Letter to Artemisia   12th June 2024

Hi Artemisia,

You asked me if I could write a personal appreciation and assessment of my experience of doing the training with you.  I am very happy to do this as the personal benefit to me - and to my wife - has been enormous, in fact I should say even life changing.

For those curious to do this training, I’m sure each has their own individual history and motivation that leads them to consider learning from Artemisia. Your journey through life will be different from mine but I hope it might help you reach a decision if I write something of my particular history, how I came to find Artemisia and what my experience with her has come to mean.

I am a now retired 80 year old man, married for over 40 years,  In 2022 I had a really significant moment when I said, “I really want to be alive when I die !”  Life, including sex, for me had become rather vanilla and I dearly wanted to do something about that.

I had worked professionally for nearly sixty years, first as a minister, then as a counsellor for young people and finally as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. As a therapist I had been inspired by, and used the work of Donald Winnicott on the importance of play.  Winnicott worked with both children and adults. His seminal book “Playing and Reality” brought together the hugely important value and function of children “playing”.  From his detailed studies of them at play he came to understands that it is through their spontaneous play, their experience of story and their imagination, that they try to make sense of the realities around them. In this they deal with their anxieties, fears, limits, as well as their desires and excitements.

We tend to think of such spontaneous playing as the sole preserve of our children, For adults we tend to see play as engaging in sports and games. However, in the area of our erotic lives, desire, fantasy, and story, tend to be looked on as rather suspect, something to be kept very private, dangerous or even criminal.

In my desire to be alive sexually I first saw a Tantric therapist, Rebecca Lowrie. She was a great help and led me to the surprising rediscovery of my sensual body. This included an experience of kink - something that had been totally forbidden by my “good boy” self. While it had been a matter of curiosity, it was also a matter of denial and shame. My public, social and moral position did not allow it, unless possibly within the confines of marriage. But in my “wish to be alive” I was determined to discover more about my sensual and erotic self. This was also for sake of my marriage.

I came across Artemisia’s work on the internet and was intrigued and excited as it seemed to me that she was saying something about the process of deep  transformation that is possible through exploring the details of ones fantasies and desires, not least the ones that appear dark, forbidden or shameful. Do not be put off by her vast experience as a dominatrix in a former life. I believe that it was there that she learned how people’s sexual desires and fantasies can be absolutely transformed into a  healing process. This caught my attention and appealed to me because through my professional life as a therapist, I had tried to help people transform their lives, but somehow aspects of our bodies and sex in particular had been largely avoided.

But having been doing the training with Artemisia using weekly zoom sessions over some months I have come to see, that it is not just about the world of kink and BDSM, exciting though that may be for some. But it is the process of gently and steadily identifying ones sexual desires in whatever form they take, the fantasies one privately engage in, and working with Artemisia on them. Putting it in a simplistic form, for me the “good boy” - my longstanding personal and social self - has been given the space and time  to explore in considerable detail what it means to be “the bad boy or man”. 

In Artemisia’s language this is what we fear is poison. What she then does is help find an antidote to that poison. This is where the transformation takes place. She takes each bit of our reported fantasies in detail, and as she puts it, we then “pan for gold”.  The detailed development and transformation of my illicit desires into amazing healing sexual experiences has been life changing. I am more accepting of myself in all its dimensions, I know so much more about my desires and the ways they have started giving me a sense of intimacy and excitement that I never had before. My wife, who has also been in training with Artemisia, would agree.

I have found Artemisia to be a very experienced professional woman, attentive to every detail that I have presented, kind, respectful and with a great capacity for laughter. I have never felt humiliated or shamed by her. I have valued her intelligence and her considerable capacity for original thinking based on her experience and knowledge of the human body and psyche. If your experience is anything like mine, it will be life changing for the better.

Stephen H. 

13th June 2024