Sex therapy in San Diego by Certified Sexual Therapist Dr. MacIlvaine
Advanced sex therapy for sexual problems, sexual dysfunction,
sexual desire, sexual arousal, sexual abuse, sexual addiction, and sexual orgasm.
Infant, child and teen sexual issues.
Sexual education and sexual counseling for sexual satisfaction,
and overcoming depression, anxiety,
lack of communication, grief, stress, loss, illness.
Sex is about the natural energy of being alive.
Dr. MacIlvaine, Ph.D.
AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist, Orgone Therapist, Holistic Orientation.
619-501-0334
My office is located centrally in San Diego, California,
near where Freeways 8 and 15 come together.
Everyone wants to love and be loved.
There's a lot of confusion about sexuality today, but you don't have to take it lying down.
Sexual issues arise for genuine, tangible reasons that can be examined and changed.
That's what I do.
I'm an Orgone Therapist and AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist.
Improving relationship skills is one of the nicest things people can do for themselves
and for everyone they know.
All people can achieve a higher quality of life.
People want comfort, excitement, even adventure from sexuality.
When all the cylinders are clicking, sex includes love, pleasureable sexual desire, arousal, orgasm, satisfaction, gratitude, and a sense of connection with nature.
But tragically, sexuality is too often the source of misinformation, sadness, longing, suffering, furtiveness, guilt, resentment, fear, disgust, anger, and silent resignation.
For information on basics of sexuality, pregnancy, abortion, birth control, information for parents, sexual orientation, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual violence, or sex and the law, please click on the individual topics or click here. You can also call this sexinfo number.
Here is another good source of information on-line.
A rewarding relationship with sexuality and love is one of life's loveliest gifts. There is so much goodness to be savored in living fully. You feel a genuine sense of romance and emotional intimacy. Colors seem brighter, and life is full of wonder, adventure and beauty. When our relationships are simple and direct, life just takes place naturally. Love is one of the most important things in life.
Healthy sex involves the loving free flow and discharge of life energy. The healthiest person is the one with the freest flow of usable energy.
About discharge of energy: The more charge you can maintain, the more release you get. You want to start with a good charge. You can increase your ability to hold a charge in various psychological ways.
Here are some ways people learn to increase their charge: learning to tolerate anxiety; not just venting whenever you feel like it; accepting your own responsibility, even if it is difficult; and allowing loved ones to look deeply into your eyes -- not with a blank stare. The greater the charge you can tolerate, the greater the discharge you can achieve, which translates into greater satisfaction in all areas of life -- and especially more gratification in love and sex.
These are some of the skills that are included in therapy with Dr. MacIlvaine.
The more fully your life energy flows (with charge and discharge), the richer your experience of living. It's about life and vitality. Life energy flows through you as it does with all other living organisms. It makes you a part of nature.
Sexual misery itself can block our vitality, or it may result from other problems that have distorted or blocked our life energy, such as depression or medical issues.
It's hard living with sexual problems. The suffering can be intense, with debilitating physical pain. And yet people go on living their lives, thinking maybe things will change. Or that this is just how life IS. Too often these problems lead to resignation, dullness, destructiveness, hopelessness, and a genuine living death.
The most common sexual problems seen today are lack of desire, reliance on internet sex, compulsive or meaningless sex, sex for control, lack of arousal or orgasm, erectile or ejaculation problems in men, sexual avoidance, gender identity issues, and carry-overs from sexual abuse in childhood or emotional neglect. Naturally, there are also problems caused by stress, tiredness, and other environmental or relationship issues. And there's the big underlying problem of people not feeling alive: "I don't feel anything."
Here are some screening tests for compulsive sexuality:
Heterosexual Male Sexual Addiction Screening Test: www.sexhelp.com
Homosexual Male Sexual Addiction Screening Test: www.sexhelp.com
Women's Sexual Addiction Screening Test: www.sexhelp.com
Sexaholics Anonymous Test: www.sa.org
Sex Addicts Anoymous: www.sexaa.org
Cybersexual Addiction Test: www.netaddiction.com
I also treat unconsummated marriages, painful sex, troublesome fetishes, sexual addiction, problems from sexual assault, emotional torture, and childhood or teenage sexual issues. I have particular experience with issues resulting from pelvic surgery, birth defects, or mutilating injuries.
You are at risk for sexual dysfunction if you:
- Have cardiovascular disease
- Use cardiovascular medications
- Have diabetes
- Have hypertension
- Smoke
- Ride bicycles (more than three hours/week)
- Are a man 50 years or older
- Are peri- or post-menopausal
- Have low testosterone or DHEA
- Have used oral/patch contraceptives
- Have been treated for infertility/endometriosis/painful menstruation
- Have lower urinary tract symptoms
- Take anti-depressants
- Have anxiety
- Had prostate/bladder/breast cancer
- Have given birth
- Have had a hysterectomy
(Thank you to Alvarado Hospital, Department of Sexual Medicine for this list.)
It's IMPORTANT to remember, though: Sexual problems arise for genuine, tangible reasons that can be examined and changed
Many people only need sexual information, tips, or advice. For other people, the issues are deeper. A therapy that offers lasting change and relief must treat more than body parts or isolated body systems. It treats the whole person -- mind and body. A person is a living organism. I help people to be more whole, with more room for happiness.
Significant change in therapy, especially taking on sexual issues, demands courage and an adventuresome spirit. Exploring the truth of how we function taps into the best that is in us – offering a chance for a fuller, more rewarding life.
I have had over 25 years of education and experience addressing sexual issues in psychotherapy. I am an AASECT-certified Sex Therapist (American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists).This is the highest certification for this sort of work.
The way I approach sex therapy is advanced, because I use a form of therapy that allows people to make more gains than are available from conventional treatments. I work with people at the biological level, which is deeper than psychology. I tune into people charge and discharge capabilities, as well as their pulsation as an organism.
I am an Orgone Therapist, which means I work holistically with mind and body, from a deep understanding of how the autonomic nervous system unifies mind and body in health. I work from the knowledge that all natural life is based on the pulsation between expansion and contraction. I understand the connections of body, self, and soul. I consider the entire person I’m working with and their capacity for deep contact and pleasure. I help people tolerate more charge, so they can enjoy more discharge.
It's important to keep in mind
that sex is about life energy.
Each living organism
is a pulsing energy system
that charges and discharges,
expanding and contracting.
Making deep contact with
other people is expansive.
The fuller the energetic pulsation,
the more fully life is lived.
When our pulsation is restricted,
we experience psychological symptoms and bodily distress.
The way we grow up in today's stressful world, it's no wonder we end up less happy than we could be. Because our vital energy is our sexual energy, constrained ways of living always, in some way, interfere with full sexual functioning.
Sexual issues are not just medical. They indicate emotional armoring, especially problems with direct human contact. For example, there may be difficulty being face to face with someone, or making eye contact in an open, relaxed, and revealing manner. Can you see how the couple on the left is even more open and unguarded than the couple on the right? It's the intensity of emotional contact.
Many people undermine love by making off-putting remarks, even without noticing. This is because of emotional armor. (Read from the book online: Emotional Armoring: An Introduction to Psychiatric Orgone Therapy by Dr. Morton Herskowitz.)
Intimacy involves deep emotional contact. Rich and rewarding sex with love requires being vulnerable at the same time you are breathing deeply enough for your body to respond.
When we're stressed, it is natural to breathe shallowly in order to shut down emotions. As children, we learn to do this for comfort or a sense of safety. However, shallow breathing won't allow even a minor orgasm, and especially not the deep release and discharge accompanied by profound love and gratitude.
A genuine, holistic sex therapy works on "building blocks" such as eye contact (blank stares don't count), breathing, being open, and allowing the flow of energy -- depending on the individual person's needs. Holistic sex therapy also increases your ability to tolerate and maintain a full charge of life energy, in ways such as by tolerating anxiety, not blowing off steam, accepting difficult truths, and being specific rather than vague. These practices require full breathing and result in more intense contact with your partner, as well as greater charge and discharge. They reduce emotional armoring. They increase the aliveness of your own organ sensations, which for many people are completely numb. The more intense contact makes sex become electric.
Therapy sessions involve working on key elements such as these, depending on each person's individual needs and what they want. Therapy isn't all talk by any means! I ask people to do things (such as breathing or moving) in session in order to expand their capacities. Please keep in mind, though, that sex therapy never involves sexual activities, including any kind of masturbation, nudity, or demonstrations. People practice new relationship and contact skills in their outside lives, whether in sexual relationships or with other social contacts.
Sexual issues are addressed clearly and directly in sex therapy, but also in the context of the person's entire quality of life.
In the big picture, I help a person expand their comfort, pleasure, sensory awareness, physical and emotional expressiveness, emotional contact with their partner, and connection with nature, other people and themselves. People transform their lives.
What is the origin of this advanced form of therapy?
Wilhelm Reich discovered the mind/body unity, with systematic scientific evidence. (Order a wonderful 29-minute video about Reich's scientific work, "Man's Right to Know.")
His studies of orgone energy (life energy or chi) were ahead of his time, with findings in natural science, political science, and weather control, in addition to helping people escape from suffering and enjoy more quality of life through psychotherapy -- Orgone Therapy. Orgone energy is visible and can be concentrated and measured. (Watch a video lecture:1 hr,17 min)
He accomplished this without exposure to the Chinese concept of chi, which is the same life energy but with a different focus.
In today's terms, Reich's work was "green." It focused on the threatened layer of life that surrounds our planet, as well as the threat to our own aliveness.
Look at the blue layer around Earth in these photos. In his laboratory work, Reich demonstrated that blue is the color of life energy.
As early as the 1950's, Wilhelm Reich was warning about environmental destruction and the depletion of our planet's life energy, just as he helped restore full aliveness and energy flow with his patients in Orgone Therapy. And with his concern for nature and natural health, he developed a therapy that doesn't rely on psychotropic medications. Overall, orgone therapy is a non-medication form of therapy. It works by increasing a person's flow of energy.
Reich called this organism energy "orgone energy." It's also the energy discharged in orgasm. Orgone energy is the underlying functioning principle of life. Our expansion and contraction act to keep life energy moving through us freely. This flow refreshes and renews us and connects us with the natural experience of being wholly alive, something exciting, surprising, and rare in the human world today.
Through his research, Reich discovered that people can increase their tolerance of charge and discharge. He coined the term orgastic potency for the capacity of a person to surrender completely to involuntary convulsions and full discharge of excitation at the culmination of the genital embrace. Orgastic potency is absent or inadequate in neurotic individuals. Achieving orgastic potency requires a person to resolve pathological armor. This is a frequent goal in therapy. Note that orgastic potency is different from erective potency or ejaculative potency.
The genuine reality of life energy's or chi's or orgone energy's existence is well-accepted by many people today, although mainstream science has yet to grasp and assimilate the implications of Reich's revolutionary discoveries. Many people world-wide are working to expand awareness of this neglected but vital area of science.
The energy of the cosmos is the same energy in our bodies -- if we can only give it free rein to function for our health and pleasure. This is our most profound connection with nature. Reich said that we are functionally identical with nature.
Reich left a legacy in his therapy, which provides a way for brave and motivated people to free themselves from nagging restrictions and experience life in a more vital, flowing, and pleasurable manner.
I invite you to learn more about the functions of life by clicking on the links I have provided, or by calling and scheduling an appointment to talk. You can reach me at (619) 501-0334.
Sincerely,
Mary Lou MacIlvaine, Ph.D
| Services |
| Sex therapy includes knowledge about sexual functioning, anatomy, expectations, etc., often with homework assignments to try new behaviors. |
| Individual therapy treats a person’s own psychological functioning and provides the best opportunity for dealing with character and emotional armoring. |
| I also provide Child Psychology for children's behavioral issues, especially involving pelvic or sexual concerns. |
I provide equal access to treatment for people of all persuasions, orientations, and ethnic identities. I work with personality disorders if the person is cooperative with treatment. I don’t treat major mental illnesses, multiple personalities, or groups -- or provide court-mandated therapy or other coerced treatment.
I do not prescribe medication. However, I coordinate treatment with psychiatrists or other physicians who prescribe antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.
I take appointments seriously and am available at the appointed time. I ask people to let me know 48 hours in advance in order to cancel or reschedule. I can be somewhat flexible about unforeseen emergencies or illnesses. I ask clients to agree that if they "no-show," they will be responsible for paying for my time.
My fee is $150 per hour. Although I don't accept any insurance, I keep a limited number of slots available for people who need a reduced fee or a sliding scale. Please feel free to inquire. All inquiries are treated confidentially.
Sex therapy never involves sexual activities, nudity, or demonstrations.
(619) 501-0334