Conversation-based therapy for people who want to talk about sexuality, intimacy, and connection with someone who will not flinch. Delivered by regulated clinicians, including Registered Psychologists registered with the College of Alberta Psychologists (CAP). Available individually or with a partner or partners, subject to fit and clinician availability. In-person at Edmonton and St. Albert locations, with virtual appointments that may be available across Alberta. 50-minute sessions.

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You Might Be Wondering Whether Sex Therapy Is Right for You

You may have opened and closed this page before. A lot of people get as far as a search bar, then decide the problem is not big enough, or too awkward to say out loud to a stranger, or something that will probably sort itself out.

Maybe you have started avoiding intimacy and then felt bad about avoiding it. Maybe you are present with a partner but feel a long way away. Maybe something has changed in your desire, comfort, or body that you cannot account for, and you have been quietly managing it on your own.

Concerns about sex and intimacy are common, and they are usually tangled up with other things: stress, health, medication, life stage, relationship history, culture, faith, and what you were taught about your own body. Canadian professional guidance describes sexuality as a highly individual experience shaped by values, past experiences, physical and mental health, and relationships (Canadian Psychological Association [CPA], 2019). These are ordinary human variations, not evidence that something is wrong with you.

You do not need a label, a diagnosis, or a crisis to justify a conversation. If you would like to see what this kind of support actually involves before deciding anything, the rest of this page walks through it.

Who We Help

Sex therapy at Wholesome Psychology may be a reasonable fit if you are:

• Noticing changes in desire, arousal, comfort, or interest that you would like to understand.
• Finding it hard to talk with a partner about needs, preferences, consent, or boundaries.
• Managing a mismatch in expectations or wants inside a relationship.
• Adjusting to intimacy after a health change, pregnancy, becoming a parent, or aging.
• Sorting through how stress, mood, self-image, or past experiences connect to your sexuality.
• Working out questions about orientation, gender, culture, faith, or personal values.
• Trying to decide whether individual, couples, or relationship-focused support fits your goals.
• Gathering information for someone you care about rather than for yourself.

This service may not be the right fit in these situations:

• You need urgent help. Please use the crisis resources below instead.
• You need a formal psychological assessment or a report. Psychological assessment is a separate service at this clinic and is not part of sex therapy. If you are looking for that, see Sexual Functioning Assessment.
• You need a legal, forensic, or court-directed service. Therapy is not an investigation, a legal process, or a source of evidence for proceedings.
• Your concern is primarily medical. Pain, hormonal changes, medication effects, and other physical factors need a physician or another appropriate regulated health professional. Therapy does not replace that assessment.
• You are looking for support with sexual behaviour that has caused harm or legal difficulty. That work is a distinct specialist area. Please contact the administrative team so you can be pointed toward an appropriate service rather than booked into the wrong one.

If You Need Help Right Now

Wholesome Psychology is not an emergency or crisis service. We cannot respond to urgent messages outside of appointments. If you are in danger or cannot stay safe, please use one of these instead:

• 911 for immediate danger, or go to your nearest emergency department.
• Alberta Mental Health Help Line: 1-877-303-2642, 24 hours a day.
• Family Violence Info Line (Alberta): 310-1818, 24 hours a day, toll-free, if coercion, pressure, or violence is part of what you are dealing with.
• Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741.

Wholesome Psychology is not an emergency or crisis service.

What This Service Is

Sex therapy is talk therapy. It is a series of conversations with a regulated clinician about sexuality, intimacy, communication, consent, and the relationship context around them.

Sessions involve conversation only. They do not involve sexual contact, nudity, or physical examination of any kind. No clinician at this clinic will ever ask you to undress or be touched. If anything about a session ever feels otherwise, you can stop and raise it with the administrative team.

The pace belongs to you. You decide what to bring up, how much detail to give, and what to leave alone for now. If something is considered between sessions, it is discussed openly first and agreed on together, and you can decline.

A few boundaries worth stating plainly. This service is not a psychological assessment and does not produce diagnoses or reports. It is not a legal or investigative process. It is not a substitute for medical care, and it is not crisis support. Confidentiality and its limits are explained before you share anything personal, and there is a fuller section on that below.

Signs Sexual Concerns May Be Affecting You

People arrive with very different experiences. Some of the patterns that bring people in include:

• Losing interest in sex, or having interest that no longer matches a partner's.
• Discomfort, tension, or pain connected with sexual activity.
• Difficulty with arousal, or difficulty staying present during intimacy.
• Avoiding closeness, then feeling guilty or distant afterward.
• Going quiet about what you want because raising it feels risky or unkind.
• Feeling watchful or self-critical about your body during sex.
• Carrying worry between encounters about whether things will go wrong again.
• Noticing that stress, low mood, medication, or a health change has shifted things.
• Feeling that your values, upbringing, or faith sit uneasily with what you want.

Canadian professional guidance notes that difficulties like these can have physical causes, psychological ones, relational ones, or several at once, and that some are temporary responses to a demanding period of life (CPA, 2019). Recognizing yourself in this list does not mean you have a disorder and does not mean anything is permanently wrong. It means there is something worth talking through, and structured conversation is one place to do that.

How Treatment Works Here

• Find your therapist. Use the Match with a Therapist tool or read through Our Therapists. You can also call the administrative team at 780-904-4880 and ask for help narrowing it down. Because training in sexual health varies between clinicians, it is reasonable to ask directly about a therapist's experience in this area before you book (CPA, 2019).
• Book your first session. The first appointment covers what brought you in, what you would like to work on, informed consent, and confidentiality along with its limits. It is also a chance to ask questions before you share anything personal.
• Build your plan together. Goals are set collaboratively. You are not handed a protocol. What gets prioritized, and what stays off the table for now, is discussed with you.
• Ongoing sessions. Sessions run 50 minutes, typically weekly or bi-weekly, and the spacing can be adjusted as things change.
• Progress check-ins. Your clinician reviews how things are going at regular intervals. Plans get revised when they are not working.

There is no fixed number of sessions and no standard course length. Some people come for a short stretch with a specific question. Others stay longer. Your view of what is working matters at every stage, including the decision to stop.

Evidence and Approaches

An honest note before the detail. The research materials assembled for this page do not include a systematic review or clinical guideline covering sex therapy outcomes as a whole. What follows describes approaches documented in Canadian professional guidance and one recent review of online delivery. It describes the field, not a confirmed menu of techniques offered here. Which approach a clinician uses is something to discuss with them directly.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

What it helps with: Patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaviour that interfere with comfortable or satisfying sexual experience.

Evidence summary: The Canadian Psychological Association describes cognitive behavioural therapy as the most frequently used and best established short-term psychological approach for sexual difficulties, generally delivered across weekly or bi-weekly sessions (CPA, 2019). The same guidance indicates that psychological work usually opens with a careful discussion of history and circumstances rather than a fixed protocol.

Limitations: This comes from a professional education resource rather than a systematic review, so it does not establish how well the approach performs against alternatives or what any individual should expect. No Tier 1 review of sex therapy outcomes was available for this page.

Mindfulness-Based Approaches

What it helps with: Difficulties with sexual interest and arousal, and anxiety or pain connected with sexual activity.

Evidence summary: Canadian professional guidance reports that mindfulness is increasingly folded into cognitive behavioural work or used on its own, and identifies interest and arousal difficulties, pain and anxiety with intercourse, and sexual concerns arising alongside health conditions as areas where it has been applied (CPA, 2019).

Limitations: This source is a public education fact sheet. It reports no effect sizes, comparison conditions, or population breakdowns. Individual responses differ, and nothing here predicts an outcome for a particular person.

Online and Virtual Delivery

What it helps with: Access to conversation-based support for people who prefer to meet remotely or cannot easily attend in person.

Evidence summary: A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of online interventions for sexual dysfunctions reported that most participants showed measurable improvement in sexual function, across interventions averaging roughly ten weeks (Ferreira et al., 2026). The authors concluded that further research is needed before the findings can be generalized.

Limitations: The review drew on eight studies and 961 participants, and most participants had been treated for cancer, so the results may not carry over to a general sex therapy population. Virtual care should not be assumed equivalent to in-person work, and it does not suit every person or situation.

Where Sexual Health Sits in Clinical Classification

The World Health Organization's ICD-11 includes a chapter on conditions related to sexual health, covering sexual dysfunctions and sexual pain disorders (World Health Organization [WHO], 2025). Classification systems exist to organize health information. They do not determine whether your experience is real, how distressing it is, or whether therapy is worth your time. Therapy at this clinic does not assign diagnoses.

What Results to Expect

No therapy guarantees an outcome, and this page does not promise one. Change in this area tends to be uneven rather than linear, with stretches where things move and stretches where they do not.

Several things influence how it goes: what you are working with, your physical health, what else is happening in your life, whether a partner is involved, and the fit between you and your clinician. Some people notice shifts within a few months. Others find longer-term work more useful. The research assembled for this page does not support any statement about how quickly results appear, so any timeline you read anywhere, including here, should be treated with caution.

Fit matters more than most people expect. If an approach is not working, it can be changed. If a clinician is not right for you, you can switch, and asking to do so is a normal part of the process rather than a complaint.

Confidentiality and Privacy

What you say in therapy is treated as confidential. Given the subject matter, that deserves more than one line of reassurance, so here is how it actually works.

Psychologists in Alberta are regulated by the College of Alberta Psychologists (CAP) and are guided by the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists. Both set expectations for privacy, informed consent, and record keeping (CAP, 2023).

Two pieces of Alberta legislation are relevant, and they apply differently. The Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) is the legislation that generally governs psychologists working in private practice or private clinics, which includes this one. The Health Information Act (HIA) governs health information held by custodians as defined in that Act. CAP's guidance is explicit that psychologists are not currently designated as custodians under the HIA, though psychologists employed or contracted by a custodian, such as a psychologist working in a hospital, are treated as affiliates and must handle health information in accordance with it (CAP, 2026).

Confidentiality has limits, and your clinician will explain them at the first session before you share anything personal. In general, information may need to be disclosed when:

• There is a risk of serious harm to you or to someone else.
• There is reason to suspect that a child is being abused or neglected, which triggers a mandatory reporting duty under Alberta law.
• A court orders disclosure, or disclosure is otherwise required by law.

You are welcome to ask how records are stored, who can see them, and what happens to them, before you disclose anything. For virtual appointments, it is worth thinking about where you will sit and which device you will use, since privacy on your end is something only you can arrange.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to describe my sex life in explicit detail?

No. You control the level of detail, and you can say that a topic is off limits without explaining why. Useful work often focuses on present-day patterns, communication, and what you want to be different, rather than on graphic recall. If a clinician asks something you would rather not answer, saying so is a legitimate response and not a problem.

Is what I share kept private?

Yes, with defined legal limits. Your clinician reviews confidentiality and its exceptions during the consent process at the first session, before you share anything personal. The main exceptions involve risk of serious harm, suspected abuse or neglect of a child, and court orders or other legal requirements. The confidentiality section above sets out the relevant Alberta legislation and regulatory bodies.

How many sessions will I need?

There is no fixed answer, and anyone who gives you a firm number without knowing your situation is guessing. Some people come with a focused question and attend for a short period. Others find longer-term work more useful. Progress is reviewed regularly, and the plan is adjusted with you rather than for you.

What if the therapist is not the right fit?

Then you change therapists. Fit has a real effect on whether therapy is useful, and this subject matter makes it more important than usual, so it is worth taking seriously rather than persevering out of politeness. Call the administrative team at 780-904-4880 and they can help you find a different clinician. New clients may access their first session at 50% off to help find the right therapeutic fit.

Can I access therapy online?

Virtual appointments may be available across Alberta, subject to clinician availability and whether remote work suits your goals. The same confidentiality standards apply. Whether virtual is a good option also depends on having somewhere private to speak from, which is worth thinking through in advance.

Do I have to attend with a partner?

No. People attend on their own, and people attend with a partner or partners. Canadian professional guidance notes that partner involvement can be helpful, and also that individual work remains worthwhile when a partner is not available or not willing (CPA, 2019). What suits your situation can be discussed when you book or at the first session.

Does sex therapy involve physical contact or demonstrations?

No. Sessions are conversation only. There is no sexual contact, no nudity, and no physical examination. If between-session reflection or practice is ever suggested, it is discussed openly first, agreed together, and something you can decline.

Do I need a diagnosis or a referral first?

No. You do not need a referral, a diagnosis, or a specific label to book. This service does not provide diagnoses. If you are specifically seeking a formal evaluation, that is a separate service, and Sexual Functioning Assessment is the relevant page.

Meet Your Clinicians

Wholesome Psychology clinicians hold a range of credentials: Registered Psychologists, Registered Provisional Psychologists, Registered Social Workers, Certified Canadian Counsellors, Mental Health Therapists, and Student Therapists. Fees differ by credential type, as listed above.

All psychologists at the clinic are registered with the College of Alberta Psychologists. Registered Provisional Psychologists practise under the supervision of a senior registered psychologist. Registered Social Workers and Certified Canadian Counsellors are regulated or certified through their own respective bodies.

Training and experience in sexual health vary from clinician to clinician, and this page does not identify any individual as a sex therapy specialist. Canadian professional guidance recommends asking a prospective clinician directly about their expertise and experience in this area when you first make contact (CPA, 2019). That is a reasonable question and clinicians expect it.

You can read individual profiles on Our Therapists, use the Match with a Therapist tool, or call the administrative team at 780-904-4880 for help deciding.

Related Support

Depending on what you would like to talk about, these services may also be relevant:

• Couples Counselling
• Sexuality and Intimacy Therapy
• Male Sexual Health
• Female Sexual Issues
• Online Counselling

Taking a Next Step

If you would like to try this, there are a few ways in. You can book a session online, use the Match with a Therapist tool, call 780-904-4880, or email info@wholesomepsychology.ca. The Getting Started with Therapy page explains what the process looks like from the beginning.

New clients may access their first session at 50% off to help find the right therapeutic fit.

Starting the conversation is enough.

References

• College of Alberta Psychologists. (2023). Standards of Practice.
• College of Alberta Psychologists. (2026). Interpretive guide: Privacy legislation in Alberta (Approved November 24, 2023; revised January 23, 2026).
• Ghannam Ferreira, B., Lerner, T., Fuster Barbosa, G., Aida Gay de Pereyra, E., Baracat, E. C., & Soares, J. M., Jr. (2026). Online interventions for the treatment of sexual dysfunctions: Systematic review and meta-analysis. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 23. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsxmed/qdag154
• Reissing, E. (2019). "Psychology Works" fact sheet: Female sexual dysfunction. Canadian Psychological Association.
• World Health Organization. (2025). ICD-11 for Mortality and Morbidity Statistics (Version 2025-01), Chapter 17: Conditions related to sexual health. World Health Organization.