Naked Therapy (N.T.) is an experience that combines elements of positive and person-centered talk therapy, experiential therapy, and creative play therapy, with the added component of the patient and/or therapist getting naked to facilitate more honest and unique insights through the experience of arousal. In each Naked Therapy session, I seek to provide my patients with a comfortable, accepting, even fun environment wherein they can develop a sense of self that is empowering, an awareness of their feelings that is freeing, and an understanding of the conflicts that are holding them back from realizing their full potential. Just as dreams unlock the unconscious, arousal unlocks the hyper-conscious. Arousal may be emotional, physical, and/or intellectual.

A Naked Therapy session takes place via live text chat or voice call and lasts 40 minutes. We will talk about whatever’s on your mind, just like in a regular talk therapy situation, but as our conversation progresses I will drip videos to you that help increase your arousal and inspire new insights and feelings. These fully videos are of me stripping, oiling and rubbing my feet and breasts, sucking on a dildo and making it squirt, using my fingers or a sex toy to pleasure myself, and more. You, the patient, are also free to send me videos of yourself, naked or clothed, doing whatever you wish.

Every Naked Therapy session is different for every patient because it’s based on the patient’s arousal, which is always personal and unique. And different patients seek Naked Therapy for different reasons. Some are single and they’re trying to get better at meeting someone significant. Some are married and they’re looking for someone new to talk to. Some are having sexual or relationship problems and want help working through them. Some lack confidence around the opposite sex and need to practice and improve in that area. Some have unresolved issues from childhood that are keeping them from realizing their full potential. Some are frustrated and simply need to vent. Some are dealing with pornography addiction and want to overcome that. Some merely want to express themselves and engage in thoughtful conversation with someone who listens. Some are just curious. And some are interested in taking a long, fascinating journey through their arousal.

But nakedness and arousal on my part and yours provide you with the possibility of letting go of restrictions and inhibitions and also instantly establishes a communicative, intimate, and trusting relationship between us. Instead of the cold, objective, impersonal demeanor of some traditional therapists, you will encounter me just as I am, with nothing to hide, and as a result you will feel less inhibited, and through the arousal I provide you will discover things no clothed therapist can provide you.

Accepting Male Desire

All of my patients are men, and that’s something I’m very proud of, because men want to be in therapy but traditional therapeutic practices – which not only downplay and dismiss expressions of male arousal, but have completely forbidden it in the therapeutic setting – have proven increasingly unattractive to them. As these statistics make painfully clear, men represent the vast majority of those in crisis. Yet as this article points out, therapy is quickly becoming something that only women seek. In other words, there is a major and growing disconnect between those who need therapy and those who are getting therapy. And what has been traditional therapy’s response to this disconnect? In general, it’s been to say that men “don’t get it.” Well, I say it’s not men who don’t get therapy, it’s therapy that doesn’t get men. Naked Therapy is first and foremost an attempt to create a form of therapy that men want to participate in because they feel it’s relevant to their thoughts, feelings, and urges. An expanded version of my views on this Global Mental Health Crisis can be found here.

Here’s a list, far from all-inclusive, of some of the things my patients and I work on together in our Naked Therapy sessions:

– Resolving conflicted feelings
– Choosing between contradictory objectives
– Setting achievable goals
– Becoming more motivated
– Feeling more confident
– Identifying and overcoming sources of unhappiness, stress, shame and impotence
– Achieving a more satisfying sex life
– Improving intimate relationships
– Understanding and resolving feelings about porn use
– Seeing positively and harnessing the power of masturbation

These issues are symptomatic of what I call the new male hysteric, which I expound on here

What’s So Important About Arousal?

In our current therapeutic culture, arousal (not to mention nakedness) is largely forbidden between therapist and patient. This is because arousal is associated with sex, and sex between therapist and patient is not allowed by the Codes of Ethics of the American Counseling Association and the American Psychology Association. But Naked Therapy does not involve sex between therapist and patient. Instead, it supports and encourages the patient’s arousal through the therapist’s nakedness and attitude in order to explore how the patient being aroused might help him achieve his therapeutic goals.

By linking arousal and sex, and therefore forbidding arousal because sex is forbidden, the “institution” – which is increasingly run by women – has failed to understand and fully utilize therapeutically what happens to men psychologically when they get aroused. Perhaps the closest we’ve come to explaining that is the tantric philosophy, typified by such books as “From Sex to Super Consciousness” by Osho. And while it respects and gains some impetus from this spiritual approach, Naked Therapy is a more “Western” analytic approach that is both informed by 21st century realities (such as the Internet) that encourages and utilizes in a therapeutic context the mental causes and effects of physical arousal.

Naked Therapy is based on the assertion that it is not enough to say a man seeks arousal just “because he naturally wants sex.” Men seek arousal not only to feel physically good, but for the emotional, inspirational, and mental benefits and effects it offers. It relieves their stress. It stimulates sections of their brain not reachable in other ways. It excites them about their lives. It puts them in touch with who they are, what they want, and what they imagine they might be. Indeed, I would assert that helping a man open up to his aroused mind is akin to helping him open up to his unconscious mind. Just as Freud said “your unconscious thoughts mean something personally relevant to you,” Naked Therapy says “your arousal thoughts mean something personally relevant to you.”

And indeed, Freudian Psychoanalysis and Naked Therapy have, in a certain sense, similar beginnings. Freud devised a therapeutic method meant to treat what was ailing turn-of-the-century women – called “hysteria” – while I have devised a therapeutic method to treat what’s ailing turn-of-the-century (albeit a different century) men – which I call “phobophilia,” or the fear of desire. Of course, men shouldn’t fear their desire at all, but many social forces have coalesced in contemporary society to tell them they should and must, much like the society of Freud’s days told women they should fear their desires!

Freudianism was born out of the practices of hypnosis and mesmerization when Freud posited the existence of an unconscious given what he saw hypnotized patients doing. So too is Naked Therapy sourced in a new form of mesmerization – men in states of arousal (for my thoughts on arousal and women, click here). Who can watch a man become aroused by a naked woman and not sense that he is in some way “mesmerized”? From this observation, Naked Therapy posits that there is an “arousal state” in the brain. But the brain does not seek this for purely physical reasons. The brain seeks this arousal to heal, to discover, to learn, to become aware of things it cannot otherwise become aware of, for this state is as unique in the human mind as is the unconscious state of dreaming.

In other words, arousal is a mental state that we seek for its own sake, and we have let the physical nature of it cloud us from looking at it more closely for what values it might hold in terms of informing us about ourselves. But this makes sense, for “dreams” used to be just what we did when we slept (just like “arousal” used to be just what we did when we became sexually excited). It’s seeing arousal in a new light – as a state of informative mental material personally relevant to the patient who could not gain access to this material in any other way – that is at the basis of my Naked Therapy practice.

To give a crass example, everyone knows how much porn there is on the Internet. History will look back and agree with the puppets of Avenue Q: “The Internet is for porn.” But why? It is scientifically lazy to just say “because men are biologically hard-wired to crave sex.” Any time we use the phrase “hard-wired” we should feel the obligation to investigate more. I would assert that so many billions of men spend so many billions of hours every day seeking access to women through porn, prostitutes, strippers, and sexual partners because it IS the mechanism through which they know themselves. As any man can tell you, the experience of being aroused and satisfying yourself or having someone else satisfy you through that arousal contains within it a variety of unique mental states, discoveries and transformations. In other words, it contains otherwise inaccessible information that must be, just like dreams, utterly relevant to the life-arch of the individual. That information simply needs to be allowed, encouraged and explored in order to discover its relevance.

Looking for something to get you aroused…feeling aroused…satisfying your arousal with yourself or with someone else…what arousal tells you about yourself…how being aroused changes how you see yourself…why you get aroused by what arouses you…how you handle yourself while feeling aroused…it’s all been belittled as basically meaningless (or worse…destructive).

But Naked Therapy is changing all that. Just like Psychotherapy said that dreams mean something personally relevant, Naked Therapy says that arousal means something personally relevant. Arousal is as unique a mental state from non-arousal as consciousness is from unconsciousness. When you are aroused you are being given information about yourself (just like when you dream) that you cannot access in any other way. Just like Freudianism is entirely based on helping the patient access his unconscious thoughts, Naked Therapy is entirely based on helping the patient access his arousal thoughts. That’s why Naked Therapy studies and attempts to utilize in the therapeutic context what kind of mental information emerges in states of arousal in order to see how it might be used to help patients live freer, happier, healthier lives.

For in the end Naked Therapy is based on the belief that since we live in a world full of arousal, arousal should be allowed, explored, and respected in the therapeutic context. And people are waking up to this idea. They are starting to realize that because traditional therapy forbids arousal, trying to learn how to live (especially for men) is a lot like trying to teach them to swim by talking to them about it.

Naked Therapy puts you in the water.

Thank you for taking the time to inquire about Naked Therapy, and I look forward to talking with you in a state of informing arousal.

xoxo
Sarah White