Sex Therapist

Do You Need A Sex Therapist?

A sex therapist is very often someone who was originally trained in a related field such as psychology, social work or counseling and has chosen to specialize in the treatment of sexual issues. A sex therapist might also be a person who did not previously come from a related clinical field but has received both a proper education, as well as clinical supervision, from a university that offers a qualified graduate program in Human Sexuality.

When dealing with sex and relationships, it's often difficult to separate the sex
part from the relationship part. But that's exactly what a sex therapist tries to do; not that sex therapists don't care about your bigger relationship concerns or don't want to talk about them, but very often it's important to isolate the actual sexual issues from the underlying relationship factors. Experience has shown that fixing your relationship won't necessarily fix your sex life, so sex therapists like to focus on specific behavioral therapies that are known to address successfully a broad range of sexual problems.

Sex therapy usually requires in-office visits but sometimes can be conducted via telephone or e-mail, depending upon the nature of the problem. Some of the more common problems that sex therapists deal with include: premature ejaculation, erectile disorder, female orgasmic dysfunction (inability to reach orgasm), female sexual unresponsiveness, low libido and lack of desire, interpersonal psychodynamics around sexual issues, and lack of communication between couples about their sex lives. Many sex therapists also handle gender-identity disorders and sex-change counseling, as well as fetish and paraphilia-related issues (deviant sexual behaviors, such as pedophilia) and sexual trauma to name a few.

In general, sex therapy takes its cues and definitions of sexual dysfunctions from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, also known as DSM-IV, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association and is essentially a compilation of symptom and behavior checklists that help clinicians make reliable diagnoses of mental disorders.

The original therapeutic models for sex therapy go back some 30 years to the work of pioneering sexologists, Masters and Johnson, and were later developed and refined by brilliant clinicians such as Helen Singer Kaplan and media personalities such as Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Sex therapists have devoted considerable time and effort to researching and understanding human sexuality and are much more apt to put a patient on an appropriate clinical program than a typical psychologist.

To dispel a myth: If you go to a sex therapist, you will not be asked to get undressed or engage in sexual activity. What you see on HBO's Real Sex has nothing to do with what happens in the office of a real sex therapist. Sex therapists use their time with patients to foster communication and understanding, as well as to pinpoint the precise nature of a given sexual problem.
Sex therapists will often give their patients "homework" that includes intimacy-building activities of a sexual nature and then discuss the results of those assignments later during an in-office session.

Sexual dissatisfaction is the number-two reason for divorce in this country (US), and, unfortunately, lawyers far outnumber sex therapists. But if you're having a sexual problem and would like help, you can locate a qualified sex therapist by contacting organizations such as AASECT (the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists) and the American Board of Sexology, or you can ask your medical doctor for a referral.

So as we noticed, there is a need for this kind of therapy all over the world. Maybe some people are under or overestimating it but no one can deny that misunderstanding sex can led to serious problems in the community.

Conceding this treatment or therapy, to enter the Middle East region as a market scope, I think it will face a lot of barriers to entry according to Porter framework. These barriers consist of governmental, religion, tradition, cultural, and values that the Arab world will not feel free to talk about. So it is really hard for this kind of business to exist in the market.

On the other hand, some people look at it as a non market issue, because some organization and institutions will stand up to talk and fight these services. They will refer it to religious and tradition issues.

Therefore, I think these services will not appear to the customers although there is a great demand in the Arab market.