Solana Warner, Intern Therapist
Solana Warner (she/they) is an intern therapist at The Center for Growth. Her internship runs from August 26th, 2024 to August 26th, 2025. Solana is currently working towards achieving a master’s degree in clinical and counseling psychology at Chestnut Hill College, with a concentration in diverse and underserved populations. She is available for individual and couples therapy, both in-person at the Art Museum/Fairmount PA office or virtually within New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Solana is passionate about therapeutic work that helps individuals embrace newly discovered aspects of themselves or continue ongoing exploration. She believes that the best tool for an effective listener is an open mind and approaches new challenges with curiosity, honesty, and humor (when appropriate). Though she draws from a variety of theoretical backgrounds, a few that influence her work are: narrative, person-centered, psychodynamic, strengths-based, and trauma-informed. First and foremost, her goal is to establish an environment in which you feel safe and comfortable to share.
Background
Solana completed a Bachelors of the Arts in English literature at Ursinus College. In this program, she studied narratives of many diverse populations, which helped inform her understanding of oppressive systems and the importance of retaining agency over one’s own story. She believes the best way to learn about a culture is through speaking with its people – and that reading is just another form of conversation.
Empathy remains at the heart of Solana’s work: whether analyzing texts or practicing therapy. She is sensitive to the barriers that many people face when seeking help for their mental health, and it is her wish to make therapy as accessible to everyone as possible. Whether it is your first time in therapy, or you are well-familiarized with the process, she will meet you where you are and collaborate to set goals tailored to your own unique experience. She understands that seeking help can be scary – but the fact that you’re reading this means you have shown incredible courage already.
Sex Therapy
Some of the possible topics to discuss in sex therapy are:
- Sexuality exploration
- Alternative sexual lifestyles
- Polyamory & open relationships
- Gender identity & dysphoria
- Kink & BDSM
- Sex and disability
- Low sex desire
- Orgasm difficulties
- Painful sex
- Self esteem & body image issues
- Sexual trauma & PTSD
Sex can be hard to talk about. And yet, for many people, it is a deeply important part of their lives. It can be a means of connecting with others, experiencing intimacy, fully inhabiting and enjoying your own body, or stress relief – it can be any multitude of things to any multitude of people. For that reason, it can also be most disheartening when issues arise and you feel uncomfortable broaching the topic with your existing support network. That’s also where sex therapy comes in – Solana believes it is vital to create a safe environment where a client can discuss these topics openly and without judgment.
The experience of seeking and obtaining pleasure is a right we all, as humans, share. However, there can also be a lot of stigma surrounding sex, depending upon the societal expectations of where you live and who the participants are. Solana’s goal in this type of therapy is to welcome people of all identities and backgrounds and learn their particular relationship with sex in order to help them discover the root of their issues.
Relationship Challenges
Relationships can be hard. There are many things that can affect your emotional and physical intimacy with your partner, such as differing ideas about sex, sex drive, boundaries, or sexual interests – to name a few. Depending on where you grew up – as well as personal and cultural influences – each person is raised with different ideas about sex and its meaning. Since this topic can be difficult or embarrassing to bring up, however, these differences can lead to miscommunications and a sense of disconnection within relationships.
In sex therapy, it is important to consider these emotional and sociocultural factors in addition to any physical ones, as they often inform how our bodies react. Stress from our relationships and any mismatched expectations can impact sexual satisfaction, and it is often clear communication that helps untangle these issues. In the first few sessions, Solana will explore these topics with clients to their comfort level and identify issues and goals together. She will also explore recent life transitions and work stresses – which can greatly impact relationship dynamics.
Non-traditional Relationships
As a queer and genderfluid person, Solana understands that relationships are as varied and nuanced as the people in them. As such, she welcomes individuals, couples, groups, and other relationship compositions into therapy, as well as people of all gender identities and sexual orientations. She is sensitive towards the fact that people in queer and non-traditional relationships often encounter social and legal discrimination and that this may add yet another layer of complication to the topics addressed in sex therapy. The historical criminalization of non-heteronormative sex in this country has left a lasting legacy of harmful policy and internalized shame that many still contend with in some form or another to this day.
Relatedly, Solana also welcomes those in the kink and BDSM communities to her practice, as well as those engaging in sex work. She recognizes that not all communities are granted the same respect and sexual agency, and people with physical disabilities or developmental disorders like ASD are often ignored or infantilized in the discourse as well. Similarly, sex among the aging and elderly is often viewed as a taboo topic, when it is yet another natural part of life.
Exploration of Pleasure
While sex can be hard to talk about, it can also be hard to think about. A lot of people struggle with feeling comfortable enough to explore their bodies and discover sexual interests. But curious exploration can be one of the best tools in learning your needs and your limits. For many of us, the narrative around sex that we have absorbed from popular media tells us that it happens naturally and without complication when you are with the “right person.” However, this is not the case – sex requires communication and does not always proceed in a linear direction. Also, mistakes sometimes happen, and the better you understand your own pleasure and its boundaries, the better you can articulate these to a partner – should that be something you’re interested in.
There are many factors that contribute to the discomfort surrounding self-exploration: social stigma, variable sex education, religious and cultural influences, gendered expectations, internet misinformation, etc. Sex therapy with a professional you trust can be a great opportunity to explore these barriers in depth and determine the best path towards your own unique exploration.
Trauma
Trauma affects many of us – be it smaller, repeated traumas or a singular, catastrophic event. It can also affect us in different ways. Some people experience strong physical reactions that are triggered by specific stimuli, while others learn patterns of interacting with the world that are unhelpful or even actively harm them.
The way we experience trauma is tied to survival. When people experience an endangering event, their brain is inundated with sensory details that do not get processed right away, as they function in “survival mode.” When the danger passes, however, most memories will be processed naturally and incorporated into their working memory. This is not the case with trauma; traumatic events are different in that they do not get processed and organized by the logical parts of our brain. Instead, they remain nebulous pockets of fear and overwhelming sensory information that grip the body – often uncontrollably – when we are reminded of the event(s).
Understandably, this experience can be very frightening – especially when tied to intimate acts such as sex – but it is also not irreversible. Trauma work in therapy involves helping a client process these crystallized memories, so they no longer evoke such visceral reactions. Through reprocessing trauma, a major goal is to help a person move out of a state in which they’re always seeking danger and return to a stabler baseline where they can feel the stirrings of hope and imagination again – the parts of the brain that are most constricted by living in “survival mode.”
In working with sexual trauma survivors, Solana’s first goal is to make clients feel safe. You will never be asked to share more than you are comfortable with, and there will be no judgment should you choose not to share. Trauma-informed care means approaching a client’s past with care and sensitivity, and Solana strives to administer this approach with all clients – regardless of their background with trauma.
A trauma-informed approach also means paying particular attention to bodily symptoms of distress, as trauma often manifests in a physical form. Sexual trauma in particular can lead to fear and discomfort with parts of one’s own body, and sex function issues as a result of these feelings are not uncommon. Sex therapy can help a client work through these issues at their own pace and discuss any associated feelings of shame or anxiety that may come up along the way.