Reading List
Here are resources and a reading list that will help guide you philosophically and practically in becoming a Somatica Sex Coach. If you are serious about making this your profession, read both the required and recommended reading.
Required Reading
Shame
Men, Women and Worthiness: The Experience of Shame and the Power of Being Enough
By Brené Brown
With continued bravery and tenacity, Brené Brown helps us face one of our most challenging emotions: shame. She explores how shame arises differently for men and women and teaches four steps to shame resilience, helping us move beyond its crippling repression toward a more joyful, expressive, and pleasurable life.
Attachment
Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy
By Jessica Fern
Regardless of what relationship structure you or your clients want to have, Polysecure offers one of the most clear, concise, and non-judgmental explanations of attachment styles as well as a roadmap on how to deepen security in relationship.
Core Desires
Coming Together: Embracing Your Core Desires for Sexual Fulfillment and Long-Term Compatibility
By Danielle Harel PhD and Celeste Hirschman M.A.
Coming Together is an in-depth exploration into what turns you on and why. Understanding these Core Desires is the key to overcoming sexless marriage, regaining the spark, and solving low desire and ED. Have the sex you’ve always fantasized about!
The Erotic Mind: Unlocking the Inner Sources of Passion and Fulfillment
By Jack Morin
Jack Morin presents a pleasure-focused, non-judgmental approach to understanding our deepest turn-ons and fantasies. Morin helps us all to uncover and understand our “core erotic theme”, one of the surest pathways we have found to deeply knowing exactly what you are looking for from sex and intimacy, from there you can learn how to communicate about it and share it with a partner or partners.
Relationship Repair
Making Love Real: The Intelligent Couple’s Guide to Lasting Intimacy and Passion
By Danielle Harel PhD and Celeste Hirschman M.A.
Making Love Real will help you take both your sex life and relationship to the next level. This guide offers a comprehensive view of emotional and sexual relationship dynamics as well as practical tools for lasting transformation. Making Love Real goes beyond hot tips and tricks to help you address your foundational human needs so that you can create a deeply trusting, passionate and sustainable relationship. Read more.
The Course of Love
By Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton shares the story of a couple who take the journey from idealized romanticism and the hope of perfect fulfillment to the realities of love in long-term marriage. His writing is an amazing combination of a fictional story and a teaching manual. Read it closely and you will learn how to empathize across differences, share and listen to feelings, and understand the inner workings of the erotic mind.
Privilege, Oppression and Trauma Empowerment
My Grandmother’s Hands
By Resmaa Menakem
In My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem offers a body-based description of racialized trauma, which serves to explain the daily experiences that result from a history of trauma. This book elucidates the long-term effects of oppression, helps us understand the inner workings of trauma in general, and offers tools for an embodied journey of trauma healing
Sex Across the Gender, Sexuality, and Ability Spectrum
Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sexy Life
By Emily Nagoski, PhD
Nagoski offers an in-depth look at the social messages as well as the science around women’s sexuality. Nagoski gives women permission and a wealth of information foundational to the exploration of their own sexual desires and physiological responses.
Confidence: The Definitive Guide to Being the Man You Want to Be and Driving Women Wild
By Celeste Hirschman M.A. and Danielle Harel PhD
Whether you are single, dating, or in a relationship – this book will show you how to understand women, attract their sexual desire, and bring them to the heights of their erotic and orgasmic potential.
It will help you find your personal power, clarify who you are and what you want in your life, and have mind-blowing sex and passionate connections with women. Read more.
Life Isn’t Binary – On Being Both, Beyond, and In Between
By Alex Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker
Iantaffi and Barker deconstruct society’s binary assumptions and create space for the in between, both, and beyond when it comes to gender, sexuality and so much more. This book will help you think outside the box and support your clients in the freedom of self-definition and expression.
Blogs and information on treating Low Desire and addressing Sexual Dysfunction
The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability
By Cory Silverberg
The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability: For All of Us Who Live with Disabilities, Chronic Pain, and Illness is a thorough and sex-positive book, which challenges the myths around disability and sexuality and offers in-depth guidance on how to create a thriving sexual life for people across the ability spectrum.
Guide to Getting It On
By Paul Joannides
No need to purchase the most recent edition – an older edition is fine! If you are looking for a fun, hip, and detailed guide to pleasure for men, women, and couples, look no further. The Guide to Getting it On has it all. It is a must-have for every household who is interested in keeping their sex life hot.
It is essential to read at least one book that talks overtly about women’s and men’s physiology and sexual pleasure so you have lots of ideas to offer your clients.
Recommended Reading
Article on Psychological Erectile Dysfunction
The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge
Edited by Tristan Taormino
The Ultimate Guide to Kink is a textbook on the fundamentals of risk-aware consensual kink and BDSM, with plenty of illustrations, exercises, and references, as well as a collection of important, varied perspectives from renowned practitioners, including Patrick Califia, Midori, and Mollena Williams. The twenty essays cover skills and techniques (such as bondage, impact play, rough sex, and more), fantasy and role-playing, power exchange dynamics, and personal experiences in the scene.
Opening Up: A Guide To Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships
By Tristan Taormino
For couples considering some form of non-monogamous relationship, Tristan Taramino has put together a very practical, straightforward guide on styles of non-monogamy, as well as ideas about how you negotiate your relationship needs, desires and boundaries.
The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity
By Esther Perel
Finally, a book on affairs that deals with them in an adult manner. In The State of Affairs, Esther Perel points out that affairs have always been a part of the social fabric. However, they are such a charged issue, we never take the time to look under the surface of condemnation to see the human complexity of why people have affairs and how people feel who have been betrayed. She also gives many suggestions for how to face them, heal from them, and, sometimes even have stronger relationships as a result.
My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity
By Kate Bornstein
With the journey through My New Gender Workbook, Kate Bornstein offers all of us an opportunity to take a critical look at the way gender socialization and gender norms have constricted our self-expression. By exploding traditional ideas about gender, power, and sexuality, she invites us to claim our humanness and celebrate our identity, not as it is supposed to be, but as it truly is.
Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
By Christopher Ryan
Have you ever wondered if humans were meant to be monogamous? In this fascinating read, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha make a research-based case for how our prehistoric beginnings set us up to live a more non-monogamous life. If you are interested in exploring different relationship styles, this book is for you.
Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence
By Esther Perel
Perel talks about the inherent tension in long-term relationships between domesticity and passion. While commitment, trust, closeness and excellent communication are the foundations of sharing a life, home, and children with another, passion needs distance, barriers, a synapse over which to jump in order for relationships to stay hot and exciting.
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
By Marshall B. Rosenberg
If you want to make your relationship better overnight, begin using the communication techniques offered in this book. When you learn how to really listen to each other, to take responsibility for your feelings and needs and for communicating them and when you learn to truly empathize with your partner, everything becomes easier!
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