Essential Strategies of Healing Sexual Trauma and Sexuality

ONLINE

Friday, November 21, 2025 - Sunday, November 23, 2025

Saskatoon, Canada 

Facilitator Ariel Giarretto

Open to any healing practitioner

Course Description:

All of us work with clients who have experienced sexual trauma as a child, sexual assault as adults, with couples who grapple with sexual incompatibilities, or people who struggle with debilitating shame, dissociation, flashbacks, sexual/gender identity, body image and just generally resist being in their bodies.

This workshop is designed to tackle just these issues, and is aimed at helping practitioners acquire a variety of new and effective tools to best serve these clients—even the toughest ones. Introducing material and exercises not covered in the Somatic Experiencing training.

Professional Content:

  • How to help those most reluctant to inhabit their bodies actually find ease and pleasure!

  • Help clients with complex histories identify clear goals, so you both know where you’re headed, have the consent you need to nudge a bit, and then take the most direct path torecovery

  • Learn some of the newest science in sex education that will help you explain essential facts to your clients that will normalize behaviors and lessen shame

  • Learn multiple embodiment exercises that support regulation in the present—which helps people who are triggered by daily life find moment-to-moment resource and stability.

  • Learn new techniques that strengthen boundaries, help people “find their voice”, and express genuine “embodied consent”

  • Learn advanced strategies for reworking sexual trauma without re-traumatizing, and the order and steps that are most effective for success

  • Learn a variety ways of working shame and helping clients escape from its clutches


There will be time to discuss some specific cases.
 

Anyone currently in the SE training can receive 2 hours of consultation credit to apply toward SEP

What you will learn personally:

  • Get comfortable talking about the body and discussing sexuality issues with your clients and intimates.

  • Become friendlier with your body and inhabit it with new levels of comfort and awareness.

Who will benefit:

Therapists, psychologists, touch therapists, sex educators, intimacy coaches and any practitioner who wishes to become more adept at somatically treating sexual trauma and sexuality issues.

Registration Details - Will be Posted Soon

If you haven’t yet, please fill out this questionnaire.

Ariel Giarretto, LMFT, SEP, CSSE

Ariel Giarretto, MS, (she, they) is a body-oriented therapist, trainer, and Somatic Sex Educator. After completing her post-graduate education in counseling psychology, and licensed as a marriage and family therapist in California, USA, she studied a wide variety of somatic and touch therapies, and is primarily informed by Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing (SE), She was introduced to SE in 1999 and became full-time teaching faculty in 2005. (www.traumahealing.org)

Throughout the 90’s she was on staff at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA as a workshop and group leader, a private therapist and part of the bodywork and massage crew. There she studied with sexuality
/tantra experts Carolyn and
 Charles Muir, Margo 
Anand, Jack Rosenberg,
 Paul Carter and dozens 
of other somatic 
teachers and touch practitioners.

As early as age 16 she identified as non-binary and pan sexual (long before those terms existed) and has long-term involvement in a number of sex positive, LGBTQ+ communities, engaging in conscious sexuality, consensual non-monogamy, exploring kink, hosting “play parties”, teaching safer sex, and helping others navigate the land mines of open relationships.

In 2015, she certified as a Somatic Sex Educator at The Institute For Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, in San Francisco (now closed). She now specializes in sexual and gender-based violence, as well as all sexuality and relationship challenges. She has been called to train therapists dealing with Ukraine war refugees and war rape. She is the co-developer of “The Full Embodiment Model” which offers gentle, transformative workshops for people wanting to heal from the effects of sexuality trauma, sexual abuse and disembodiment.

Although she has recently closed her private practice, for decades she specialised in working with couples challenged by childhood sexual abuse, incompatible libido, sexual dysfunction and infertility. Her larger mission is to support all people regardless of their trauma history, their identity or sexual orientation to find pleasure, ease and even ecstasy in their bodies and in connection with others.

She has extensive training in prenatal and birth therapy with Ray Castellino, as well as attachment and early developmental trauma. She has been a home birth “doula”, a dancer, a drummer, an athlete, a professional cook and baker, a firefighter and first responder, a world traveller and adventurer, a juggler and street performer, and is particularly fond of her doodle.