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
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
Read insightful pieces from clinicians helping their clients navigate multilayered forms of commitment with care, including discussions of boundaries, intimacy, insecurity, and more.
Couple Dynamics & Conflict
Learn from fellow clinicians about working with couples facing repeating fights and stuck narratives over everything including intimacy, money, parenting, and sometimes deciding whether to stay together at all.
Dating, Divorce & Breakups
These articles examine the often-challenging process of helping clients define for themselves what constitutes a healthy, meaningful relationship, even when that means choosing to be single.
Infidelity
Discover insights from leaders in the field into helping clients navigate the aftermath of infidelity, including disclosure dilemmas and evidence-based strategies for helping couples navigate trust repair and decide their path forward.
Intimate Partner Violence
Explore 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
Gain essential guidance for providing affirming therapy to LGBTQIA clients. Explore insights into topics ranging from sexual and romantic identity development to societal and familial messaging that shapes self-understanding, and learn approaches for creating therapeutic spaces free of judgement and bias.
Loneliness & Friendship
Broaden your understanding of the role of friendships in your clients’ lives and learn to help them seek and build these platonic connections. Topics include the loneliness epidemic, sources of belonging, and more.
Sexual Abuse
The stories offer survivor-centered reflections and practice-oriented guidance to help therapists bear witness and offer support as survivors learn to navigate the long-term effects of sexual violation.
Sexual Desire, Intimacy & Orgasm
In these articles, you’ll 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.
Can you be an individual therapist and a couples therapist for the same partners? Psychotherapist Johanna Herwitz gave it a try. Read more
There's power in asking our clients—and ourselves a radical question: What do you want? Not, what do you think you should want, but what do you actually want? Read more
In couples therapy, using confrontation isn’t conflict—it’s more like holding up a mirror to a system that’s malfunctioning. Read more
Has a field that once shamed the betraying partner overcorrected to where it’s now failing the betrayed? Read more
Infidelity doesn’t just wound the betrayed partner—grief ripples through the entire relational system. Sometimes, holding it in unconventional ways... Read more
The landscape of infidelity has shifted dramatically—what will it take for our clinical thinking to catch up? Read more
Betrayed partners don’t need perfect apologies. Their nervous systems need a pattern. Read more
It’s easy to dismiss or villainize the affair partner. But when they bring their unique experience into the room, do you know what to do? Read more
Rushing to repair after betrayal isn’t just premature—it can deepen your clients’ pain. Read more
Four decades of nuggets from our archives trace how our field’s thinking about affairs has evolved—and remind us to hold today’s certainties a little... Read more
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
Meeting with partners separately at the start of treatment can improve couples therapy in ways many therapists overlook. 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
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