Women's Sex & Relationship Therapy
You’ve never fully connected to your own desire because you’ve been too busy tracking your partner’s. There’s space for yours too.
Individual and couples sex & relationship therapy via telehealth across Maryland and Pennsylvania.
The Contradiction
You’ve spent so long focused on everyone else’s experience that you’ve lost track of your own. For a lot of women, desire has always been complicated. Tied up with how you were taught to think about your body, with how you were taught to be: agreeable, available, uncomplicated, but also desirable, erotic, sexy. Make yourself easy, but also make yourself irresistible. Want it, but not so much that you become someone who can be judged for it. The contradiction is exhausting, and you may have spent years inside it without ever naming it.
The Rules
The rules about your sexuality were never written down, just absorbed through culture, religion, family, and especially watching how other women got treated when they got it wrong. Want it, but not too much, not too openly, not in the wrong way with the wrong person. And then you got into a relationship and a new expectation arrived: now you were supposed to want it reliably and enthusiastically, for your partner. Be accommodating and also be satisfied. Be easy and also be irresistible. You may have arrived still carrying all of it, still not quite sure whether your own desire is allowed, still waiting for permission that never quite comes.
Performing for Someone Else
Somewhere along the way you became attuned to someone else’s desire, monitoring, adjusting, trying to be enough. Sex became something you showed up for, something you managed, something you performed. Your own curiosity, your own hunger, your own sense of what you actually wanted got quiet. Maybe it was never very loud to begin with. And without ever intending to, you organized your whole sexual self around someone else’s experience rather than your own. For some women this shows up as low desire or absent desire, not a dysfunction, but a response to years of not being centered in your own experience.
The Present That Was Never Opened
Nobody ever told you that your pleasure was the point. The messages were about danger, accommodation, keeping someone else satisfied, never about your own desire as something worth claiming. So desire got put in a box on a shelf, a present that was never opened. And when everyone around you seemed to have opened theirs, you were left wondering if something was broken in you. It wasn’t. Nobody gave you the gift. Difficulty with arousal, trouble reaching orgasm, or simply never knowing what you actually want are not personal failures. They are the entirely predictable result of never having been given the building blocks.
The Impossible Setup
Culturally, sex has always had a script centered on male pleasure, with a fixed order of touch ending in penetration and climax. Her pleasure was either foreplay or a performance for his benefit. Most women simply tried to meet those expectations, never knowing the script could be rewritten or that pleasure was actually there for them. She arrives without the building blocks, without knowledge of her own body and without permission to explore it, and then finds herself expected to orgasm as proof that the sex was good. That is not a personal failure. That is an impossible setup.
When Your Body Changes
Sometimes the shift is hormonal. Perimenopause and menopause can change desire, sensation, and comfort in ways that feel sudden and disorienting. Sex may have become painful, whether from dryness, tension, vaginismus, or changes in your body that nobody prepared you for. Pain during sex, whether from vaginismus, dyspareunia, or hormonal changes, is one of the most under addressed experiences women bring to therapy and one of the most treatable. Or something changed after a baby, after a loss, after years of putting yourself last, and you don’t quite know how to find your way back. Postpartum shifts in desire and identity are real, and they deserve more than being told it will pass.
What Therapy Does Here
We start with you. Not your partner’s needs, not what you think you should feel, and not what I think you should want either. If that question draws a complete blank, that’s a place to begin. From there we look at what shaped you. The messages you absorbed, the ways you learned to organize around someone else’s desire rather than your own. Not to dwell in the past, but because once you can see what was imposed on you, you can start to separate it from what is actually yours.
Then the work becomes about noticing what holds interest for you and exploring what feels possible. Building a relationship with your own body and your own desire, possibly for the first time. Finding out what actually opens it, and what it feels like to reach for something for yourself.
If desire discrepancy with your partner is part of what brings you here, there is also specific work we can do together.
This Might Be You If…
You’ve tried to perform what you thought pleasure looked and sounded like
You dread your partner’s cue that it’s time to meet his needs
You wonder why you can’t orgasm and think you are broken and missing the pleasure chip
You experience pain during penetrative sex
Something happened in your past and it lives in your body now during sex
Your body changed after pregnancy, loss, or menopause and sex hasn’t felt right since
