What Does a Sex Coach Actually Do? A Real Couple Shares Their Experience
Most people have a vague sense that sex coaches exist. Far fewer know what actually happens in those sessions, what changes, and whether it is worth it.
On a recent episode of Sex Ritual Radio on KXFM, I did something I had never done before on air. I invited two of my current clients to sit across from me and talk honestly about what it has been like to work together. Lawrence and Regina have been in coaching with me for about three months. They are also the founders of the LS Playground, a lifestyle community in Los Angeles. And they showed up to that microphone with a level of honesty that stopped me in my tracks.
This is what they shared.
Where They Started
Lawrence grew up in Watts, got into trouble young, and spent eight and a half years in the youth authority. He did not begin his adult life until his mid twenties. Regina grew up in a strict Catholic household, was married young, and had experienced sexual abuse she had never spoken about publicly until our sessions. At her heaviest she weighed over 330 pounds and had lost more than 100 pounds by the time we met, though the mirror still sometimes showed her the woman she used to be.
They were not a couple in crisis when they came to me. They were having sex. They were communicating. They were even running a lifestyle community together. But something was still not working.
"The communication was a problem," Regina told me on air. "Not just in general, but when we were bringing others into our space. There was a breakdown there."
What Sex Coaching Actually Looks Like
A lot of people assume sex coaching is about technique. It is not, at least not primarily.
What Lawrence and Regina needed was a way to talk to each other that did not immediately activate old wounds. Lawrence, coming from a background where vulnerability had never been safe, had learned to interpret anything that felt like criticism as an attack. Regina, naturally fiery and direct, did not always realize how her tone was landing before her words even had a chance.
One of the first shifts we worked on was replacing the language of right and wrong with the language of working and not working. When you remove the need to win, you remove the wall that keeps two people from actually hearing each other. Lawrence described it simply: "I want to be loving. I don't have to be right."
That is not a small thing for a man who spent nearly a decade in an environment where being right could mean survival.
The Homework
Sex coaching involves assignments. Real ones.
Lawrence and Regina filmed some of theirs. There was flogging. There was erotic exploration they had never tried inside their previous relationships. Regina shared on air, for only the second time in her life, that she had experienced sexual abuse as a younger woman. She said she could not have said it out loud without first having done the work to feel safe in her own body again.
"I didn't even think about it until after," she said, laughing a little. "I was like, oh God, I should probably call my mom."
That laugh matters. It means she has moved the story from something that controlled her to something she now holds.
What the Lifestyle Actually Is
Because Lawrence and Regina run the LS Playground, we also spent time on the episode demystifying what lifestyle communities are for anyone who has never encountered the term.
Lifestyle is another word for the swinger community, though both Lawrence and Regina, like me, find the word swinger reductive. A lifestyle community is a space where couples and singles who are interested in consensual non monogamous experiences can connect, play, and build real friendships. Not every event involves sex. Their upcoming game night features Jenga and Uno. The door to what they call the play spaces is always optional.
What distinguishes a good lifestyle community from a free for all is the same thing that distinguishes good coaching from good advice: intentionality. Lawrence put it plainly. "If I can share the most precious thing in my life, I want to make sure I know everything and we're authentic. We're not just doing it to do it."
They host events in Inglewood on Thursday evenings and have a new indoor outdoor venue opening in Van Nuys at a space called the Yellow Door. Their online community is at members.thelsplayground.com and they can be found on Instagram at we underscore r ecore.
Why Couples in the Lifestyle Still Need Coaching
Here is something most people do not expect: being in an open relationship does not automatically make you better at communicating. In some ways it raises the stakes on every unresolved issue you were already carrying.
The jealousy does not disappear. The body image wounds do not disappear. The fear of saying the wrong thing, of being too much or not enough, of needing something your partner might not be able to give, none of that disappears just because you have expanded the container.
What coaching does is give you tools to navigate all of it without shutting down or blowing up. Regina told me something toward the end of our episode that has stayed with me: "There are so many couples out there who are probably both freaky enough to have these thoughts, but they don't know how to bring it out. And so they just fight it."
She is right. And that fight, that slow quiet suppression of desire, is one of the biggest things I see eroding intimacy in long term relationships.
What Is Possible
Lawrence and Regina came in as a couple who loved each other and wanted more. Three months later they are clearer in their communication, more honest about their desires, and actively building something together that reflects who they actually are.
That is what sex coaching does. Not fixing what is broken. Expanding what is already there.
If you are curious about what working together might look like for you, I invite you to apply at roseheartsong.com. And if you want to hear the full conversation with Lawrence and Regina, including what their dream threesome looks like and how sobriety shifted Regina's erotic blueprint, that episode is live now on Sex Ritual Radio on KXFM and wherever you listen to podcasts.
Rose Heartsong is a certified intimacy coach and the host of Sex Ritual Radio. She works with couples, men, and women who are ready to stop settling and start living from desire. Applications for private coaching are open at roseheartsong.com.
