A New Place to Think About Sex
For most of my career, my work has happened in relatively private spaces: the therapy room, research labs, professional conferences, classrooms, and conversations with other clinicians.
I'm creating a new space for some of those conversations to happen more publicly.
I've launched a Substack where I'll be writing regularly about sexual health, trauma, relationships, the body, and the research that helps us understand how these experiences intersect.
Why Substack?
There are questions I find myself returning to again and again in both my clinical work and research. Why does one person develop a sexual difficulty after a painful experience while another does not? How can someone consciously desire intimacy while their body seems to resist it? Why can sexual pain, problems with desire or arousal, difficulty reaching orgasm, erectile difficulties, or sexual avoidance persist even when someone desperately wants things to change?
And, increasingly, I find myself asking a larger question: How does an experience become a symptom?
My research focuses on understanding the mechanisms that may connect childhood maltreatment and other adverse experiences with sexual functioning later in life. I'm particularly interested in posttraumatic stress, somatization, interpersonal processes, the autonomic nervous system, and the ways psychological and physiological systems interact.
My clinical work continually informs the questions I want to investigate, while research changes the questions I ask in the therapy room. Substack gives me a place to bring those worlds together.
Bringing Research Outside the Journal
Academic research is essential to my work, but most people will never read a scientific journal article about sexual functioning—and they shouldn't have to in order to benefit from what we're learning. I want to translate research into something useful.
On Substack, I'll share emerging research, ideas from clinical practice, reflections on sexuality and relationships, and questions that don't yet have satisfying answers. Sometimes I'll write about trauma and sexual dysfunction. Other times we might explore desire, pleasure, intimacy, orgasm, sexual pain, relationships, embodiment, or what it actually means to be sexually healthy.
Not every sexual concern is rooted in trauma, and not every physical symptom has a psychological explanation. But after years of specializing in this work, I have become increasingly interested in what happens when we stop treating a sexual symptom as an isolated problem and begin asking what else might be happening within the person experiencing it.
Sexual health is much bigger than sexual function. It includes pleasure, embodiment, agency, curiosity, safety, connection, intimacy, meaning, and the capacity to experience ourselves as sexual people without excessive fear or shame. That's the territory I want to explore.
Come Join Me
My first Substack essay, How Does an Experience Become a Symptom?, is also an introduction to me. I share some of the experiences that shaped the way I think about sexuality—from growing up on a dairy farm in rural South Dakota, to volunteering in an emergency room in Ecuador, to becoming a sex therapist, and eventually becoming increasingly interested in research.
More importantly, I introduce the question at the center of much of my work today: What if our sexual symptoms have something to tell us? If these are questions you're curious about too, I'd love to have you join me on Substack.
Read and subscribe to my Substack →
Want to Go a Little Deeper?
Reading about sexual health is one thing. Becoming curious about your own is something different.
If you're ready to begin thinking about your own sexuality, I've created a free introduction to the MendEd approach, which is my science-based approach to treating symptoms of sexual dysfunction. In this introductory video, I'll introduce you to the way I approach sexual health and sexual functioning, including the relationship between mind and body and why understanding a symptom can sometimes be as important as trying to change it.
You don't need a diagnosis. You don't need to know exactly what you want to change. And you don't need to have all the answers. You can simply begin with curiosity.
