THE CENTER FOR RELATIONSHIPS
AND SEXUALITY
THE CENTER FOR RELATIONSHIPS
AND SEXUALITY
When sex, intimacy, or relationship concerns do not fit a standard formula.
I work with adults, couples, and partners facing complex sexual concerns, difficult-to-discuss desires or behaviors, nontraditional relationships, longstanding intimacy problems, and questions involving spirituality, shame, conscience, faith, or meaning.
David Roth, PhD
Some concerns are difficult even to name
You may be here because:
• a sexual thought, fantasy, interest, or behavior is troubling or frightening you
• kink, polyamory, consensual nonmonogamy, or another nontraditional relationship has become complicated
• you are caught between desire and conscience
• shame has made it difficult to speak honestly
• you and a partner have profoundly different erotic needs
• illness, aging, grief, betrayal, or bodily change has altered your intimate life
• your concerns have not responded to a standard protocol
• sexuality and intimate life are connected to questions of spirituality, consciousness, faith, morality, creativity, or meaning
• you fear that a therapist will judge you, misunderstand you, or reduce you to a label
• you want a more alive and satisfying sexual life but do not know what is preventing it
You do not need to know exactly what the problem is before contacting me. The first task is often to find language for something that has been carried privately for a long time.
Care for the particular person
No two sexual or relational lives are identical.
My approach is informed by sex therapy, psychoanalysis, affective neuroscience, pastoral psychotherapy, and decades of clinical work. But the work does not begin with a theory or predetermined protocol. It begins with your actual experience.
Together, we may need to consider:
• personal and relational history
• attachment and loss
• shame and secrecy
• behavior and choice
• desire and fantasy
• bodily experience
• consent, boundaries, and responsibility
• spirituality, faith, or the absence of either
• conscience and moral conflict
• the meanings that sexuality and intimacy have acquired for you
The aim is not simply to make an unwanted feeling disappear or to impose a particular way of living. It is to understand what is happening deeply enough that new possibilities can emerge.
Areas of Practice
Complex sexual concerns
Kink, polyamory, and relationships beyond standard scripts
Sexuality, spirituality, and meaning
Couples and intimacy
Help with troubling sexual thoughts, fantasies, interests, or behaviors; difficult-to-manage patterns; sexual shame; and concerns sometimes described with terms such as paraphilia, fetish, compulsion, or addiction.
Care for individuals, couples, and partners living in or considering kink, BDSM, consensual nonmonogamy, polyamory, mixed erotic styles, or other “nontraditional” forms of relationship.
Sexual and intimate life may be connected to spirituality, embodiment, consciousness, creativity, ritual, moral conflict, religious formation, or the search for greater aliveness and meaning.
I work with people rooted in religious traditions, people who identify as spiritual but not religious, and people who are still discovering what language—if any—fits their experience.
Work with differences in desire, betrayal, erotic disconnection, incompatibility, aging, illness, grief, changing bodies, and the wish for a more alive and satisfying intimate relationship.
What “pastoral” psychotherapy means here
Pastoral psychotherapy, as I practice it, does not presume religion. It makes room for the life of the spirit—however you understand or name it.
For one person, that may involve God, faith, prayer, or participation in a religious tradition. For another, it may involve meditation, yoga, nature, ritual, energy, consciousness, creativity, embodiment, or a sense of the sacred. Still another person may use none of these words but know that sexuality and relationship touch the deepest questions of identity, meaning, connection, and aliveness.
The whole person may be taken seriously: body, mind, feeling, relationship, history, culture, imagination, conscience, meaning, and spirit.
I will not impose or suggest religious doctrine upon you. I will not dismiss spiritual experience as irrational or irrelevant. Nor will I assume that every spiritual interpretation is necessarily helpful or true.
We can explore your experience in the language that is authentic to you.
A small and highly individual practice
I maintain a deliberately limited practice so that the work can remain personal, thoughtful, and responsive.
You will communicate directly with me. There is no intake department and no institutional process to navigate.
A brief introductory conversation is available without charge to help us determine whether working together is appropriate.