Sexual Grounding Therapy

Context, Theory and Practice

Geoff Lamb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367862572
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000384048
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This important book explores the history of sexuality and the breadth of support available to people experiencing sex and relationship challenges, presenting a model of psychosexual therapy that's contextualised in the past, present and future and examined within a developmental and relational framework.

Sexual Grounding Therapy focusses on the work of Willem Poppeliers, who developed his unique approach to sex and relationship issues in the 1990s. Geoff Lamb explores the model's historical context; offers a comparison with other contemporary approaches, both mainstream and alternative; describes the model and its application in detail; and looks at future directions for this innovative work. While Poppeliers' approach to psychosexual therapy is radical, Geoff's book emphasises and goes beyond this, taking a controversial stance on such topics as sexuality and religion, psychotherapy and science, and the position of both psychotherapy and psychosexual therapy in today's society.

Sexual Grounding Therapy explores how people's needs at each stage of their lifelong psychosexual development relate to any current sex and relationship problems they may be experiencing. It will be invaluable, not only to professionals – counsellors, psychotherapists and others whose work involves sex and relationships – but also to readers who are interested in exploring their own self-development and relationships from a historical, social and family perspective.

Part 1

Exploration

Chapter 1

History

There is no such thing as an original idea, model or theory if by ‘original’ we mean that the idea, model or theory has been produced in a vacuum. All ideas are either developments of existing ideas or reactions to them. Sometimes there are new, creative angles, which can unlock ‘stuckness’ and bring insight to bear on a problem, but these angles are almost always developed in the context of existing thought and knowledge. It is important for a newcomer to an idea, model or theory to be aware of the context in which it was developed in order to move from their familiar ground into new territory.

In this chapter, I am aiming to present a picture of the historical background against which Sexual Grounding Therapy (SGT) – its development, theory and practice – will be shown in sharp relief as the book unfolds.

As Ellenberger (1970) suggests in The Discovery of the Unconscious, the earliest ways of supporting healthy psychological development, which would have included sexuality and relationships, were connected with or part of religion. In prehistoric times, the way in which this help and support was given was part of the existing oral culture and cannot be directly accessed or researched. We are therefore dependent, as far as our understanding is concerned, on anthropological research (carried out by authors such as Malinowski and Mead in the early 20th century) into the way sex and relationships were lived and, where necessary, healed in the surviving indigenous cultures of that time. Wilhelm Reich (1971), one of Freud’s followers and a pioneer of sexual liberation, drew on Malinowski’s work in The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality.

We also have the writings of indigenous authors such as Sobonfu Somé (1997) to give us a first-hand and more recent account. Without romanticising tribal cultures either in the past or in the present, we can see that one consequence of living in close contact and harmony with nature is that you are inevitably more at home with your own inner nature, including and especially your sexual nature. This means that the support that would almost certainly have been given to individuals with their psychosexual development would have been a matter of supporting that nature within the individual human being and within their social group. The flavour of this pervades Somé’s The Spirit of Intimacy (1997). She talks movingly of the whole village community supporting the couple in negotiating the obstacles that inevitably arise during the course of an intimate relationship:

In the Dagra community marriage is not a private matter. It’s not just two individuals getting married. In fact, when a couple gets married, they create an occasion for other people to renew their vows and get married once again, at the same time. Sharing is a way of enlisting support for when problems start to hit.

(p. 74)

I particularly appreciate the way that she assumes there will be problems and that support is available from the whole village to make the relationship the best it can be. The couple don’t have to hide their problems behind closed doors and neither are they being sold a romantic myth. Of course, this system is dependent on a generational level of sex-positive and nature-positive support, which is rare in the 21st century and was under threat even as Somé was writing.

As the Abrahamic religions spread throughout the Middle East and Europe, it may not surprise us to observe that, although some support for psychological and psychosexual well-being might be offered within the context of the religious establishment, support for what would now be called healthy sexual expression became limited. In contrast to the ‘tribal’ approach, the Abrahamic approach is characterised by control and limitation (the oft quoted book of Leviticus being a prime example of this). In Oedipus Revisited, Shere Hite (2007), author of two groundbreaking surveys on male and female sexuality in the 20th century, suggests that some of the sexual prohibitions in Leviticus were in fact designed to increase the population of the Hebrew tribes, who had recently returned from exile, by limiting permissible sexual expression to ‘foreplay followed by intercourse and ending with male orgasm inside the vagina’ (Hite, 2007, p. 32).

Whether the kind of limitation and control I’m talking about is inevitable or necessary is an important question which will re-emerge throughout this book, but the fact that the context in which all three of these religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) developed was patriarchal almost certainly had something to do with it. Of course, I’m aware that patriarchy developed and still exists in other religious communities, but I’m focussing on the Abrahamic religions here, firstly because they are arguably dominant in the 21st century and secondly because patriarchy is enshrined within their monotheism.

At a very basic level in a patriarchal society, men, especially powerful men, are concerned to know that their sons are their sons, whereas women always know that their sons and daughters are their sons and daughters. Limiting the support given to what we in the 21st century might see as healthy sexual expression could be viewed as a way of preserving monogamy (and even polygamy, but definitely not polyandry!) and therefore reassuring the men concerned.

‘Reassuring’ is a very important word here, particularly where sex is concerned. Sexual desire sometimes seems irrational and has been argued by many, particularly poets and mystics, to be in itself, a form of madness. Where men and women are not supported in becoming self-regulating and self-fulfilled as they grow up, as they were in earlier cultures and which they unfortunately are not in the present day, then sex, along with death, becomes something to be feared. We could perhaps say that it is the life force, manifesting itself sexually and following its natural trajectory through maturation towards death, that is really what human beings have been afraid of since earliest times. In pagan cultures, this fear was contained and channelled (regulated, we might say in an SGT context) through ritual and licence, as, for example, in the Dionysian rites, where a degree of divine, sexual madness was supported. Pagan religions were also balanced, i.e., they had masculine and feminine principles enshrined within the pantheon of their divine beings, which gave a model for balancing the masculine and feminine parts of each human being; this balance is an essential ingredient of the self-regulation and self-fulfilment which I shall explore in Part 3 of this book.

With the coming of Christianity, or rather with its development as the state religion of the Roman Empire, the separation between the divine or rational aspects of human beings and their physical/emotional nature became even more extreme. Spirit and body came to be regarded as separate, the former being seen as superior to the latter and thinking being similarly privileged over feeling. Arguably, this separation between spirit and matter could be said to have started with the post-Socratic Greek philosophers, notably with Plato’s doctrine of divine originals, but it became more pronounced as the Christian era developed. It was almost inevitable that, because the divine/rational seemed to offer more certainty in the face of the fear referred to in the previous paragraph, it should control and dominate the physical/emotional ever more strongly.

The contemporary writer and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle (1997), who quotes Jesus’ teachings and parables in The Power of Now, clearly takes a different view of Christianity, seeing its essential message as connecting the divine with the physical rather than separating them, imbuing the body with spirit, rather than seeing the two as enemies; I am more in sympathy with this view. However, he makes it clear that he’s talking about the essence of Christianity, Jesus as a spiritual teacher, rather than the institution of the church. Tolle draws on the teachings of Jesus (see Luke 12:27) in support of the idea that living in the here and now does away with the necessity of fear and control, and his recommended way of living in the present is through awareness of the body.

The control and domination that gradually developed as Christianity became an established institution were epitomised by the doctrine of original sin – that human beings, by their very nature and because of the fact that Eve, the first woman, had succumbed to the temptation of the serpent in the garden of Eden, are intrinsically sinful and need to be controlled from the outside, usually by a combination of the church and the state. It is possible, as Reich (1975) said in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, to see this as some kind of conspiracy where the control is being imposed on passive victims. The problem is that there’s a circular process in operation here. The more we believe that part of us is sinful and needs controlling, the more we fear it and the more likely we are to believe that we need to be controlled from the outside. This can lead to us welcoming rather than resisting the externally imposed control. Reich (1945) described this situation as the ‘emotional plague’ (Reich, 1945, pp. 248–280) and used the idea to explain the rise of the far right in Germany and Austria in the 1920s and 1930s. Reich also believed that, by controlling the ‘sinful’ part of ourselves or having it controlled, the impulse we are afraid of will become more powerful and emerge in a destructive way, which supports the belief that it needed controlling in the first place.

Certainly, sexual experience and behaviour in the Middle Ages (as evidenced in Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales), despite or maybe because of the draconian restrictions placed on sexual expression in that era, would support Reich’s assertion. Put simply, there were a lot of rules and restrictions placed on the expression of sexuality. The fact that these were often ignored was used as evidence of their necessity in the first place.

The fear of sex and death (the fear of life?) is perhaps always a possibility for human beings who are ‘blessed’ with an enlarged neocortex, which enables us to learn, in a very sophisticated way, from past experience. We can project ourselves into the future and plan, but we can also generate within us a fear of that future and a seemingly insatiable desire for certainty. This makes us all very vulnerable to anyone, a priest, a politician or even a psychotherapist, who seems to be able to offer us that certainty in return for separating us even further from that part of us which makes us feel uncertain, i.e., our human (sexual) nature. Curiously, if we can accept this uncertainty both inside and outside ourselves and can learn to live with it in both senses of that word, our need for outside control diminishes. Our lives become exciting just by virtue of our being alive and then we don’t have to look for external excitement in thrill-seeking activities.

It is important to note that the repression and control over its followers’ sexuality, which gradually developed in the Christian establishment, was not universal. Within or just outside the ‘system’ there have always been individuals who recognise the unity of humanity and the importance of the life force in the whole of the cosmos. One such example was Hildegard von Bingen (1994). Hildegard was a visionary, musician and healer in 12th-century Germany and, although she had some peculiar ideas about the physiology of conception and birth (that the man plants his seed in the woman, whose role is then to nurture that seed with her menstrual blood in order for the seed to mature into a human being), she at least acknowledges sexual desire and pleasure in both sexes. In stating that healthy women maintain that desire into their seventies, she also acknowledges that there is more to sex between men and women than reproduction, which is what the church was teaching.

This position of being on the fringes of the mainstream is also, as will be explored in the fourth part of this book, where I believe psychotherapy and especially SGT, truly belongs. Arthur Versluis (2008), in The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism, takes a similar but different position on the relationship between religion and sexuality, thinking more in terms of the pagan/early Christian sexual rituals described earlier being preserved and perpetuated in secret and underground rather than visibly on the fringes. These included the Dionysian rites and, most importantly, other rituals designed to allow worshipers to experience the relationship between the divine masculine and the divine feminine, which according to Versluis, have been preserved from the pre-Christian era and incorporated into the beliefs of some Christian sects until the present day.

Help for emotional, relationship and sexual problems continued to be available through the church during the Renaissance mostly, as Ellenberger documents, via the casting out of ‘demons’ along with the kind of pastoral support that, however kindly meant it might have been in individual cases, essentially reinforced the restrictive status quo. The recognition of human beings as entities in their own right as a byproduct of the Enlightenment seemed like a significant step forward. However, McGilchrist (2009) argues that the Enlightenment, by prizing left brain over right, separated human beings even further from their own nature by prizing rationality rather than a judgemental divine being. I would suggest that the post-Socratic Greek philosophers began this process earlier by linking the rational with the divine, but, interestingly, Freud, who was known to be a classical scholar before he undertook his medical training, shows the considerable influence of this way of thinking in the development of psychoanalysis. Clearly the philosophy of the Enlightenment gives human beings more sense of autonomy, but the price of this is separation from themselves, which I shall discuss further in Chapter 3.

The overall support for individual human beings expressing their sexuality and life energy as human beings was to remain limited until towards the end of the 19th century when the first sexologists, Havelock Ellis and Richard Kraft-Ebbing, began to write about sexuality. Notwithstanding their focus on the pathological aspects of sexuality, these two authors amongst others represent the beginning of a movement to study sexuality as a serious scientific subject and a ‘respectable’ branch of medicine. It is significant that neither of these pioneers were ordinar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1: Exploration
• PART 2: Comparison
• PART 3: The SGT model
• PART 4: Future perspective
• Appendix: Further information and useful links
• Index