People always want to know why anyone would want to be a sex therapist—what the journey was. For me, becoming a sex therapist as part of becoming a psychologist was completely natural.

 

My mother was ahead of her time in every way imaginable. She was a medical social worker and was always appropriately open about sex. When I was young, she read me books about where babies come from which used all the correct names for sexual organs and nearly accurately described how babies are conceived. I say “nearly” because somehow, they left out the concept of erections…. This was a source of confusion for me as a teenager.  I remember a conversation with my friend Evan when we were teenagers. We could not figure out how the penis got into the vagina. We hypothesized that maybe a penis grew little legs and walked into the vagina…This memory cracks me up, even now.

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When I was a small child, I was able to talk about sex in an open and unashamed way. No question was out of bounds.  There was nobody shame or criticism of anyone’s body--theirs, mine, friends, people we saw on  TV.  Bodies were just bodies. My parents were also very affectionate, so I have wonderful associations to touch.

 

You probably had a much different experience. Most people in this country did.  

 

In addition, some cultures are particularly sex-negative, paternalistic, or repressive to women’s sexuality, so you might have grown up in one of them, as well.  If you grow up in a sex-negative home or a “sexual vacuum” home where people act like sex does not exist, you’re likely to feel squeamish and ashamed talking about sex. (Luckily you can overcome this as an adult.)   I’ll be writing about this a lot here at xxTALK. 

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After college and graduate school, I became licensed as a psychologist. My training included classical psychodynamic training, hypnosis, and Reichian/bioenergetic therapy (which is very body-based). In the 1970s, I actually worked intensively with Myron Sharaf, Ph.D., who had been a beloved student of Wilhelm Reich’s, and I took intensive workshops with John Pierrakos, another brilliant student of Reich’s.  In more recent years, I have trained in Sensorimotor psychotherapy for trauma,  also a very body-based kind of psychotherapy.

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My training in sex therapy took many years and involved studying with famous sex therapists from all of the country through AASECT. My work on sexuality has been featured in AASECT publications since 1992.  I  became an AASECT certified as a sex therapist in 1993.  I am also a member of SSTAR,  The Society for Sex Therapy and Research, which is a more sophisticated organization that one has to be voted into.

 

So that’s the story of how I got into sex therapy. Writing this all up makes me want to ask Dr. Ruth some questions.   If you are interested in even more details, I wrote even more about my evolution in a column in 2020 in my Newsmax blog.