Couples and Sexuality: Books, Websites, Podcasts
Books
General Relationship / Attachment
Hold Me Tight by Dr. Sue Johnson - The message of Hold Me Tight is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, get to the emotional underpinnings of your relationship by recognizing that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. Dr. Johnson teaches that the way to enhance or save a relationship is to be open, attuned, and responsive to each other and to reestablish emotional connection. With this in mind, she focuses on key moments in a relationship and uses them as touch points for seven healing conversations, including: Recognizing the Demon Dialogues, Finding the Raw Spots, Revisiting a Rocky Moment, Forgiving Injuries, Keeping Your Love Alive. These conversations give you insight into the defining moments in your relationship and guide you in reshaping these moments to create a secure and lasting bond.
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by Dr. John Gottman and Nan Silver - Straightforward yet profound, these principles teach partners new approaches for resolving conflicts, creating new common ground, and achieving greater levels of intimacy. Gottman offers strategies and resources to help couples collaborate more effectively to resolve any problem, whether dealing with issues related to sex, money, religion, work, family, or anything else.
The Power of Attachment by Diane Poole Heller - From our earliest years, we develop an attachment style that follows us through life, replaying in our daily emotional landscape, our relationships, and how we feel about ourselves. And in the wake of a traumatic event―such as a car accident, severe illness, loss of a loved one, or experience of abuse―that attachment style can deeply influence what happens next. In this book, Dr. Diane Poole Heller, a pioneer in attachment theory and trauma resolution, shows how overwhelming experiences can disrupt our most important connections― with the parts of ourselves within, with the physical world around us, and with others.
Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel - In her twenty years of clinical experience, Perel has treated hundreds of couples whose home lives are empty of passion. They describe relationships that are open and loving, yet sexually dull. What is going on?
In this explosively original book, Perel explains that our cultural penchant for equality, togetherness, and absolute candor is antithetical to erotic desire for both men and women. Sexual excitement doesn't always play by the rules of good citizenship. It is politically incorrect. It thrives on power plays, unfair advantages, and the space between self and other. More exciting, playful, even poetic sex is possible, but first we must kick egalitarian ideals and emotional housekeeping out of our bedrooms.
Sexuality
Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski - For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, women’s sexuality was an uncharted territory in science, studied far less frequently—and far less seriously—than its male counterpart. That is, until Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which used groundbreaking science and research to prove that the most important factor in creating and sustaining a sex life filled with confidence and joy is not what the parts are or how they’re organized but how you feel about them. In the years since the book’s initial publication, countless women have learned through Nagoski’s accessible and informative guide that things like stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it—and that even if you don’t always feel like it, you are already sexually whole by just being yourself.
She Comes First by Ian Kerner, LMFT, PhD
Things Your Mother Never Told You: A Woman ' s Guide to Sexuality by Kim Gaines Eckert, PhD.
Infidelity and Affairs
The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity by Esther Perel, PhD
Websites
Diane Poole Heller - https://traumasolutions.com/
The Gottman Method - https://www.gottman.com/couples/
Esther Perel - https://www.estherperel.com/blog
Dear Young Married Couple - https://www.dearyoungmarriedcouple.com/
Podcasts
Where Should We Begin? (Esther Perel) - https://www.estherperel.com/podcast
Small Things Often (The Gottman Institute) - https://www.gottman.com/podcast/
Dear Young Married Couple (Adam and Karissa King) - https://www.youtube.com/@dearyoungmarriedcouple
The Decoding Couples Podcast (Rachel Facio & Stacy Sherrell) - https://www.decodingcouples.com/podcast