PSYCHOSEXUAL AND RELATIONSHIP THERAPY
Monica Chiorascu MBACP - Integrative Psychotherapist | Psychosexual & Relationship Therapy | Sex & Porn Addiction
What is psychosexual and relationship therapy?
Psychosexual and relationship therapy focuses on how sex, intimacy, and relationships connect — as your own experience, or as something you're navigating together with a partner. It sits alongside general couples or individual work, but goes deeper into the specific territory of desire, intimacy, and how we relate to our own and each other's bodies.
I work from a biopsychosocial approach — meaning I look at the whole picture: body, mind, relationship, and life circumstances together, rather than treating a sexual or relational difficulty as one isolated thing. A change in desire, for instance, is rarely just physical or just emotional — it's usually a conversation between both, plus whatever's happening in the relationship and in life more broadly.
Terms you might see used
This area of therapy is described in a few overlapping ways:
Psychosexual therapy — focused specifically on sexual difficulties and their impact
Relationship therapy — focused on the relational dynamic itself, with or without a sexual component
Psychosexual and relationship therapy — the combined term, reflecting how rarely the two sit apart in practice
Sex therapy — a more everyday term for the same broad area of work
How the process works
1. Initial appointment A first conversation to explore what's brought you here — whether you're coming alone or with a partner, and however clear or unclear the concern feels right now.
2. Assessment A fuller session (or sessions) looking at relevant history, current relationship dynamics, and the specific difficulty in more depth — including physical, emotional, and relational factors, and life stage or circumstances that may be part of the picture.
3. Formulation Together, we make sense of what the assessment has shown — how desire, intimacy, communication, and relationship patterns connect for you specifically. This becomes the shared understanding the rest of the work is built on, arrived at with you, not delivered to you.
4. Ongoing work From here, we agree a way of working that fits what the formulation has shown — at a pace that suits you (or both of you), reviewed together as we go, rather than following a fixed programme.
Who this is for
Individuals wanting to understand a sexual or intimacy-related difficulty
Couples where desire, sex, or intimacy has become a source of distance or difficulty
People navigating the impact of illness, menopause, ageing, or disability on intimacy
People exploring questions of sexuality, orientation, or identity
Couples wanting to rebuild intimacy after a rupture or life change
Anyone who's found this a hard thing to talk about anywhere else — that's exactly what this space is for
What counselling can help with
This isn't an exhaustive list, but common areas include:
Desire differences — [e.g. mismatched libido between partners, or a change in your own desire over time]
Sexual anxiety or difficulty — [e.g. performance anxiety, pain during sex, difficulty with arousal or orgasm, without a clear medical cause]
Impact of life changes on intimacy — [e.g. illness, medication, menopause, pregnancy, ageing, or disability]
Rebuilding intimacy after a breach of trust — [e.g. infidelity, or a loss of closeness over time]
Sexuality and identity — [e.g. making sense of orientation, gender, or a part of yourself you haven't explored before]
Shame and inhibition — [e.g. a difficult relationship with your own body, or beliefs about sex carried from earlier in life]
Mismatched expectations between partners — [e.g. around frequency, type of intimacy, or what sex "should" look like]
Wanting a calmer, more honest relationship with sex — [e.g. simply wanting to feel less alone with something private]
If what's on your mind isn't listed here, it still belongs in this room. Get in touch and we can talk it through, with no pressure to have the right words for it yet.
Monica Chiorascu MBACP
Integrative Psychotherapist | Psychosexual & Relationship Therapy | Sex & Porn Addiction
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