Michael Sytsma
PhD, LPC, CST, C-PST™, CPCS
Licensed Professional Counselor, Certified Sex Therapist, and Certified Psychosexual Therapist · Building Intimate Marriages
Dr. Michael Sytsma is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Certified Sex Therapist, and Certified Psychosexual Therapist with over 40 years of clinical experience specializing in marital sexual therapy. He holds a PhD from the University of Georgia with a dissertation focused on sexual desire discrepancy in married couples. His clinical and research specialties include sexual desire discrepancy, marital sexuality, assessment and history taking, theoretical approaches to sex therapy, and problematic sexual behaviors, with work appearing in peer-reviewed journals and multiple professional texts. Dr. Sytsma is the Director and Senior Therapist at Building Intimate Marriages. He developed the graduate sex therapy certificate program for the Institute for Sexual Wholeness and currently serves as adjunct professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Richmont Graduate University, and as visiting professor at several others.
Sessions
United States · Thursday 22 October · 10am ET · ninety minutes
Rethinking Sexual Desire Distress
Sexual desire concerns present complex clinical challenges that are not always adequately captured by current diagnostic frameworks. This presentation introduces a three-dimensional assessment model designed to improve diagnostic clarity and guide treatment selection by systematically examining desire across three dimensions: desire type (how desire emerges and is experienced), desire level (the relative intensity of desire within the individual and relational system), and desire direction (the targets and qualitative patterns of desire, including arousal patterns, orientation, and sexual interests). Rather than assuming that distress about desire necessarily reflects a disorder of desire, this model helps clinicians identify the specific features contributing to distress and differentiate an individual’s authentic desire pattern from physiological, psychological, relational, and contextual factors that may be disrupting it. This more differentiated assessment can reveal substantially different clinical presentations that may initially appear to be the same “desire problem” but call for different therapeutic approaches. Through clinical case examples, participants will learn to apply the three-dimensional model to clarify the nature and context of sexual desire distress, strengthen differential assessment and diagnosis, and select interventions more closely matched to the clinical presentation.