Designing Your Life: Freedom and Responsibility in Existential Sex Therapy
Genevieve Marcel Genevieve Marcel

Designing Your Life: Freedom and Responsibility in Existential Sex Therapy

This blog post explores how existential sex therapy empowers individuals to become the designers of their own lives and sexuality. It reframes freedom not as limitless choice, but as the responsibility to live with intention, integrity, and self-awareness. Through existential sex therapy, clients are encouraged to step out of autopilot and make conscious decisions about who they want to be—sexually, relationally, and personally. True freedom, the post argues, lies in owning our power to choose and create a life aligned with our values and desires.

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To Be Desired…
Genevieve Marcel Genevieve Marcel

To Be Desired…

An essay by an existential sex therapist and sexologist on the difference between wanting and being wanted, and how erotic desire is shaped by recognition rather than appetite.

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When Pleasure Encounters Existential Isolation
Genevieve Marcel Genevieve Marcel

When Pleasure Encounters Existential Isolation

This essay reframes genital and sexual symptoms not as dysfunctions but as embodied expressions of meaning. The vagina is treated as a site of existential experience, carrying history, memory and truth rather than just physiology. Existential sex therapy is described as a process of listening rather than fixing, attending to the body without judgment and helping clients reclaim presence, agency and authenticity in their sexual selves. The core message is that healing is not about correcting the body, but about understanding it and that the vagina speaks in sensation where language once failed.

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Existential View on Pleasure and Human Connection
Genevieve Marcel Genevieve Marcel

Existential View on Pleasure and Human Connection

This essay reframes pleasure not as a skill or performance but as a form of presence rooted in embodiment. It shows how people often fear or mistrust touch because of past experiences, disconnection or meaning embedded in the body. Drawing on existential ideas, it argues that pleasure is existential rather than mechanical, and that healing involves reclaiming safety, sensation and choice slowly. Instead of techniques or goals, existential sex therapy focuses on attention, authenticity and inhabiting one’s own body as a site of meaning.

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Fear of Loneliness in Relationships
Genevieve Marcel Genevieve Marcel

Fear of Loneliness in Relationships

The essay explores why many people, especially women, remain in relationships long after they have become empty or disrespectful. The core argument is that staying is often driven less by love and more by fear of solitude, compounded by cultural conditioning that equates partnership with worth. From an existential sex therapy perspective, remaining solely to avoid isolation is a form of self-abandonment. Therapy creates space to examine the meaning of staying, the meaning of leaving, and the possibility that solitude can be a threshold rather than a failure. The central idea: intimacy begins with inhabiting one’s own life, not with filling the fear of being alone.

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When the Fire Fades: Diminished Desire and the Existential Call to Reconnect
Genevieve Marcel Genevieve Marcel

When the Fire Fades: Diminished Desire and the Existential Call to Reconnect

This essay explains that changes in sexual desire are common and rarely occur without context. Desire responds to stress, grief, identity shifts and life transitions, yet is often mislabeled as dysfunction. From an existential sex therapy perspective, sexuality reflects meaning and selfhood rather than performance. When desire diminishes, it may be signaling protection, overwhelm or a need for new forms of intimacy. Instead of trying to restore past levels of desire, the more helpful question is what the change is asking of the person now. Diminished desire is not a failure but information that can lead to deeper understanding of the self.

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