. You'll find practical guidance for reaching avoidant clients and supporting them as they explore new relational experiences. Across personal reflections, research-focused essays, and practical videos, you'll find resources for fostering secure attachment and catalyzing real change in your clients.
Consensual Nonmonogamy
Consensual nonmonogamy involves partners who decide to open their relationship with care, honesty, and as much self-awareness as possible. For clinicians, clients who choose to pursue these multilayered forms of commitment often bring new and unique challenges to therapy. These pieces follow clients navigating "monogamish" arrangements, polyamorous experiments, and "new monogamy" agreements. They explore how to negotiate boundaries, talk explicitly about sex and intimacy needs, and work skillfully with the jealousy, insecurity, and power dynamics that open relationships sometimes bring to the surface. Clinicians will find language for helping partners design structures that protect vulnerability and center consent and disclosure.
Couple Dynamics & Conflict
These articles explore the challenging dynamics and pain couples often bring to therapy. They follow clinicians as they work with couples facing repeating fights and stuck narratives over everything including intimacy, money, parenting, and sometimes deciding whether to stay together at all. You'll find honest, vulnerable reflections and cutting-edge insights from clinicians navigating these often-choppy waters alongside their clients. They offer practical guidance on slowing reactivity, questioning blame, and addressing contempt. Learn which interventions can best help your couple clients address conflict with honesty and respect, building a stronger and more resilient base for their future. Learn from Esther Perel, John and Julie Gottman, Sue Johnson, Ellyn Bader, and others.
Dating, Divorce & Breakups
These articles trace the realities of searching for love and, in some cases, the fallout that surrounds its loss. They also honor the often-challenging process of helping clients define for themselves what constitutes a healthy, meaningful relationship, even when it means choosing to be single. Articles range from explorations of hookup culture and midlife dating to "last chance" couples therapy, collaborative divorce, and the financial realities of separation. They explore the sacred work of heartbreak, the politics of no-fault divorce, and the upending question of when to call an end to a relationship. Learn more about how to support clients through ambivalence, grief, high-conflict breakups, and post-divorce reinventions.
Infidelity
Articles in this category explore what happens when a relationship's central promise is broken, and what it takes to sort through the ensuing damage. These pieces highlight stories of emotional and sexual affairs, online betrayals, betrayal trauma, and long-kept secrets. They examine the myriad reasons clients may be unfaithful, offer language for empowering clients who have been betrayed, and ask important questions about how much to disclose following an affair. Explore these stories and insights for guidance as you help couples decide how to navigate life in the wake of infidelity.
Intimate Partner Violence
These articles examine the many forms coercion, gaslighting, control, shame, and abuse can take in intimate partnerships, as well as the unique challenges therapists face when helping survivors on their healing journey. You'll find case-based narratives that examine the myths surrounding abuse in our culture, offer tips for working within the legal system, and provide guidance on protecting victims of domestic abuse.
LGBTQIA & Sexual Orientation
The articles in this category center on the experiences of clients as they discover, question, and explore their romantic and sexual identities in today's social environment. They include reflections from LGBTQIA individuals on the messaging they received from society and loved ones that shaped their internal understandings of who they are. Examine what psychotherapists should know about working with LGBTQIA clients in affirming therapy that's free of judgement and bias.
Loneliness & Friendship
These articles on loneliness and friendship highlight the value of platonic connection in a culture that too often favors self-sufficiency or couplehood. They explore strategies for supporting people struggling to make connections, giving friendship its proper due in clinical work, and acknowledging the difference between being "alone" and being lonely. The stories here offer narratives and reflections on the loneliness epidemic, defining friendships, and other sources of belonging. Broaden your understanding of the role of friendships in your clients' lives and learn to help them seek and build these platonic connections.
Sexual Abuse
These articles address the profound impact of sexual violation on survivors and how therapists can best help them heal from the long-term effects on mental health, sexual health, relational health, and overall well-being. The stories offer survivor-centered reflections and practice-oriented guidance to help therapists bear witness and offer support following the trauma of sexual abuse, so their clients can reclaim agency and trust.
Sexual Desire, Intimacy & Orgasm
These articles dive into the ways people long for, avoid, negotiate, and rediscover erotic connection across the lifespan. They explore online flirtations, porn use, and the realities of aging bodies, as well as the impact of trauma, culture, and gendered expectations on sexual desire. These essays, interviews, and case studies highlight erotic intelligence, the role of fantasy in couples therapy, and the ways clients can bring mindful, embodied practices into their homes. Clinicians will find nuanced guidance for discussing sex without preconceptions, busting common myths on sex and sexuality, differentiating compulsions from exploration, and helping partners cultivate intimacy and pleasure that feel emotionally safe and mutually chosen.
Couples therapy pioneer Ellyn Bader and relationship expert Alexandra Solomon reveal how they’d work with a couple derailed by conflicts and chronic pain. Read more
More and more therapists are helping clients examine the emotional benefits and potential pitfalls of a prenup agreement. Read more
Here are six hot takes on what’s in store for clinicians in 2026, from Matthias Barker, Linda Thai, Chinwé Williams, and more. Read more
Poet Yung Pueblo helps us inspire relational change in our clients and ourselves. Read more
Billions of daily swipes on dating apps yield an average match rate of less than 2 percent. What does this say about the role of physical chemistry in love? Read more
If therapists can become culturally competent in the world of dating apps, exploring our clients’ profiles is an opportunity to deepen therapy. Read more
As a field, in our efforts to be neutral and nurturing, have we been unwittingly recreating the culture’s individualistic bias? Read more
Embracing friendship therapy as fully as we do couples or family therapy might help us shift friendship to its rightful place of clinical importance. Read more
Sex therapist Tammy Nelson and trauma specialist Frank Anderson take different paths to empower a client struggling with intimacy. Read more
When we’re tormented by resentment toward someone we believe has wronged us, forgiveness can be a form of self-care. Read more
Stories like "Wicked" can help us create safe rehearsal spaces for emotional exploration, where fictional attachments allow us to experience intense emotion... Read more
To shift friendship to its rightful place of importance in our lives, the conventional friendship script needs a dramatic rewrite. Read more
Asking a client about sex doesn’t need to feel intimidating or awkward—but it is important for all therapists to do. Read more
We're all familiar with the pursuer-distancer dynamic, but are therapists missing the mark when it comes to helping withdrawers connect? Couples therapist... Read more
One of the world's leading couples therapists examines a major turning point in couples therapy—and the woman who spearheaded the change. Read more
By making sense of one another’s temperamental styles through an Enneagram lens, therapists can help partners understand their differences in a new way. Read more
Many women struggle with orgasm in heterosexual relationships. Here are seven strategies therapists can use to empower female clients to feel more pleasure. Read more
Discover two models of love and how distinguishing between them can help therapists support clients in designing a conscious relationship. Read more
Concurrent couples therapy has advantages over conjoint therapy that get overlooked by many therapists. Discover 7 ways concurrent couples therapy can improve... Read more
In a society where most people spend more time on dating apps than in places of worship, the pursuit of a romantic partner has become a holy quest. Read more
A new framework for visualizing attachment turns a potentially pathologizing concept into a friendly clinical tool. Read more
How might a panoramic view of a relationship at the start of couples therapy change what clinicians focus on? Read more
The current political push to eliminate no-fault divorce is dangerous, particularly for women in abusive relationships. Read more
Post-separation abuse can easily masquerade as a simple "bad breakup." Read more
How you document sessions with clients in emotionally abusive relationships can either help or harm them in family court. Read more
Why aren't we doing more to support male survivors of intimate partner violence? Read more
Is teaching partners to join forces against their stress where all couples work should begin? Read more
When opening a relationship, the agreement-making process is far more important than the agreements themselves. Read more
Seeking protection from a violent relationship is difficult enough on its own, but for Black women, the problem is compounded many times over. Read more
Making friends isn’t easy. But amid unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and trauma, and in the middle of what the Department of Health and Human... Read more
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