My earlier post about whether it is possible to eradicate fetishes appears to have struck a nerve, as I have heard from folks all over the world with their comments, questions, and requests for further information. I want to thank everyone for writing in– everyone’s communications have been very thoughtful and respectful, and it is really heartening to be able to reach so many in constructive dialogue.

As I read over the article however, I realize that, while pointing out what I believe to be inappropriate and unethical treatment, I do not go into any detail about what I do believe to be appropriate treatment protocols when someone is seeking help with a fetish. So, to address that gap, I’m going to go into some treatment protocols here in this particular post. It’s a lengthy and very broad topic, so I think this may very well turn into a series of postings, but I’ll see how it goes. For this article though, I’m just going to focus on initial steps (edit: as you’ll see, I found that laying down some groundwork of important initial considerations took up a lot of writing, so in this post, I am focusing on the groundwork, and I’ll talk about specific interventions in subsequent posts).

First, in the interest of disclosure, let me put it out there that I hold a sex-positive perspective. For more on what this means, you can take a look at my article about sex positivity here. Basically, I start out with the assumption that sexual behavior is neither inherently negative nor pathological unless shown to be otherwise. In other words, the meaning […]