Ariel Giarretto, LMFT, SEP, CSSE
Ariel Giarretto is a body-oriented therapist, trainer, and Somatic Sex Educator. After completing her post-graduate education in counseling psychology and license as a Marriage and Family Therapist in California, USA, she studied a wide variety of somatic and touch therapies. She is primarily informed by Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing (SE). She was introduced to SE in 1999 and became a full-time teaching faculty in 2005.
Throughout the 1990s, Ariel was on staff at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA as a workshop leader, group leader, private therapist, and part of the body work crew. There she studied with sexuality/tantra experts Carolyn and Charles Muir, Margo Anand, Jack Rosenberg, Paul Carter, and others. She also has extensive training in prenatal birth therapy with Ray Castellino, as well as attachment and early childhood developmental trauma.
In 2015, she received her certified as a Somatic Sex Educator at The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. She now specializes in sexual and gender-based violence, as well as all sexuality and relationship challenges. She has been requested 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. Her specialities include working with couples challenged by childhood sexual abuse, incompatible libido, sexual dysfunction, and infertility. Since moving to the Netherlands, she closed her private practice. Her larger mission is to support all people regardless of their trauma history, identity, or sexual orientation to find pleasure, ease, and even ecstacy in their bodies and in connection with others.