This workshop offers a clear, integrative, and clinically grounded approach to working with desire discrepancy in couples, through a psychosexual lens that sits in direct dialogue with Relational Life Therapy (RLT).
Sexuality remains one of the least well-integrated areas of psychotherapy and couples therapy training. It is often treated as a specialist or stand-alone modality, leaving many therapists under-resourced and lacking confidence when working with sexual issues in clinical practice. As a result, desire discrepancy—one of the most common presenting issues in couples therapy—is frequently misunderstood, pathologised, or approached in ways that inadvertently increase shame, blame, and relational polarisation.
This workshop seeks to bring sexuality back into the relational centre of therapeutic work.
Drawing from contemporary psychosexual theory, including models of sexual arousal, spontaneous and responsive desire, and the role of context in shaping erotic experience, this workshop offers a framework that helps therapists normalise desire discrepancy and work with it more effectively.
At the heart of this approach is the understanding that desire is not fixed or trait-based, but relational, contextual, and responsive. Rather than asking “what is wrong with one partner?”, the work shifts toward understanding the conditions under which desire can emerge, develop, and be sustained within the relationship.
Through the integration of psychosexual principles with an RLT-informed relational stance, participants will learn how to support couples in moving out of blame and impasse, and into curiosity, collaboration, and the conscious co-creation of an erotic relationship.
Dolma’s workshop was a masterful synthesis of complex material, delivered with clarity, rigour, and deep passion… Her commitment to reclaiming the contributions of Psychosynthesis, and of Assagioli himself, felt both timely and necessary. A rare and inspiring offering.
