SexSmart: How Your Childhood Shaped Your Sexual Life and What to Do About It: Transform Your Sexuality [Paperback]

Whether your problem is lack of desire, difficulty with sexual functioning, sexual pain, sexual addiction, anxiety, sexual inhibition, or fear of sexuality altogether, your life growing up as a child in your family may be partly to blame. Fully a third of us grew up in homes where our sexual development was terribly derailed, due to alcoholism or drug abuse, mental illness, witnessing spousal abuse, experiencing physical, emotional or sexual abuse, or just plain neglect. For others of us, the family problems were so subtle we never recognized them.

Sex Smart is the award-winning book praised by America's top sexologists as an essential guide for understanding your sexual self and solving your problems.

"Sex Smart is a wonderfully written, clear account of the many factors that shape and influence our sexual selves. Unlike most self-help books, which focus on aspects of sexual performance, Dr. Zoldbrod takes a broad, integrative view. With great skill and warmth, she weaves a tapestry of complex non-sexual events in our past that determine the ways in which we relate sexually. Complemented by rich clinical vignettes, her book will be welcomed by those wishing to understand the nuances and mysteries that contribute to our sexual being."
--Derek C. Polonsky M.D., Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Executive Council Member, Society for Sex Therapy and Research; author,TalkingAbout Sex.

Highly recommended in professional journals:
--Contemporary Sexuality, American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists, 2005, reviewed by Sally Valentine, Ph.D.
--Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, 2005, reviewed by Ursula Ofman, Psy.D.

The perfect title for anyone who's mystified about why they
Hi. I'm Aline Zoldbrod, Ph.D., the author of Sex Smart, a licensed psychologist, and a sex therapist certified by the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists. I'm happy to tell you more about my book. If you are mystified about why you turned out the way you did sexually, or how to solve your sexual problems, Sex Smart is for you. Sex Smart is also for you if you are a person who is simply intrigued by sexuality and wants to understand it more deeply. Sex Smart talks about sex in a way that is unlike most other self help books, because it discusses many of the non-sexual aspects of family life which contribute to adult sexuality. How your family touches, and whether or not your parents listened to you and your emotional needs. Whether or not you learned trust. What kind of message your parents gave you about your body. How your parents handled power. What you learned from your parents' relationship to you. Whether there was emotional neglect, alcoholism, or physical violence. What your parents taught you about friendship. Whether you felt you owned your own self or not. These probably aren't aspects of your family life that you think of as being tied to how you feel about yourself as a sexual person now. I have always loved being a sex therapist. Each person's sexual development is so completely unique that figuring out the puzzle of each patient's (or a couple's) sexual problem is always interesting. For many years, I have been thinking about why people turn out so different sexually, why there are so many variations in sexual preferences and sexual pleasures and sexual problems. I did a lot of reading, trying to see if anyone had written a theory of sexual development that explained this phenomenon for me. I couldn't find one. Many of my patients had erotic blocks which completely puzzled them. The other "how-to" books and articles they had read had not explained to them why they had the issues they had and hadn't helped to fix them. The problems themselves weren't unusual--things like lack of desire, difficulty getting aroused, orgasm problems, erection difficulties, premature ejaculation, sexual addictions and compulsions, sexual pain. These are garden variety issues for a sexual therapist to treat. But when I unraveled a number of these people's questions, it turned out that the answer lay in their family experience. And until they were able to understand the deeper events, the behavioral exercises suggested in the other articles and the books they had been reading didn't work. (For instance, a man with erection problems had been negatively affected by seeing his father beat his mother. A woman with sexual pain came from a family where no one ever touched each other affectionately.) My patients thought my explanations made a lot of sense. But people lose a lot of what happens during the therapy siession within a few hours, let alone from one week to the next. They wanted a book to read that would reinforce and amplify what I was saying to them in their sex therapy sessions. But there was no book available I could recommend to them that explained what had happened to them the way I was describing it in the sex therapy sessions. As I treated more and more patients and looked carefully at why people had the sexual difficulties they had, I came up with my own integrated theory of what each of us needs to get in our family-of-origin to be able to enjoy being sexual as an adult. So I wrote Sex Smart, to help people understand that a lot of non-sexual events in family life turn out to profoundly affect how we feel about letting go sexually with another person. Understanding the basis of our sexual difficulties lays the groundwork emotionally. At the end of each chapter, Sex Smart goes on to give exercises to do. I must tell you that it is pretty frightening to come out with your own theory about something and then see what other experts have to say about it. I'm delighted at the response Sex Smart has gotten. More than a dozen of the nation's most famous sex therapists and experts in psychiatry and the addictions have endorsed the book and my ideas about why people turn out the way they do sexually. Sex Smart won Fore Word Magazine's Bronze Award for the Best Self Help Book of 1998. I have also gotten calls from all over the U.S. and Canada from people telling me that this is the first book which explained their sexuality to them, and one which gave them some hpe that they could change things. Sex Smart will be translated into Turkish and Spanish. I hope you read Sex Smart, and that it helps you. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.