SexSmart: How Your Childhood Shaped Your Sexual Life and What to Do with It- Transform Your Sex Life

1. The fact that the author gets that our sex life is sculpted through childhood experiences and influences - in fact she's an expert in this link.2. Her straightforward approach to sexuality as something each person must define for themselves.3. Strategies for increasing your comfort for being touched - awesome list!4. The "Draw Your Body Map" exercise5. How to assess your "Sexual Perfectionism" - love that term sexual perfectionism, meaning the rigid demands we can make on ourselves and our lovers6. Her recognition of the fact that when BDSM is a rigid, fixed role in someone's sex life (as opposed to a curious exploration among many explorations), it might mean there was something terribly amiss in the power dynamic in the family.Quote from SexSmart I love:"To experience sexual ecstasy with another person (in a relationship between peers) you must let go of the controls over your body, and allow an instinctive, biological process of arousal, continuing excitement, and orgasm to occur. You need to trust the other person to take good care of you, to listen to your wishes, and to give you sexual pleasure."Thank you Dr. Zoldbrod, for this ground-breaking work that I hope someday will become common knowledge.By Staci, author of:  Naked in Public: A Memoir of Recovery From Sex Addiction and Other Temporary Insanities

I've read almost every chapter of this book and I have to emphasize its not hyperbole to say it's truly excellent and worth five stars!It's completely accessible which is really refreshing for a nonfiction book on such a complex topic. You can learn as much as you could from a college course on the topic and its easy and engaging to read! The language is very direct and concise, so you won't be reaching for the dictionary constantly or straining your brain to understand the concepts in the book.There are lots of anecdotes describing the kinds of issues people have with sex and sexuality that are relatable to the kinds of people that would benefit from reading this book. These stories help illustrate the concepts discussed in the book even more, and really helped me by allowing me to compare my situation with those described and how my issues were similar and slightly different.Best of all, Dr. Zoldbrod is extremely thorough in her coverage of every single element affecting sexuality. There's not a single area that isn't covered in the book, everything from self-image, social anxiety, to childhood trauma. It makes it easy to select a chapter that is most applicable to you and start there.Some people might disagree with Dr. Zoldbrod's emphasis on parents as one of the principal sources of people's formative experiences in sexuality and their attitudes towards sex. But if you start with the reasonable idea that your parents are your key influence in your childhood and an open mind, you'll find that many of the book's insights seem intuitively true, and you can extrapolate a lot more about your experiences with sexuality beyond your family life, using this book as a launching pad. For me, reading this book, I became acutely more aware of some of the memories I had been harboring for years, since I was 4 or 5 years old even, and was able to process why they might be such strong memories and the effects those experiences had on my sexual health.I have also met with Dr. Zoldbrod in her Lexington office and found her to be very warm, helpful, and humorous alongside her very direct, no nonsense approach to therapy. Her personality and keenness to help others can be sensed in the pages of this book.

As a certified sex therapist working with groups and individuals at the VA I frequently refer to the concepts in this book and recommend it for my patients who live with childhood sexual traumas, compulsive sexual behaviors, sexual difficulties due to PTSD, and many other psychosexual issues. Many contextual factors trigger, reinforce, maintain, or worsen sexual health problems thus the need to examine from a bio-psychosocial-behavioral and cultural perspective to find predisposing and precipitating factors. My clients easily grasp the model of “milestones in sexual development” as an entry into examining their own evolution. As a student of Dr. Zoldbrod during my sex therapy training I found her to be a dynamic educator: warm, witty, approachable, pragmatic, and down to earth. Her instruction on early developmental influences on sexual development compliments psychodynamic training.

As a sexuality educator who works with parents on how to have conversations about sex and sexuality with their children so their children can grow into sexually healthy adults I recommend it often. I find that parents have a hard time having these conversations because of much of the internalized shame, their own experiences and beliefs about sexuality. Inevitably the parents who have the hardest time with having the conversations often have experienced the most shame or trauma in their lives. If parents can work out their own issues around sex and sexuality then they can help to heal themselves with a book like this and also give their children a better chance at being sexually healthy. Highly recommend it.

SexSmart manages to be both very substantive and quite clear. As a couples therapist, I found it to be a useful tool in guiding my work with couples who present with sexual concerns. However, the book is written in such an accessible language that I also feel comfortable recommending it to couples, who have also found it to be very useful.

good

Some interesting sections, but disappointingly it pathologizes non-normative sexual behaviours without much reflection on how normative sexualities are produced and policed.