A new start after 60: I divorced – and became a sex therapist | Life and style

AThe part of her training as a consultant, Jill Le Jeune, gave a presentation about sex. Her group had worked with people who had experienced trauma, low mood and suicide thoughts. “And everyone has very well with these difficult topics,” she says. But talking about sex was winding. “I thought: I would actually rather talk about sex than suicide.” She decided to specialize in the topic and began practicing as a sex therapist at the age of 60.

But why? “There was a curiosity,” she says, sitting in her office in Clapham in southwestern Londons.

Le Jeune's marriage ended a decade before. “We had a very satisfied marriage. Great children, nice house, great holidays. We had an active sex life … When he went, I thought: What? I have to understand that. “

As a psychosexual and relationship therapist, Le Jeune asks the customers: “How did you learn something about the birds and bees?” Some say they watch sex and the city. Le Jeune himself learned from educational videos at school near Exeter in Devon. “It was about putting yourself off. How you don't get pregnant not to get to Stis. “

Teenager friends were pregnant everywhere around them. “I thought: I can't.” Although she had been streamed to sit in the secondary school instead of the academic Gces CSES, she graduated from high school and started a degree in psychology and women's studies at Lancaster University at the age of 19.

She was the first member of her family to go to the university – but sometimes she still sees herself as a “CSE Jill”. She remembers the word of the first question of her CSE mathematics examination. But in retrospect the satisfaction she felt how simple she found that it was colored by displeasure – “this is the level to which they were taken up”. Le Jeune is 62 this year, but still believes that she has “some really big gaps” in her knowledge: “I look up and do not know the names of stars … I don't know any chemical compounds.”

During her 20s, 30s and 40s, she worked as a primary school teacher in the local government, in sales and marketing, as a primary school teacher and then in compliance, while she held four children together with parents. “I slept halfly in my 40s,” she says. “I wondered to sit down on a postgrade at 57, could I do it?” But she says: “I think I'm best on site now.”

She loves to hear the traffic outside of her therapy room, the hustle and bustle of the buyers, “because I have the feeling that I did it”. She has the same feeling to break into the world as after graduation at the age of 22.

“I am almost grateful for what happened to me. I'm so much more about this marriage. “

She spent the first year after her divorce in shock. “I didn't think that at the time. I just thought: get the tea on the table, keep everything going. “She was looking for refuge in gardening -” very comforting ” – and dealt with while the children did their homework.

“I had to go through the therapy and then go on this trip,” she says. Now she is able to “promote the ability to concentrate on the here and now”.

Le Jeune was her first customer in many ways.

“I work as a feminist. I recognize and I regret that I have not kept my career up. And I haven't used sexually to be used for myself either, ”she says. “When I read all these things about female excitement, I thought: Why didn't I insist that my own needs were more fulfilled?”

She supported her five -year -old partner with prostate cancer and navigated the effects of his illness on her intimate life. We worked everything for ourselves. I had that.

“I love my life,” says Le Jeune. “I am amused by CSE Jill. I know how much I have grown and developed. I am sitting here and the people think that I can have a significant impact on their lives. And what bigger than that? “