Three in a Bed: Conversations with a sex therapist
A frank insight into the lives of those who come into sex therapy and how it changes their world.Following the stories of the clients who come into Joanna’s consulting room, Three in a Bed allows the reader to become a fly on the wall in her day-to-day work. We meet Ben, whose use of prostitutes destroyed his marriage, and Samuel, whose worries about his sexual performance led him to become impotent. We are also introduced to couples such as Jia and Hugo, who love each other dearly but don’t seem to be able to fulfil each other sexually any longer. Revealing what happens when the client is on the couch, Joanna lets us into her therapy room to hear the deepest sexual fears, secrets and fantasies.
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Three in a Bed
Conversations with a sex therapist
Joanna Benfield
Sex therapists are bound by client confidentiality; for this reason, while the individual clients presented in this book are fictional, the issues they present with are based on my experiences with real clients throughout my time in practice. Names and other identifying details have been changed to protect this confidentiality.
HarperTrueDesire
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperTrueDesire 2016
FIRST EDITION
Text © Joanna Benfield 2016
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Cover layout © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Joanna Benfield asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
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Contents
When it comes to intriguing career choices, sex therapist has to be somewhere near the top of the list, slightly below pole dancer, lion tamer and arctic explorer. It tends to elicit a response of surprise, bemusement and curiosity from all who enquire into my profession, accompanied by a fair degree of discomfort and embarrassment. Sex is still a relatively taboo topic in our society, and the idea that someone should choose to spend their days openly talking about it in minute detail is anathema to many people.
Not least of all to my mother. I shall never forget the look on her face when I told her I was giving up a perfectly good career in international politics to train as a sex therapist. An expression of amusement at what she thought was a joke quickly transformed into one of abject horror when she realised that I was serious â swiftly followed by the exclamation, âYou dirty girl!â
Rather perplexed by the vehemence of her response, I asked her what she thought a sex therapist did. Perhaps shaped by too many evenings spent in front of episodes of the TV series Masters of Sex, which charted the work of the pioneers of sex therapy in the 1960s, my mother, it seemed, imagined that I would be sitting at the end of my clientsâ beds with a clipboard, timing orgasms and closely watching their every sexual move. I could understood her concern. Patiently I explained that sex therapy in the 21st century simply involves talking with clients to help them discover and address the psychological causes of their sexual problems. There is no nudity, no touching and certainly no sex. While metaphorically it may seem as if we are climbing into bed with the clients, physically we stay firmly in our consulting rooms, fully clothed. Nevertheless, flustered by thoughts of what her friends and acquaintances might think, my mother decided that she would tell them I was still working in âinternational relationsâ or âforeign affairsâ. These clever euphemisms straddled both my old and new career choices, yet spared my mother the indignity of actually referring to sex.
âAfter all, darling,â she justified herself, âyouâre bound to see a lot of foreigners in your job. The British would never go to see someone to talk about their sex lives!â
This approach clearly worked well for her for a while, until one Saturday I called her to announce proudly that I was to be interviewed on a well-known national radio programme. I would be talking about why men pay for sex. Clearly flustered by this, she told me in a panic, âBut you canât, darling! All my friends will hear â how mortifying!â It seems that, in middle-class suburbia, having a daughter who is a sex therapist is akin to oneâs offspring choosing a life of crime or running away to join the circus.
Despite my motherâs embarrassment at my profession, there are times when her curiosity gets the better of her â usually once her inhibitions have been significantly reduced by the consumption of a glass or two of wine. Our monthly lunches in a French restaurant in London soon became the regular backdrop for mother-and-daughter conversations about sex.
Soon after I had changed careers, we were sitting at our regular table, sharing a mousse au chocolat and finishing up a rather fine bottle of Bordeaux. Having exhausted the usual topics of conversation, such as who was likely to win the âBest Gardenâ prize in this yearâs village competition, my mother leaned across the table and whispered, âSo, I know itâs highly confidential, but what
