Blog

What if therapy’s insistence on establishing a sense of safety is paradoxically causing clients harm? Drawing on lived experience and the concept of insidious trauma, therapist and author of Trans Sex Lucie Fielding questions the helpfulness of the ‘safety axiom’ – both in the context of informed consent and within a profoundly unsafe world – and suggests it may be setting up members of marginalised groups in particular to ‘fail’ at therapy.

Curiosity is an invaluable therapist tool. But it also has a shadow side. As therapist and sex educator Lucie Fielding explains, trans and gender expansive people are only the latest to experience invasive and objectifying questioning in the guise of clinical curiosity – especially when it comes to sex and bodies. Here, the author of Trans Sex proposes a new curiosity framework to benefit all clients, and shares three principles for practising with ‘ethical curiosity’.