About Hayden Dover, MFT, CST
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and AASECT Certified Sex Therapist helping individuals and couples create more fulfilling lives and relationships through somatic psychotherapy, sex therapy, existential-humanistic psychotherapy, and positive psychology.
In-person therapy in San Diego and online throughout California.
My Work
My passion is helping people create fulfilling lives and rewarding relationships. Over the past two decades, I’ve worked with individuals and couples navigating anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, relationship challenges, intimacy concerns, sexual difficulties, and major life transitions.
My work is collaborative, grounded, direct, and non-judgmental. I aim to create a space where you can understand yourself more deeply, relate to others more honestly, and make choices that align with your values and the life you want to create.
My Approach
My approach integrates somatic psychotherapy, sex therapy, existential-humanistic psychotherapy, positive psychology, CBT, and practical solution-focused work.
Somatic therapy helps us pay attention to how experience lives in the body. Existential-humanistic therapy helps us explore meaning, freedom, responsibility, authenticity, and the choices that shape your life. Positive psychology keeps the work oriented not only toward reducing distress, but toward building engagement, resilience, pleasure, fulfillment, and joy.
I don’t see therapy as only a way to fix problems. I see it as a way to support growth, deepen self-understanding, and help us live more fully.
Why Body-Centered Therapy Matters
The body often carries what words alone cannot fully explain. Body-centered psychotherapy helps us slow down, notice patterns more clearly, and reconnect with ourselves in a more grounded and authentic way.
The Body Holds Experience
Tension, numbness, anxiety, grief, desire, shame, anger, and protection can all show up physically as well as emotionally. Paying attention to the body can help us understand experiences that may be difficult to reach through words alone.
Awareness Creates Choice
When we slow down and pay attention to present-moment experience, new patterns, emotions, and possibilities for change can become clearer. Awareness gives us more room to respond intentionally rather than automatically repeating familiar patterns.
Mind, Body, Relationship, and Meaning
My background in somatic counseling, Hakomi, Bioenergetic Analysis, personal training, and body-centered work gives me a practical and grounded way of helping clients work with the connection between body, mind, emotion, sexuality, and relationship. This integration supports the larger goal of creating a more authentic, connected, and fulfilling life.
Principles of My Work
At the heart of my work is a set of principles that shape how I understand people, relationships, healing, and growth. These principles come from my experience as both a practitioner and a recipient of different health and healing modalities, as well as my training in somatic psychotherapy, sex therapy, positive psychology, and existential-humanistic psychotherapy.
Relationship
“Life is relationship.” — George Moscona
Human beings exist in relationship. We relate not only to partners, family, and other people, but also to our work, our bodies, sexuality, emotions, beliefs, memories, and the larger world around us.
Many struggles emerge through patterns of relationship, and many opportunities for growth emerge there as well. My work helps clients observe these patterns and, when desired, develop new ways of relating that allow for a deeper, richer, and more fulfilling experience of life.
Body-Mind Holism
“The body never lies.” — Martha Graham
I view body and mind as deeply interconnected. Emotions, thoughts, stress, anxiety, desire, grief, tension, and relationship patterns often live not only in the mind, but in the body as well.
Body-centered psychotherapy helps us become more deeply aware of bodily sensations, emotions, images, and behavior. This awareness can open a wealth of possibilities for understanding, experiencing, healing, and change that conventional talk therapy may not always reach.
Mindfulness and Awareness
“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.” — Lao Tzu
Mindfulness allows us to create change through awareness rather than force. By slowing down and observing present experience, we can better understand the emotional, physical, and relational processes shaping our lives.
This kind of awareness helps us respond more consciously rather than automatically repeating familiar patterns.
Organic Growth and Change
“Healing is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.” — W. H. Auden
I have a deep respect for the natural healing capacity of the individual. People are not problems to be fixed. Growth often happens organically when we create greater awareness, honesty, emotional connection, flexibility, and alignment between our choices and values.
In my work, I look for and support the natural processes of healing, development, and self-recreation that are already present within you.
Fulfillment and Self-Actualization
“The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.” — Rollo May
Therapy is not only about becoming conventionally “healthy.” It can also support the unfolding of your life into greater joy, fulfillment, relatedness, meaning, and self-understanding.
My work is oriented toward helping clients live more fully, develop greater appreciation, wonder, inspiration, and pleasure in their experience of life, and create relationships and choices that reflect who they truly are.
Relationship, Intimacy, and Sexuality
My work is grounded in the belief that relationships are among the most important aspects of our lives. The quality of our relationships influences our sense of connection, wellbeing, meaning, fulfillment, and even how we experience ourselves.
Over the years I have helped individuals and couples navigate communication difficulties, recurring conflict, emotional disconnection, desire differences, sexless relationships, infidelity, sexual concerns, life transitions, and the challenges that naturally arise in long-term relationships.
As a Certified Sex Therapist, I am comfortable talking directly and respectfully about sexuality, intimacy, desire, pleasure, sexual difficulty, sexual compulsivity, relationship structure, and sexual identity. My approach is sex-positive, non-judgmental, relational, and focused on helping clients create more authentic, connected, and fulfilling intimate lives.
Whether clients come to me because of relationship struggles, sexual concerns, anxiety, life transitions, or a desire for personal growth, the work often returns to the same questions: How do we create deeper connection? How do we live more authentically? How do we build relationships and lives that feel meaningful and fulfilling?
My practice is LGBTQIA+, poly-, kink-, and non-monogamy-aware and friendly.
Want to learn more?
Explore Couples Therapy or Sex Therapy.
Training and Credentials
My work is grounded in more than two decades of experience helping individuals and couples navigate challenges related to relationships, intimacy, sexuality, personal growth, anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, and life transitions.
My approach reflects extensive training in psychotherapy, sex therapy, somatic psychology, and body-centered approaches, as well as a lifelong interest in understanding what helps people heal, grow, and create more fulfilling lives and rewarding relationships.
Education and Professional Training
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, California (#48085)
Certified Sex Therapist, American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT)
M.A. in Somatic Counseling Psychology, California Institute of Integral Studies
Sex Therapy Training, Buehler Institute
Hakomi Method Professional Training
Bioenergetic Certification Training Program
SMART Recovery Facilitator Training
Training and experience in body-centered psychotherapy, personal training, massage therapy, and mind-body approaches to health and wellbeing
Professional Memberships
California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT)
American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT)
Southern California Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis (SCIBA)
International Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis (IIBA)
Continuing Growth
I believe that good therapists never stop learning.
In addition to formal education and training, I continue to study psychotherapy, relationships, sexuality, human development, mindfulness, embodiment, positive psychology, and the factors that contribute to meaningful and fulfilling lives.
My commitment to ongoing learning helps ensure that my work remains thoughtful, current, and responsive to the needs of the people I serve.
Let’s talk about how you can create a more fulfilling life and relationship.
I offer therapy in person in San Diego and online throughout California.