Mare and Wayne
Long-Term Relationship
"My husband and I have been together for more than forty years, and for the last thirty, we have been dealing with conflict over sexual intimacy. We tried personal counseling, we tried marriage counseling, and our difficulties only persisted. This year, my husband and I decided once again to seek help. This time, we wanted to find a therapist who could listen to both sides of the sexual conflict that had become a cancer on our marriage, and somehow guide us to a place that would change our sexual relationship to the loving satisfaction we both sought. We found Dr. Anya-a sex and intimacy coach.
Our previous attempts at personal and marriage counseling--private sessions with a therapist and couples communication classes through Kaiser--never addressed our fundamental difficulty which seemed to arise from a sex-life that was contentious. This led to a reluctance on the part of my husband to trust therapy to address our conflict. However, at his wits' end, my reluctant husband finally agreed to try seeing Dr. Anya. We warily scheduled a free consultation to discuss our issues and see whether she could help.
After describing her methods, Anya reported that with Homeplay--exercises devised to help set new behavior patterns and sensitize partners to their mutual goals--couples were usually able to achieve improvement within six or more sessions. We decided to go for it as we had nothing to lose having tried everything we could think of on our own. Yes, professional guidance is expensive, but in our experience, it was completely worth it.
With Anya's guidance, we learned how to open up to each other and address our issues for the first time. We learned how to navigate the differences in our case that are often fundamental to male and female arousal, and that made it easier to understand why we could never seem to get on the same page.
Our goal was to break the deadlock we had found ourselves in and to increase our intimacy and have more joy from sex. With Anya's guidance, we feel we have succeeded in re-establishing the connection we had lost. We have rediscovered the ability to address and satisfy our mutual desires. It has not been a particularly simple or easy process to break the destructive cycle that we had found ourselves in after all those years, but Anya has given us tools to use going forward. Finally, it's reassuring knowing that we can always contact Anya for help and further guidance if we find ourselves falling back into old, destructive behaviors".