Sex and Love Thursday

So yesterday we had this "sex therapist" come lecture to us. I don't know why I put that in quotes, she really is a sex therapist. Just...well, maybe she's a better therapist than lecturer.

She was really...awkward. Which seemed weird, given her profession. And disorganized. And seemed peculiarly uncomfortable with the men in the room (we only had two, relative to, what, three times that many women?). I dunno, it was weird.

So this woman's going on, and Sparrow (I love that she's representin' for me) points out that, wait, didn't *I* do this work for a while?

Which, I did. During my training hiatus, I sold yarn and worked as a sex therapist.

Seriously, my life is weird.

But nonetheless. So, Sparrow brings this up, and I said, yeah, and....I don't think I'm usually a name-dropper, but the woman I worked with is one of the top names in the business. She looks at me blankly, so I explained in a sentence or two the work that we did. Which she then, later, snarked at a little bit.

Um...really? First of all, was that necessary?

And second, I was a little offended. Sure, everyone takes a different approach, right, but, the clinic I worked in is world renowned. People come literally from the other side of the globe to do her program. She must be doing something right.

And so I was thinking about the clinic today during all of my driving back and forth from the coast. It was a seven week intensive program (recreated by my boss in this book) for married couples (we were a Jesuit hospital, after all). We worked as therapist pairs, and met with the couples for five hours a night one night a week for seven sessions, and it was, well, intense. We'd start with a check in, then split up and do individual, then come back together, then there was "symposium" (sex ed, really), where all the couples would come together for information sharing, and then we'd go back to our therapist-couple sets, dish out homework for the next week, and they'd go home. They spent five hours there per session, we spent about seven, not including the two weeks of introductory training we had. We did a lot of teaching, and lot of different types of therapy - dynamic, CBT, gestalt, relational...

It was a good time. I learned a lot about therapy and psychiatry and working with couples. And when you got right down to it, not much of what we did was really, strictly, about sex. We did a lot (lo-ot) of relationship work, which was the thing that I think this therapist yesterday really failed to communicate. We did a lot of work about attitudes, communication, ideas passed on by one's family of origin. We worked with religious beliefs, fetishes, gender role ideals. We worked on trauma, conflict, abuse. We rooted out anger, resentment, shame, blame, and guilt. And we changed people's lives. Some couples split as a result of the work that they did in the clinic, but many, many marriages were saved. Countless relationships were made stronger. My boss, in the decades she's been doing this, boasts close to 100 marriages that were consummated after years of marital celibacy because of the work that she's done (one of which was one of my couples. You know, once they stopped beating on each other). She's a pretty remarkable lady.

And what she did a good job of, which this woman yesterday really flubbed, was pointing out that sex is really just one form of communication in a relationship. It's actually a pretty potent, very intimate communication - even when it's casual. And it's often a crucible in which all the loaded issues of the past, all the passions and conflicts of the present, all the predictions and hopes for the future, hit a flash point.

Yeah, not a small issue. And really not about silly toys and "shocking" books.