Ruth Cohn, LMFT

Ruth Cohn came of age as a therapist in the 1980’s when psychological casualties of the Vietnam war engendered the diagnostic category of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Soon thereafter, violence against women and children began to emerge from the shadows as a social, political and public health issue. And gradually large numbers of adult men and women began to break silence about their histories of childhood sexual abuse. They seemed to share a lot of symptoms with the returning veterans, even though their traumatic experiences were quite different.  Cohn came in on the ground floor of what was to become the subfield of Psychological Trauma. As the field developed, Cohn did with it, and it rapidly became her area of particular interest and professional specialty. She began treating primarily adult women with sexual trauma histories. As she worked with them over time, she repeatedly saw that the most devastating impact of interpersonal trauma was in the later world of interpersonal relationship, with intimacy and trust being the most challenging of all. Many of her clients had partners, even long term partnerships. But often they were a chronic agony. In many cases sex was virtually “impossible”

Ruth Cohn became compelled to discover methodologies to help these suffering people regain their capacities for love, joy and pleasure. That was the beginning of how she found her way to becoming a sex therapist, and evolving an approach for working on sexuality with individual and coupled adults with trauma histories. In 2011 her first book was published, Coming Home to Passion: Restoring Loving Sexuality in Couples with Histories of Childhood Trauma and Neglect.  She lives in San Francisco with her husband of 25 years.
Her web site is https://ruthcohnmft.com/