The Fat Controller Goes To Copenhagen

Friday morning, bright and early, I took a 35 minute flight from our local airport to Copenhagen. I am going to have to get used to commuting by jet: I’ll be doing it about every six weeks for the next year and a half.

The purpose of my visit was to attend a three-day course, the first module in my training to become a sex-therapist.

No, that’s not a typo. Sex therapist. Ultimately I want to set myself up in business, seeing clients, counselling them and helping them to a better sex life. It is a thing I have been thinking about for some years and now we, Heather and I, think the time is right, so I am taking the plunge, a leap of faith. This is so out of character for me. I am normally the cautious one, the one that won’t make a move without a safety net, but this feels right, it feels like something I can do and even be good at, and my first few days of training have only strengthened that belief.

It has been a pretty intense few days: Right from the start we worked on opening ourselves up to others and to LISTENING. We were paired off and one of the pair in turn was given a specific subject to talk about; When did you first discover you were a sexual being? What was your first sexual experience? What turns you on? and suchlike. The other partner was expected to maintain eye contact and listen, without saying a word, without nodding, smiling or in any way acknowledging what was being said. This is incredibly difficult but it teaches one both how to listen and to be able to talk about sex in intimate detail with someone who was, until a couple of days previously, a total stranger.

On the afternoon of the second day, I came to give my first therapy session, with one of the other students as client, in front of the whole group. I don’t think I did too badly, at least I don’t think the poor client has suffered any permanent psychological harm.

There are 32 in the class, though only 5 men. There are people from all sorts of different backgrounds and levels of experience here, all ages from early twenties to mid-sixties, married, living together, divorced, divorcing, widowed, and single. Because the keynote of the whole course is openness, everyone is open towards each other; there are no cliques and nobody is allowed to stay excluded from the group. When we break for lunch we just grab whoever is nearest and go off in groups of five or six to one of the many sandwich bars in the locality.

Already from day one we are all bound by client confidentiality, so don’t expect any juicy gossip. I will, however, keep updating regularly on progress through the different modules as we go deeper into such things as Men and Women’s differing needs, sexual technique, paraphilias, the dark side of the psyche and many other topics. The final exam is in three parts: a written dissertation, an oral exam(stop sniggering in the back there) and the delivering of a sex-education lesson in a school, to be assessed by a survey of those present. It’s going to be hard work, but I know I can do this.