This is how our 4 days of intensive workshops on Sex Therapy started. All my colleagues immediately started to smile and leaned back in their chairs comfortably. There are 3 important things that everyone in Lithuania is proud of. These are: our country’s independence, our national basketball team and… our language. I am still not sure how conscious Matthew Bartolo was about that. But it certainly stole our hearts from the very first moment.
In the beginning of the first day, two obvious things became evident:
- We are not used to talking about sex in such an open and free way;
- We are not used to hearing others talking about sex in such a way.
That became a challenge for everyone. For some people, the challenge was just to say out loud words like ‘sex’ or ‘penetration’. For others, discussions about different sexual orientations were a big discovery and opportunity to question their own attitude towards the subject.
Following the workshop, Lithuania acquired quite a big group of future psychologists who will feel free to ask their clients questions like “Hey, how is your sexual life going?” and not feel deadly panic about the answer that they can receive. And it is at is a significant step, in a country such as Lithuania.
The workshop gave the impression that you acquired something valuable and precious, but at the same time, questions remained. I am not sure if this workshop really made us feel more aware of what we are or what sex therapy is. I think with every new day, with every new topic, we moved further away from that. And perhaps this is how it should be. As Matthew Bartolo said, it is ok to have questions that you don’t have an immediate answer to. Go and research it for yourself. Discover your own answers.
-Gabija Kisieliute