My book, Sexuality and Chronic Illness: A Clinician’s Guide to Sexual Wellness and Healing, will be released on December 7, 2026. You can pre-order it now!
Throughout my years as a psychotherapist, sex therapist, educator, and clinical supervisor, I have seen how frequently sexuality becomes overlooked when clients are living with chronic illness, disability, pain, medical treatment, and changes in physical functioning. While clinicians may feel comfortable addressing the psychological and relational effects of illness, conversations about sexual desire, pleasure, intimacy, body image, sexual functioning, and erotic identity can still be difficult to initiate.
Sexuality and Chronic Illness was written to help bridge that gap.
The book offers clinicians a practical, sex-positive, biopsychosocial framework for understanding how chronic illness can affect sexuality across the lifespan. It explores the intersections of medical conditions, medications, mental health, relationships, sexual functioning, identity, body image, grief and loss, communication, pleasure, and sexual adaptation.
Importantly, the book also approaches sexuality and chronic illness through an intersectional lens. People do not experience illness, disability, sexuality, or healthcare in isolation from the other identities they hold. Race, ethnicity, culture, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic status, relationship structure, disability, spirituality, and other dimensions of identity can profoundly influence how individuals understand their bodies, experience sexuality, access healthcare, encounter stigma, and navigate intimate relationships.
For clinicians, this means moving beyond a one-size-fits-all model of sexual wellness. The book considers how identity, culture, power, privilege, marginalization, and systemic barriers may shape a client’s experience of both chronic illness and sexuality. It also encourages clinicians to remain attentive to the ways our own assumptions about bodies, relationships, gender, ability, sexual functioning, and what constitutes a “healthy” sexual life can enter the therapeutic space.
A central message of the book is that sexual wellness is not simply about restoring sexual functioning to what it was before illness. For many clients, healing involves grieving changes, challenging assumptions about what sex is “supposed” to look like, adapting to the realities of the body, expanding definitions of pleasure and intimacy, reconnecting with sexual and relational identities, and developing a sexual life that feels meaningful within the context of illness.
My hope is that this book will be useful to psychotherapists, sex therapists, couples therapists, social workers, psychologists, counselors, physicians, nurses, rehabilitation professionals, and other providers who work with individuals, couples, and relational systems navigating chronic health conditions.
I’m very excited to finally begin sharing this work with the professional community, and I look forward to providing additional publication and ordering information as it becomes available.
Thank you to the many colleagues, clinicians, supervisees, and clients whose conversations over the years have continually reinforced the importance of making sexuality, identity, pleasure, and intimacy part of whole-person healthcare.