Three in a Bed: Conversations with a sex therapist. Joanna Benfield

before he went out to try them in real life. I would be the girl in the library one week, and the waitress in the coffee shop the next. We began to have fun together and to laugh at our terrible acting skills and my rather poor attempts at putting on a range of different accents for my various parts.

      Slowly, over the next couple of months, I noticed that Samuel came into our sessions in a different state of mind. He seemed happy to be there and he would begin talking immediately, without any coaxing from me. He would tell me excitedly about his latest experiment, how he had chatted to a female colleague about her weekend or had handed back a greetings card that he noticed a girl drop on the London Underground, looking her in the eye and smiling as he did it. Each of these acts, however small, was a minor triumph, both for Samuel and for me. Each experiment took him a step closer to feeling confident with women and being ready one day to begin a relationship.

      We started to look at the things Samuel could do to develop a greater sense of his masculinity. His upbringing had, in many ways, emasculated him and left him unsure what it meant to be a strong, confident, assertive man. We talked about the things Samuel had done in the past that had helped him feel particularly masculine. He recalled how, as a boy, he had wanted to learn a martial art, but his mother had always told him that it was too dangerous for him. As an adult he no longer had heart problems, and when we talked about the possibility of him taking up a martial art now, his face lit up. When he came into the therapy room the following week, his eyes were bright with excitement. He said he had found a local tae kwon do group and had gone to a session the previous evening. Although he had struggled to pick up the basics, he had found himself buzzing with excitement at the end of the session, and was determined to keep going back until he had mastered it.

      In helping Samuel prepare for a future relationship, it was important to give him a way of feeling more confident about sex. I didn’t broach this topic directly until about three months into our work together. It felt to me that Samuel needed to have developed some sense of confidence in himself as a man first, as well as a level of trust in me, as a woman, talking to him so directly about sex. When I felt the time was right, I asked Samuel if he would be happy for us to start talking more bluntly about sex.

      He squirmed in his chair, nervously pushed his glasses up his nose and, avoiding eye contact, he stammered, ‘W-well, I suppose it was the reason I came to see you, so at some point we’re going to have to address it!’

      When you have spent more than twenty years keeping your deepest worries about sex a secret, it takes a great deal of bravery to walk into a therapist’s office and open up. Just finding the vocabulary to describe your deepest fears and worries about sex can be challenging enough. How do you talk about your penis or a woman’s vagina? What language do you use to describe an orgasm or masturbation or oral sex? Will the therapist be offended if you use slang or swear words? Will you go too far if you start describing sexual acts in great detail? With all of these worries racing through a client’s mind, it is no mean feat to get through a session. My main task in these moments is to put my client at ease, to be gentle with his shame and not to pass judgement on his foibles or his awkwardness.