What do you like sexually? What turns you on? What do you feel shame and guilt around?

I am inviting 8-10 people to take part in a 2 day workshop, aimed at helping you to talk about under-explored and under-integrated areas of your relationship with sex.

In my experience sex often encodes trauma, and the taboos around sex can make it much harder in conventional therapy settings for people to engage with their trauma. As such sex can become a repository for aspects of self that are shut down because of shame and cultural taboo. 

As a therapist I am interested in the kind of sexual and relational patterns that play out for you, and what these may be telling you about your underlying and unmet needs.

People struggle with sex due to:

> patriarchal pressures around roles of men and women, the impact of oppressive laws re e.g. homosexuality/gender variance - and socially ingrained power differentials such as those around race,

> the presence of relational trauma including sexual abuse, and as manifesting in patterns of domination/submission, kink and fetish, 

> lack of body confidence - or patterns of body tension that surface during sex - e.g. in gut/groin area, erectile issues. 

> difficulty integrating aspects of ‘shadow’ self - e.g. the dirty, ‘disgusting’, painful, or being with one’s power, or powerlessness.

> difficulty regulating contact - fears of overwhelm, difficulty holding boundaries - or the opposite, a tendency to rush towards contact (such as speaking all the time) and avoiding what comes up when we don’t.

It doesn’t help that most ideas and models about sex, such as those employed in tantra or as expressed in ideas of “Eros”, take a normative stance on what sex should look like (genital focussed, yin/yang, sex and love fitting together etc., sex as spiritual). These do not give enough emphasis to the complicating factors that many of us experience in trying to have this idealised type of sex. Consequently too many people feel “broken”, avoid sex, or compartmentalise a part of their sexual interests which surface in use of porn etc. 

In this workshop I propose to turn conventional thinking on its head - I call this a ‘decolonising’ model because I give attention to the ‘trauma’ of coming of age sexually within a field that privileges certain types of sexual experiences and stigmatises others. 

I bring a developmental lens - sexual pathways develop at a moment in our lives when our capacity for intimacy may be limited - particularly those of us who have been harmed or abused, or who had some of our core needs neglected as children. The impact of growing up in a systemically racist, patriarchal, capitalist, and hetero and cis normative society is also formative. Hence sex, and the process of talking about sex, is intimate because it entails inviting another to see us in our nakedness including the developmental wounds that surface in sexual likes and dislikes. 

In this workshop I employ gestalt models such as the ‘cycle of experience’, body awareness, and an attention to the movement of energy and the process of relational and sexual contacting, as well as attention to the impact of power differentials - to offer participants an opportunity to integrate the various parts/voices of their sexual selves, and gain practice and experience in talking about sex. 

Essentially the workshop is about creating a space together over two days to facilitate emotional honesty and openness about the stuff for each of us that can be harder to be with. For some it’s quite transformative, this work takes courage and the group typically goes to deep places. I keep numbers at 8 (absolute maximum 10) because a small group feels necessary in order to create enough trust and support. I’d be delighted if you want to do this workshop with me

For more details and costs please email me at gillie2k@gmail.com