Heather Hillenbrand

Heather Hillenbrand is a licensed marriage and family therapist, an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist, and the owner of Soul Fire Sex and Relationship Therapy, which she opened in Phoenix in April 2025. She sees clients in person at the practice's North 16th Street office and by telehealth across Arizona, and she works with individuals and with relationships of every configuration — monogamous, polyamorous, open, and everything the standard intake form has no box for.

Her clinical focus is sex and relationships together, on the premise that the two are rarely separable. That covers desire differences between partners, eroticism and orgasm functioning, sexual communication, sexual trauma, ethical non-monogamy, and BDSM/kink. What connects them, in her framing, is access: she writes that she believes it is each person's birthright to have the knowledge, understanding, and support to achieve freedom of sexual expression, and much of the work is helping people get language and information for something they were never given either for.

The room is explicitly sex-positive. Heather describes it as affirming all sexual orientations, gender expressions, and relationship types, which in practice means kink and consensual non-monogamy are areas of competence rather than things a client has to justify before therapy can begin. Her stated approach is warm, collaborative, and compassionate. She names emotionally focused therapy and internal family systems as the two frameworks she works from, and the listing carries those alongside attachment-based, art, narrative, and mindfulness practice, trauma-informed throughout. She sees young adults, adults, and older adults, individually and as partners.

She came to clinical work through sex education rather than the other way around, spending years teaching before she trained as a therapist, and she is the author of two sex-education books for parents, A Girl's Magic and A Boy's Magic. That teaching instinct stays in the therapy — her own line is that knowledge is power and the client is the guide of what they want to learn. Heather holds a Master of Advanced Study in Marriage and Family Therapy from Arizona State University and a certificate in human sexuality from the University of Minnesota, and she is licensed in Arizona as an LMFT, #LMFT-16081. Individual sessions are $175, and the practice is private pay.