Thank you for your interest in learning how somatic sex education teachings can benefit clients. Somatic sex education provides increased access to healthy sexual pleasure and sexual healing.
My Call to Somatic Sex Education
I experienced the cumulative effects of sexual shame, repression and trauma throughout my lifetime. I was a victim of child sexual abuse.
In my youth, sex education was sparse or non-existent. Sex positivity did not exist. Sex was a closeted subject. Societal conditions were ripe for child and youth sexual abuse and exploitation, even more so than today.
High degrees of sexism dictating the socialization and objectification of women was the cultural norm. This adversely affected women’s sexuality in many realms. It certainly affected mine. I had a twisted and disempowered view about sex and about fixed gender roles as a teen and young woman.
As a young woman during my nursing career, I experienced the powers of patriarchy. Men held the power. My voice and choice about most matters in life did not count, including my sexual desires and pleasure. Later in life in my social service career, I worked with vulnerable children and adults impacted by sexual abuse, exploitation and sexualized violence for over 30 years. I experienced vicarious sexual trauma from this line of work. All of these factors in my history took a toll on my sex life. I became disinterested in sex and thought I would never again experience sexual desire.
After sixteen years of a sexless marriage, I decided to attempt to revive my sex life. And I stumbled upon help from a somatic sex educator. Through the use of wanted touch, he showed me ‘how to’ re-ignite my erotic pilot light, ‘how to’ ask for and access erotic pleasure and ‘how to’ follow my pleasure to locate more pleasure. I returned home to my husband and simply showed him ‘how to’ do the same. And, as a result, our sex life was quickly revived and has continued to improve since then.
I experienced for myself, the transformational powers of somatic sex education. It was a powerful antidote to internalized sexual shame, repression and trauma that affected me for most of my life. The transformation was instant from my very first session. And my embodied feelings of exhilaration, personal power and joy with experiencing pure and healthy pleasure, for the first time in my life, grew deeper with each subsequent session I attended. I wanted to learn more about the modality to understand how this transformation happened.
So I registered at the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education in July 2019. It is a two year professional certification program that encompasses nine on-line and in person intensive training courses. I graduated in the summer of 2021 as a certified Sexological Bodyworker and Somatic Sex Educator.
In addition to the five core courses required for completion of this program, I also attended these elective specialty courses:
- Sex and Intimacy Coaching with Caffyn Jesse
- Sex and Disabilities with Shauna Farabaugh
- The Wheel of Consent with Robyn Dalzen and Helena Palmquist De Felice
- Myofascial Release for Somatic Sex Educators with Ailsa Keppie
- Embodied Personalized Code of Ethics with Christiane Pelmas
How Somatic Sex Education Teachings Can Benefit Clients
- Clients discover they hold their own expertise about their pathway to pleasure. As practitioners, we do not position ourselves as expects. Our clients are the experts.
- Clients realize they do not need fixing. Prior sexual responses, often labeled as problems in normative culture, are seen by somatic sex education practitioners as being protective and adaptive mechanisms that served a useful purpose at the time.
- Clients learn to tap into their body wisdom and adjust to their needs, desires and equilibrium when pleasure orientation is guided within a safe, non-judgemental environment that supports client-directed choice and voice about touch.
- Clients can experience release of historical trauma held in the tissues of their body
I felt the release of sexual trauma and shame in my body as a client of somatic sex education.
Clients learn that:
- Wanted and pleasurable touch supports the processing, reduction, release, and healing of sexual trauma or other difficulties and increases access to increased sexual pleasure concurrently.
- Somatic awareness and following one’s sexual pleasure through empowered choice and voice about wanted touch is the most potent means to achieve greater sexual pleasure and sexual healing.
- Liberated sexual pleasure as a natural birth right has been diminished by current dominant cultural norms of sex negativity, pathologizing sexuality and judgement-based attitudes that limit sexual expression.
- Healthy sexual pleasure blossoms and thrives within full empowered consent and respectful ethical relationships.
Somatic sex education offers a new non-normative modality to:
- Counter the fear and judgment-based attitudes about sex found in normative culture.
- Restore one’s rightful access to liberated sexual pleasure under one’s own terms.
- Experience being held in ‘loving presence’ and offered service with ‘a full heart’; two cornerstones of our practice.
- Explore sexual pleasure as a direct portal to one’s natural erotic life-force energy.
- Feel into one’s erotic life force energy as a creative and empowering force that is life affirming and life transforming in many realms.
These learnings impacted me as a client of somatic sex education and became reenforced while training as a practitioner. I also learned about the ill effects of patriarchy on men. It helped me feel less judgmental and more accepting of everyones unique circumstances.
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