Sex Therapy in NYC: Expert Counseling for Intimacy & Desire
Sex is a real part of who you are, and it deserves real attention. Not the watered-down, one-size-fits-all version most therapists offer. We work with people across identities, body types, and relationship structures to help you enjoy your sex life, not just talk around it.
What Brings People to Sex Therapy
Sex and intimacy matter. They affect how you feel about yourself and your relationships. Here’s what we work on in sex therapy:
Low Libido
Low desire. Stress, medication side effects, hormones, or something going on in the relationship. There’s almost always a cause. We find it and work with it — not against you.
Mismatched Desires
When you and your partner want different things sexually, talking about it honestly is where it starts. We help you get past the blame loop and figure out what actually works for both of you.
Affirming Sexual Interests
Your desires are yours. We help you get comfortable with them.
Painful Intercourse
Vaginismus, dyspareunia, vulvodynia. Pain during sex has a lot of causes. Most are treatable.
Trauma & Abuse Recovery
Past experiences can show up in the bedroom. We work through that at your pace. If trauma is the main thing, our trauma therapy page goes deeper.
Performance Anxiety
Erectile dysfunction, delayed ejaculation, an anxiety spiral that shows up at the worst time.
Orgasm Difficulties
Anorgasmia, premature ejaculation, trouble getting there at all. More people deal with this than talk about it.
Infidelity & Trust
After a breach of trust, rebuilding is messy and hard. Figuring out what’s worth saving is the real work.
Sex therapy works because it gives you a place to be honest about what’s not working. Maybe it’s shame you’ve carried for years. Maybe it’s anxiety that shows up every time things get intimate. Whatever it is, we’ve heard it before, and we can help you move through it.
What makes sex therapy different from regular therapy
Most therapists got zero training in sexuality during their graduate programs. That’s not an exaggeration — it’s the norm. So when you bring up something sexual in regular therapy, a lot of therapists get awkward, change the subject, or treat it as a symptom of something else.
A sex therapist has specialized training in sexual health, sexual function, and the ways that desire, arousal, and intimacy actually work. That means when you say “I haven’t wanted sex in two years,” your sex therapist doesn’t just ask about your mood. They ask about your relationship, your stress, your medications, your body, and the specific patterns around when desire disappeared. Different questions lead to different answers.
Sex therapy also involves homework. Not the scary kind — usually things like mindfulness exercises, sensate focus work with a partner, or journaling about patterns you notice between sessions. The sessions are talk-based, but the work extends into your actual life.
Meet Our Sex Therapists
You’re trusting someone with the most private parts of your life. Our sex therapists are licensed (LCSW, LMHC) with specialized training in sexual health, and many are part of the LGBTQ+, kink, and ENM communities themselves. Not just trained to work with them.
Training and credentials
Our sex therapists hold clinical licenses (LCSW, LMHC, LMFT) and have completed additional training specifically in sexual health — AASECT-informed coursework, sex therapy certification programs, and trauma-specific modalities like IFS and somatic experiencing.
That training matters because it’s the difference between a therapist who’s comfortable when you bring up sex and one who actually knows what to do with it. Our team has worked with hundreds of clients on sexual concerns: ED, low desire, kink negotiation, post-trauma intimacy, and everything in between. Across the team, we bring over 30 years of combined clinical experience in sex therapy and LGBTQ+ affirming care.
Everyone on the team also does ongoing continuing education in sexual health. The field changes, the research evolves, and we keep up.
Our Approach to Sex Therapy in New York City
We live in a culture that’s somehow both obsessed with sex and terrible at talking about it. Most people never learned how to have an honest conversation about what they want, what scares them, or what isn’t working. Not with partners, not with friends, definitely not with their doctor. That confusion leaves a mark.
Being sex-positive means we’re not going to pathologize what turns you on or how you love. If it’s consensual, it belongs in the room. What we use depends on what you bring in: IFS for shame or internal conflict, CBT for anxiety, somatic work for reconnecting with your body, EFT for couples.
Sex therapy here is talk-based. We sit and have real conversations about what’s going on for you sexually and emotionally. Your history, your patterns, and the stories you’ve internalized about sex all shape how you show up in intimate moments. We work with all of that.
Sometimes that means unpacking old shame. Sometimes it means practical strategies for a specific problem. It depends on what you need. Our sex therapists in NYC have worked with enough people to know there’s no script for this.
Individual Sex Therapy & Personal Growth
A lot of what people believe about sex — what’s normal, what’s allowed, what they should want — came from somewhere outside them. Family, religion, media, past partners. In individual sex therapy, we sort through those messages together and figure out what’s actually true for you.
We also work on sexual function concerns, low desire, difficulty with arousal or orgasm, body image, and the anxiety that builds up around all of it.
Couples Sex Therapy & Relationship Support
Most couples who come to us have stopped talking about sex, or they’re talking about it, but it keeps turning into a fight. In couples sex therapy, the goal is to get past the defensiveness and hear each other. What do you each want? What’s gotten in the way? How do you build something that works for both of you?
For LGBTQ+ couples, we bring that same directness with an understanding of how identity, coming out, and cultural pressures shape your relationship. More on our LGBTQ+ couples therapy page. We also work on desire gaps, performance anxiety, sexual function concerns, and the emotional disconnect that builds up when intimacy stalls.
How long does sex therapy take?
It depends on what you’re working on. Some concerns are more targeted. Performance anxiety or a specific sexual function issue might see real progress in 8-12 sessions. Desire discrepancy between partners, shame that’s been building for years, or sexual trauma recovery usually takes longer, sometimes 6 months or more.
Most clients come weekly to start, then move to biweekly once things are shifting. You’ll know it’s working when the thing that brought you in stops running your life. The anxiety before sex, the avoidance, the fights about it. Whatever it was, it loosens.
We don’t drag things out. If you’re making progress and feel ready to stop, we help you wrap up. If something comes up later, you can come back. There’s no minimum commitment beyond the first session.
What else we work on
Your Kink Isn’t the Problem
You shouldn’t have to educate your therapist about what kink is, or worry they’ll treat your sexuality as a problem. As kink-affirming therapists, we know the territory: BDSM, power exchange, fetish, whatever your thing is. Whether you’re just starting to explore or you’ve been in the scene for years, we can help with the real questions: communication with partners, boundaries, shame from outside the community, and anything else that comes up around your sexual life.
Ethical Non-Monogamy
Whether you’re in a dyad, a triad, a polycule, or figuring out what shape your relationships want to take, we work with all of it. Our therapists have real experience with open and poly relationship structures and can help you build something that works instead of something that looks good on paper.
Gender & Sexuality Affirming Care
If you’re LGBTQIA+ and looking for a sex therapist, you’ve probably had the experience of explaining your identity before you could even get to the reason you came in. Our therapists are part of the community, which means you skip the part where you educate them. Whether you’re questioning, coming out, going through transition, or working through how your gender or orientation affects your sex life, our team already has the context. We also support partners and families working through these changes together.
More of what we treat
Trauma-Informed Sexual Healing
Sexual trauma rewires how you experience touch, trust, and intimacy. Healing from that is slow, nonlinear, and deeply personal. Our trauma-informed therapists won’t rush you. We help you reclaim a sense of safety in your own body, at whatever pace makes sense for you. If compulsive sexual behavior is part of the picture, we address that too, without shame, without labels you didn’t ask for.
Sexual Health & Wellness
Sexual health isn’t just about function. It’s about how you feel in your body and with your partners. If something feels off — whether it’s desire, arousal, pain, or just a general disconnection from pleasure — we can work on it together. We look at the full picture: stress, medication side effects, relationship dynamics, the messages you grew up with.
Sexuality & Chronic Health
Chronic illness, disability, and pain change things, but they don’t have to end your sex life. The goal is to get creative about pleasure and intimacy in a body that might not cooperate the way it used to. That means practical problem-solving, honest conversations with partners, and figuring out what feels good now.
Culturally Competent Approach
How you grew up talking about sex — or not talking about it — shapes everything. Religious upbringing, immigrant family dynamics, cultural expectations around gender and purity — all of it shows up in the therapy room. These aren’t side notes in therapy. They’re often the whole point. We pay attention to where your beliefs about sex came from and help you figure out which ones still serve you.
Out of Control Sexual Behavior (OCSB)
If you’re troubled by sexual behaviors that feel out of your control — whether that’s compulsive porn use, serial infidelity, or patterns around sex that keep causing problems — sex therapy gives you a place to be honest about it without being judged. Some clients call it sex addiction. Others don’t identify with that framing at all. Either way, we skip the labels and focus on what’s actually happening: how these patterns affect your life, what drives them, and what you want to change. We use a harm-reduction approach, not an abstinence-only model.
Specialized Sex Therapy Services in New York City
In person, we see clients at our SoHo office on Lafayette Street (a quick trip from Tribeca, the Financial District, and NoHo) and at our Kingston, NY location. Telehealth is available across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.
Frequently Asked Questions About Sex Therapy Services
Further Reading
A few books tend to come up in conversations about sex and intimacy. Come as You Are covers the science of how arousal and desire work, Mating in Captivity for the tension between closeness and eroticism in long-term relationships, and Come Together for couples trying to build a more intentional sex life. They approach the topic from different angles, and each has its limits, but they are common reference points for the kind of work that happens in sex therapy. We have a full list of sexuality books if you want to explore further.