Angela, the owner and operator of St. Louis Marriage Therapy, is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in the state of Missouri. She is also a nationally certified Sex Therapist through the American Association for Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT). She received her Master of Education degree from the University of Oregon in Counseling and Family Therapy. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She has offered couples and sex therapy for over 11 years. She is also working to become an AAMFT approved supervisor for other Marriage and Family Therapists seeking their license.
Angela is well known in her field as an expert in Sexual and Relationship health. She received a media award from the Missouri Association for Marriage and Family Therapists in 2017 for her HuffPost blogging, video/audiopodcasting, and appearances in radio, podcasting and television. She also received the "2020 Best of Ballwin Award" in the category of marriage and family counseling.
She is also commonly used as a keynote speaker at local and national conferences, businesses and training facilities including the Missouri Mental Health Counseling Association, the American Academy of Psychotherapists, and the American Association for Marital and Family Therapists. She is an AASECT approved continuing education provider.
She is author of the books, "Pre-Marital Counseling: A Guide for Clinicians," (2016) and "Helping Couples Overcome Infidelity: A Therapist's Manual," (2018). She has also a contributed to the Huffington Post, Women's Day Magazine, The Post Dispatch, Good Therapy, Psychology Today and her personal blog.
A Message About My Approach in Therapy:
I am very direct and to the point with my clients. I am NOT in the business of being polite or nice all the time. I am here to help you grow as a person (or couple). It's hard to face your demons! Sometimes at the end of therapy, you'll feel energized and excited about the progress you're making. Other times, you'll leave therapy exhausted or pissed at me because I pointed out ways you sabotage your happiness.
I care very deeply about all of my clients and I want you to succeed. That means that I have to call you out on your bullshit. Always know that you can ask questions, you can have a different opinion from me, and you can tell me when you think I'm wrong. We are a team as soon as you walk in my door.
My biggest goal is to help you create a healthy, happy life. I'll help you figure out what healthy and happy looks like for you!
Why Angela is Passionate about Couples Therapy:
Couples are incredibly fun to work with and keep me on my toes. I have been working with couples for over 15 years. In that time, I needed to learn skills for parenting, finances, ADHD, sexuality, infidelity, ethical non-monogamy, conflict, high-conflict, trauma, depression, anxiety, and many more topics. You can't do couples therapy without learning about the topics people fight about.
I am an avid learner. I love going on research deep dives into these topics to find out the latest research that can help my clients. I consider myself a creative research based therapist and have even recently started calling myself a sex scientist and couples scientist. I take the research I learn and find creative and fun ways to help couples apply this information in their lives.
The coolest part is that I get to help couples personalize this information. For example, I recently learned that asking "why" questions automatically ignites our self criticism and makes us more likely to be hard on ourselves and less likely to come up with creative solutions to our problems. Once I learned this, I started teaching all my couples to use "what" language instead and then I tested this language in sessions again and again.
I call this process "teaching microskills" and "hypothesis testing." I look for small changes or microskills I can teach couples in the moment that I learn from current research. Then, I ask couples to practice these microskills to create to shift in their relationships. I also use them and test them in sessions. For example, I may practice using "what" questions for the entire session as I teach another bigger sex therapy skill to see how well this communication shift helps the couple problem solve (hypothesis testing).
Over time, the more I teach these skills, the more I learn about your communication and help you understand each other better. I also learn various ways to shift or adjust my skills in this way. By hypothesis testing new research, I learn about your unique personality. I learn what triggers your trauma and what gets in the way of change. I may learn that one person needs to practice more emotion regulation while the other person may need to practice patience.
I also love working with couples because I learn about various personality types and what types of skills work. Every person exists along a vast spectrum of human behavior, emotions, and expressions. What works for one person or couple doesn't always work with another couple. I have an arsenal of skills, interventions and techniques that I can use to teach you about better conflict, better sexuality, better parenting, and healing through infidelity. I have developed and collected these skills across 15 years of clinical work in the therapy field.
My process of hypothesis testing allows me to learn when to use what skill and with whom to use it. It is actually very fun. I commonly say, "Humans are my favorite puzzles to solve." I have had clients remark on my ability to read them and understand their personality quickly within the first 2 sessions.
I love this work. I love helping couples find each other again. We live long lives together. What we expect out of marriage and relationships is very different now than it was 100 years ago. We expect our relationships to provide comfort, stability, adventure, hot sex, joy, friendship, partnership, and equality. All these expectations make it easier for couples to feel as though they are failing in their marriage. When in reality, our expectations have grown.
I love sitting with a couple and teaching them how to communicate differently. My favorite time is when you see the interventions start to click for a couple. Suddenly, they start coming up with their own solutions to problems. They start to tell me, "Angela, we were thinking about you when we worked through this last conflict. You were the little parrot on our shoulder reminding us to stay respectful." I love being that parrot.
While the best part is seeing a couple terminate treatment successfully, I have truly learned to love the journey of therapy and the journey of life. That's what therapy is... a journey. It is always the most challenging at first because you are learning new things and you probably feel very distant from your partner. I love watching as you, my couple, walk that journey and learn about yourself and each other.
I will notice little changes like you are sitting closer together on the couch during our sessions. One day, you will have had two weeks straight where you didn't fight and are somewhat suprised about that. Even cooler is when you start doing your own tweeks to the skills I teach. The couples who take my skills and run with them do the best in therapy. They start learning and exploring on their own. They start teaching me things they are learning. Finally, they tell me they don't need my help anymore. This journey is so powerful and truly fulfills my life.
You will see this passion in my work with you. I tell silly stories. I make jokes. Often clients are suprised that I bring a sense of humor and playfulness to therapy. The reality is that we all crave positivity in this world. Couples therapy is no different. Essentially, every couples wants to be happy again with each other. You want to laugh with your partner and have fun again. You want to love and be loved. Let me walk with you on that journey. It will be worth it.
Angela's Back Story:
Many people ask me how I decided to become a sex therapist. Long ago, I grew up in a very conservative, almost cult-style religion. As a young person, I agreed blindly with what I was taught and stayed pretty religious. However, as I grew up, I started seeing flaws or cracks in the religion that got me questioning things.
The first challenge I struggled with were my female friends. We were all taught purity principles-to wait for sex until marriage. Many of my friends did wait for marriage to be sexual. We were also taught that once we were married, sex should be fun and easy and good for you.
The reality for my female friends was quite the opposite. Many of them married young, and would call me up about a year later complaining about their sex lives (Yes, I was the friend everybody called for advice! Naturally therapy would be a good fit for me later in life). They would say things like, "I'm not enjoying sex with my husband. I am just having sex for him now, really."
This truly jolted me. We had been taught sex would be great after marriage, and I literally had friend after friend tell me they weren't having a good time or even desiring it anymore. That was a huge problem.
The next crack in my religious upbringing came when I was mentoring teenagers in the religious group back when I lived in Hawaii. There were several teenagers that were struggling with their sexual identity. Two teens in particular were very scared to tell their parents they were gay, a girl and a boy. In that religion, people were taught that anyone on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum was bad and punishable. It wasn't a very forgiving religion.
During the 4 years I lived in Hawaii, I had to question a lot of what I had been taught and believed up until that point. I was grateful to facilitate some very helpful conversations with those teens and their parents about love and acceptance. Naturally, I had to grow as a person to help them.
In the process, I recognized in myself that I am good at helping people and comfortable discussing very taboo topics. I also learned that I have a passion for sexuality and therapy. It was at that point that I decided to get a Masters in Couples Counseling. After completing my degree, I got Licensed in the state of Missouri around 2011 as a Marriage and Family Therapist. Then, I pursued my AASECT certification as a Sex Therapist. I completed this in 2014.
As a part of my training, my constant questioning, my relentless curiosity, and my willingness to grow, I have long since left that religious instution. Now, I spend my days helping clients re-write their own sexual stories.
Many people will ask me about my religion now. You are free to do so if you seek me as a therapist, but for this story I will simply say that my job is to deeply accept you and your personal value system. Regardless of what I believe now and how I practice my life principles, my goal with you is to understand your values and beliefs and help you live your own personal best life within those values.
It is NOT my job to convert you or change who you are fundamentally. It is my job to help you find a path forward and decide how best to live your life in a way that feels right to you. Sexuality is complex and very personal to each individual. My goal with all clients is to help you develop your own creative sexuality that works for you and your relationship. I hope we can work together soon.
Angela Skurtu Quotes:
"Can I get a Fuck, Yes!?"
"I'm appropriately inappropriate."
"Humans are my favorite puzzles to solve!"
"If sexual desire is similar to driving a car, some people learned how to drive on the edge of a cliff."
"I open bedroom doors!"
"Make a commitment to no resentment."
"Tension, spoken or unspoken, is chaos."
"It's hard to go from diapers to desire."
"I'm re-thinking overthinking."
"Imagine you and your partner are looking at a wall. You think it is blue and your partner thinks it is green. In conflict, it is not your job to convince your partner the wall is blue. It is your job to try and understand how in the world they see the wall as green."