The services offered at Rivka Sidorsky & Associates are religious and culturally-sensitive. If faith, religion, and culture are important to you, they are important for our work. Very often, religions have particular beliefs, practices, laws, and customs surrounding pre-marital sexuality, marital sexuality, and extra-marital sexuality. We not only honor and respect your religious and cultural beliefs, but if your faith or religion are important to you, we will work to use it as a tool in your healing. We have extra expertise working with individuals and couples who affiliate with Orthodox Judaism, Christianity, the LDS Church, Catholicism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Baha'i, and many other religions. If you find strength and comfort in your faith or religious beliefs, then we will work together to help you access that strength and inspiration from your religion.
So often in our culture, religion and culture are stigmatized as "backwards" or "outdated" or "part of the problem." We believe that for our religious clients, your religion is a true source of strength.
Additionally, in sex therapy, many approaches or techniques do not align with certain religious beliefs or laws. We will always discuss your religious beliefs with you and will find a way to provide sex therapy interventions that are aligned and fit comfortably with your religious or faith tradition.
Here are a few examples of how we have adapted sex therapy for religious clients:
Case Example #1: We worked with a young Mormon couple who were having difficulty consummating their marriage. After a while working on her pelvic pain issue and she was able to complete intercourse, her husband developed some erectile dysfunction from the experiences he has had with causing his wife pain with sex. Now he was afraid of causing her pain and this was causing him to have difficulty with his erection. The couple did not feel comfortable with him touching himself in order to help sustain the erection. We worked with their religious beliefs and adapted so that she would touch him in a way that would help him with his erectile difficulties. This was an approach that respected their feelings about masturbation and helped them complete their goals in a religiously and culturally sensitive way. Thankfully, they were able to reach their goals and were able to conceive their first child.
Case example #2: In working with an Orthodox Jewish couple, they have certain laws about "spilling the seed." With her complicated history of pelvic pain and complicated medical issues as well as sexual aversion, we figured out a way for him to ejaculate in a way that was allowed and kosher and respected her concerns about pain. With a modification and flexibility of sex therapy techniques, we were able to treat her pelvic pain and sexual aversion by having him ejaculate at the entrance to her vagina (allowed by their rabbi). This eliminated her experiencing pain and helped her with her "fear of pain." We were able to continue with a modified approach so that it worked with their religious views and was successful in treating her pelvic pain and her sexual aversion.