The treatment of sexual problems in marital and family therapy

Abstract

With the proliferation of new research data and clinical practice techniques for dealing with sexual dysfunction, many family and marital therapists whose patients express sexual complaints experience the need to integrate this knowledge into their practice. For many couples and therapists, the rapid treatment approaches to sexual difficulties are inappropriate or ineffectual, yet the current literature addresses itself to either sex therapyper se or marital therapy and rarely deals with an integration of the two. This paper presents guidelines for assessing the sexual difficulties in the context of the relationship and outlines techniques for addressing the sexual difficulties directly while maintaining a more traditional marital therapy approach.