What is an Intimacy Coach? &
How To Know if You Need One?
Sex coaches, marriage counselors, dating coaches, psychotherapists, clinical sexologists, sexological bodyworkers… It can seem like there are a hundred options these days! When you’re looking for an open-minded professional to guide you toward greater connection, pleasure, fulfillment, and meaning, an intimacy coach may be the best choice for you.
Intimacy coaches help individuals and couples foster stronger, more satisfying connections, both internally and in relationships. But there’s much more to that definition than meets the eye. Working with the right-fit intimacy coach can provide countless benefits, regardless of your age or relationship status.
As a Sex & Intimacy Coach teaching for the Somatica Institute who is deeply steeped in tantric philosophy, embodied spiritual practice, and somatic sex education, I offer uniquely well-rounded care to my clients. Through my work, I aim to show the enlivening potentials of intimacy coaching.
The Dynamic Role of an Intimacy Coach
Given the nuance in the field, intimacy coach can refer to practitioners taking a variety of approaches, with all sorts of educational and professional backgrounds. It’s truly an umbrella term. However, intimacy coaches do share a few important features as they guide you on your path towards more satisfying relationships and a more inspired life.
Facilitating Self-Intimacy
Couples may be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of intimacy coaching. But not all intimacy coaches work with only witth couples! Some work with individuals in partnerships, as well as single people, whether they’re looking to date or not. While I mostly work with couples in my practice, I regularly take on individual clients who find this exploration incredibly empowering
Through all phases of life, intimacy coaches can help you meet yourself more deeply, so you can get to know yourself and your preferences beyond romantic relationships. The insights you gain from working with an intimacy coach will improve your daily life and inner landscape, as well as all your relationships.
Teaching Connection: A Life-Long Skill
As teenagers and young adults, we often adopt the false idea that intimacy should always be easy. Then when we run into challenging situations–like struggling to communicate with our partners, or discovering that our bodies don’t respond to sex the same way they used to–we can feel like failures.
Intimacy coaches provide another perspective: connection is a learnable skill that should be practiced consistently throughout our entire lives. We can all learn how to relate to ourselves and others more lovingly, and each stage of life requires a different set of tools and habits.
There is endless self-love, relief, and grace on the other side of accepting that intimacy is learnable–and we are not meant to have it all figured out.
Offering Unique Backgrounds & Experiences
Unlike therapy, intimacy coaching– and related coaching industries are currently unregulated. Each intimacy coach has a specific background, education, and level of experience.
That means that you can find someone who fits exactly what you’re looking for, whether you’re hoping to work with someone who specializes in the challenges of menopause, religious trauma or mismatched desires in long-term relationships. (Good news: I specialize in all three!)
And I have a tremendous breadth and depth of professional training). I even teach people how to become intimacy coaches in my faculty role at the Somatica Institute.
Just be sure to ask about an intimacy coach’s background to see if it matches your preferences and expectations before you start working with them.
What To Expect During an Intimacy Coaching Session
Let’s get your first question out of the way: No, intimacy coaches do not have to watch you have sex! Intimacy is way more than sex. It’s about truth and closeness more than any sexual act, and your coach does not need to see anything in order for them to give you emotional skills to improve your sex life.
Intimacy coaching sessions can look very different depending on the coach’s background and style. But you can anticipate being guided through a gradual process of self-exploration tailored to your individual desires.
Step One: Setting Goals in a Safe Setting
Are you wanting to feel more love and closeness in your life? To get on the same page as your partner, even when they’re craving much more (or much less) sex than you are? To navigate your body’s changes with someone who gets it? To finally have the mind-blowing nights you fantasize about?
An intimacy coach will help you figure out exactly what you’re seeking and why. Together you will come up with tangible goals, addressing your “growing edges”–areas where you can expand your capacity for intimacy.
During this process, you’ll get to know your coach more deeply as you two (or three, if you’re with your partner) begin to nurture the intimate trust that sets the stage for your work together.
Step Two: Skill-Building and Embodied Learning
Your intimacy coach will help you fill in the gaps of your sexual education. You’ll have the opportunity to ask the questions you’ve always wanted to ask and share what has always felt too private to say. They’ll help you navigate the discomfort and excitement that can arise when you do.
Nearly all clients will experience a series of “growth edges” surrounding communication, and you’ll learn (maybe for the first time) how to state your desires with whole-hearted openness and how to truly listen to the needs of others. Your intimacy coach may invite you to act out your new communication skills together, giving you the chance to practice in a safe and non-judgmental setting.
Intimacy coaching sessions typically include time for constructive conversation as well as embodied practice and experience. Unlike in traditional talk therapy, your intimacy coach may guide you through a somatic journey, meditation, or another form of inner exploration. Keeping awareness on your body, you can unlock levels of healing and change that are more than skin-deep.
Step Three: Integration With Homework
(The Fun Kind)
The purpose of sessions is to expand your capacity for intimacy outside of the sessions. Intentional conversation and embodied activities will help you as you begin to apply what you’re learning to your relationships and all aspects of life.
Intimacy coaches will often assign you some projects between sessions–like homework–to keep you on track. Integrating the breakthroughs and knowledge you’ve gained during sessions into your daily life, day by day and month by month, will prompt the profound changes you seek.
Boundaries & Client Empowerment
Throughout all sessions, at the beginning and end of your coaching process, your intimacy coach should encourage you to state your needs and communicate your boundaries. They may suggest a variety of exercises, but you never need to do them.
Instead, you’ll work closely with the intimacy coach to select exercises that are a full “yes!” for you. Uncovering your needs and telling them to your intimacy coach is a great opportunity to practice your new communication skills, making it a crucial part of the process. You’ll emerge with a newfound sense of personal empowerment that stretches far beyond your sessions.
Key Signs You Might Need Intimacy Coaching
Because connection is a learnable skill, we all need to develop the tools and self-awareness to support it. Certain times in life call for a little extra help from an intimacy coach whose background aligns with your current needs.
Challenges Are Coming up in Your Marriage or Relationship
Do steamy nights with your spouse feel like distant memories? Are you acting like good companions–focused on the kids and the house–but not equally passionate lovers? Have you been feeling too tired, too uninspired, or too distant to reignite the spark in your relationship?
There’s no shame in admitting that your sex life needs help. Working with you individually or with you and your partner together, an intimacy coach can listen to your story and provide personalized guidance, allowing you to create new patterns of communication and mutual closeness.
Has Your Body Felt Different Lately (And Maybe Not in a Nice Way)?
Like other sex and intimacy coaches, I frequently work with clients when they’re experiencing perimenopause or menopause. Sessions can include an open discussion about what exactly is changing, physically, emotionally, mentally, energetically–and exactly what clients would like to see change.
You might find that your desires and needs are shifting along with your body. An intimacy coach can help you process these changes, while giving you tools to convey your new needs to the people in your life.
You Just Want To Get to Know Yourself Better!
No big change or dramatic event needs to happen for you to desire intimacy coaching. Every person can realize profoundly positive changes thanks to the caring influence of a well-trained intimacy coach.
Are you between relationships? Considering ending a job or starting another one? Looking for the confidence to kick things up a notch in your career? Secretly craving a move or a vacation? Seeking more enjoyment and creativity in your day to day life?
Intimacy coaching can reconnect you to all parts of yourself, allowing you to articulate your desires and find the courage to follow them.
“Working with Christina for three years has tangible results: my family, friends, and colleagues will tell you that there are real and concrete shifts in the quality of my presence—more integrated, centered, grounded, holistic, and overall healthier.
Specific reasons I would recommend Christina….
- To heal deep and profound sexual and heart wounds
- To integrate and deepen one’s awareness, self, and consciousness
- To get unstuck
- To talk to someone who attentively listens
- To enter into active and grounded discourse and practice about personal, spiritual, or sexual growth or healing
- To develop an understanding and potentially commit to a particular life/spiritual practice”
~Patricia Shannon Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy
You’ve Been Meaning To Sharpen Your Own Clinical or Coaching Practice
Especially when you spend your days holding the feelings and experiences of other people, you may be due for your turn being held by another practitioner. I regularly support professionals like you as a faculty trainer at the Somatica Institute–and you’ll learn a lot from my philo-sophie when we work together. (Plus you get to write off our sessions!)
How Intimacy Coaching Can Transform Your Life
Experience More Connection in All of Your Relationships
By maintaining that intimacy is about much more than sex, intimacy coaches inspire development in all aspects of relating. Thanks to intimacy coaching, you may notice yourself speaking and acting differently toward your children, friends, colleagues, people in the grocery store–not just your partner.
But, yes… Intimacy coaching will certainly inspire positive changes in your romantic relationships as well! Whether you’re navigating marriage or non-monogamy or something altogether different, an intimacy coach can assist you in discovering how to honor your needs in partnership.
Heal Trauma & Restore Connection to Your Body
Through getting back in touch with your body, you will likely come into fresh contact with your past (and the stories you’re telling yourself about it). An effective intimacy coach can guide you through this process of self-discovery with appropriate sensitivity and care for your holistic well-being, creating a safe and judgment-free space for you to move forward with newfound freedom (and fresh stories).
Reconnect With Your Creative Energy
Lots of people seek out an intimacy coach to help with the most visible examples of frustration and disconnection in their lives–like fading relationships, personal insecurities, discomfort during sex, as well as the uncomfortable emotions that can result from these situations. Whether they’re consciously looking for it or not, many clients reawaken their creative vigor thanks to intimacy coaching. Many of them realize that this energy is at the heart of whatever is arising in their lives.
“What I did not expect [from intimacy coaching with Christina Sophie] was the enormous, unprecedented burst of creative energy that flowed out of me afterwards. Immediately after our time together, I was inspired to write a play about my loss, the first play I’ve ever written. I went on to write a screenplay and two more plays, all in the span of half a year.
It was as if a tremendous boulder that had been blocking the gateway to my muse had been moved aside, and writing of a depth and emotionality I had never before reached was now flowing out of me.”
~Rita Long, M.S., M.A. Playwright/ Nonprofit Fundraiser
Open to New Possibilities and Joy
Intimacy coaches enjoy facilitating meaningful journeys for their clients. Each client has distinct needs and reasons for beginning coaching, but all are looking for some combination of more joy, bliss, pleasure, connection, meaning, self-confidence, and freedom in their lives. Though navigating the complexities of the body is far from easy, an easeful self-understanding can creep into your sessions over time. An intimacy coach can guide you to access inspired states of being, first in the privacy of your mind, body, and heart–and then throughout your whole life.
Are you ready to connect with an intimacy coach? Call me at (650) 597-9955 for a free 15-minute heart-to-heart chat to discover whether my coaching is the right fit for your unique needs. Life is too short not to enjoy the gift of our erotic birthright!
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