How Do I Find a Good Poly or Kink-Friendly Therapist?
Cathy: How do I find a good poly or kink-friendly therapist? This is Reid Mihalko from http://www.ReidAboutSex.com/
Reid: Cathy Vartuli from http://www.IntimacyDojo.com/
Cathy: And someone wrote in and said they were looking for a therapist and they weren’t sure how to find someone who is poly or kink-friendly. I think one of the first things I would do is ask your community.
Reid: What if you don’t don’t have a community?
Cathy: If you don’t have a community, if you can find one great, you can google depending on where you live you could literally google poly or kink-friendly therapist, but like in Dallas I know there were a couple but they didn’t advertise for that because they would have gotten a lot of flak so..
Reid: So how did you find them?
Cathy: What people did was they joined like the poly group on Facebook or they have an anonymous Facebook account and they went in to join and ask for that.
Reid: Got it.
Cathy: Or they went on some meet ups and they would ask, what would you recommend to people?
Reid: No, I mean, that’s good, I mean you should, you can http://openingup.net/, the website for Tristan Taormino’s book Opening Up and I know that she has a resource section there you could go to your local adult sex toy store especially if it’s women-owned or kind of like feminist sex toy store and ask.
Cathy: Or the dungeon if you’re kinky
Reid: Or the dungeon if you’re kinky and ask there, you know the people that work in those kinds of venues will often have a resource list, you can certainly email me but I might not know somebody in your area. Yeah I mean, those that’s where I would start and you know if you live in a small town that’s very conservative, there might be a poly or kink-friendly therapist there but like Cathy just said, you know who’s not advertising because they don’t want backlash.
Cathy: Yeah, so the nice thing is more and more people are working on Skype or doing distant coaching, they usually have to be in the same state for insurance, if you have insurance from what I understand but you could also just go in and ask them a lot of people feel like if they get an appointment with the therapist, they kind of need to stick with that therapist versus calling up and saying hey, is this person, you know are you kink or poly-friendly.
Reid: Yeah, there might be therapist who knows other therapists as well.
Cathy: Or can you recommend yeah.
Reid: Sure.
Cathy: Or just inter, spending the first you know ten minutes of a session actually interviewing them to figure out if they’re good fit for you coz even if they’re poly or kink-friendly they may have other things that make them not a good fit for you.
Reid: http://www.lovemore.com/ is another national poly organization, you can check their resource as well, they would probably know a bunch of places and you could also go to https://www.aasect.org/ which is the American Association for Sex Educators Counselors and Therapists and check and see if they have a resource page as well because that might also have that listed by region.
Cathy: Yeah, we hope this helps, please leave comments below or any thoughts you have.
Reid: Yeah. Thanks!