Gina Ogden, Ph.D.

Biography

Gina Ogden is an award-winning sex therapist, family therapist, researcher, teacher, and author. She is founder of the 4-D Network, an international collaboration of practitioners whose mission is to expand the practice of therapy and sex therapy beyond limiting notions of function and dysfunction to include a wide range of diversity and experience. She conducts retreats and trainings internationally, lectures widely, leads tele-seminars attended by professionals all over the world, and has appeared in the media from talk radio to the Oprah Winfrey Show. She supervises and trains sex therapists, physicians, nurses, social workers, family therapists, and other health providers in the Four-Dimensional Wheel approach, to broaden their understanding of sexual experience.

She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spends the winters on the west coast playing and teaching in places of warmth and beauty where she can see stars and eagles and watch the sun set into the ocean.  You can find her at Esalen Institute during the month of February leading two programs, and at La Casa de Los Artistas in Boca de Tomatlan, near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico during March, training dedicated professionals. When not teaching, she stays with her son and grandchildren in San Francisco. Gina and her life partner drive across the US to the west coast every January (visiting southern friends along the way), and drive back east in April (visiting friends in New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas). For the past two decades Gina has apprenticed in various kinds of ceremonial shamanism, whose practices she incorporates into her “Expanding” work. The Four-Dimensional Wheel is directly inspired by the medicine Wheels and ceremonial mesas of indigenous cultures who recognize the interrelatedness of all life forms and the sacred connections among body, mind, heart, and spirit.

Professional Background

Gina is a licensed marriage and family therapist, an AASECT-certified sex-therapy diplomate, an AASECT-certified supervisor, and an adjunct professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). She is a clinical fellow of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) and an active member of many professional organizations including the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT), The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS), and the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health (ISSWSH). She is a regular presenter at professional conferences, and has been a consulting editor for Contemporary Sexuality, the monthly AASECT journal, and for the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality. She has served as a consultant for the three latest editions of Our Bodies, Ourselves and for the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2001 “Call to Action for Healthy Sexual Behavior.” She has contributed to consumer magazines such as Parade, Ms., Ladies Home Journal, Fitness, New Woman, and New Age, and to websites such as Prevention, Belief.net, and Tantra.com.

She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, and Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. She has received grants for her work on sexuality and spirituality from Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions and from the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. Her Ph.D. in sexology is from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality; her MA in family therapy is from Goddard College; her BA in English literature is from Smith College.

Books—and More

Gina is the author of ten books to date.  Her most recent books for a general readership (all published by Trumpeter) are: The Return of Desire (2008) and The Heart & Soul of Sex (2006). The third edition of Women Who Love Sex, was published in 2007.

Her most recent books for a professional readership (all published by Routledge) are: Expanding the Practice of Sex Therapy: An Integrative Model for Exploring Desire and Intimacy (2012), Extraordinary Sex Therapy: Creative Approaches for Clinicians (2015)—an edited collection of innovative approaches from colleagues in the U.S. and the U.K., and the new 4-D Wheel workbook for clinicians: Exploring Desire & Intimacy.

In addition to books, she’s also authored numerous book chapters and journal articles about expanding the practice of sex therapy. Her peer-reviewed monograph on her ISIS survey, “Sexuality and Spirituality in Women’s Relationships” is available from the Wellesley Centers for Research on Women.

The 4-D Survey on Integrating Sexuality and Spirituality

Gina’s nationwide survey was originally called the ISIS Survey–an acronym for “Integrating Sexuality and Spirituality.” The survey was renamed The 4-D Survey to disassociate it with the current ISIS movement. By whatever name, this is the only large-scale survey (n = 3,810) to investigate the spiritual dimensions and multidimensional nature of sexual experience. Read the major findings HERE – Download the survey HERE

She conducted this survey between 1997 and 1999 — before the whole world went digital and started using Survey Monkey. This means she has some 500 pages of spontaneous hand-written stories from women, men, and trans people from all over the U.S. about how they connect sexuality and spirituality, and experience all sorts of physical, relational, and cultural issues along the way.

It’s from these survey findings that she generated her Four-Dimensional Wheel of Sexual Experience for exploring the connections among body, mind, heart, and spirit. Read more HERE