The 4-D Wheel serves both you and your clients.
body • mind • heart • spirit
We are a global community of professionals dedicated to helping our clients access the healing and power they need to experience new depths of positive relationships, self-esteem, pleasure, and erotic connection. We are dedicated to supporting each other on a path of professional mastery through training, collaboration, and the promotion of each others’ work. The 4-D Wheel can be incorporated into any kind of work you are already doing with clients. Practitioners who have successfully incorporated this approach into their practices include therapists, psychologists, counselors, coaches, teachers, physicians, nurses, and other health providers.
The 4-D Network grew from a simple idea
Back in the mid-1980s: “What would happen if we asked different questions of our clients—that encouraged them to address how sex feels and what it means in their lives, not just the goals and activities we can count and measure?” This question morphed into a nationwide survey–“Integrating Sexuality and Spirituality” (1997), which formed the core of the collection of Gina Ogden’s work in the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University.
The survey responses (3,810 of them) were so extraordinary and diverse that they overflowed any models she could find in sexology or psychology. Enter the 4-D Wheel, an update of an ancient template for spiritual awareness that was expansive enough to hold all these survey responses, and also serve as a dynamic model for teaching.
The Wheel has generated four books so far, along with a third edition of Women Who Love Sex (2007), which had been originally published in 1994, and translated into 11 languages. Two of the Wheel books are for a general readership: The Heart and Soul of Sex (2006), which explores the survey responses—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, and The Return of Desire (2008), which applies the core dynamics of the Wheel to helping women (and others) discover what they want in sex, love, and intimacy. The latest two Wheel books are addressed to professionals: Expanding the Practice of Sex Therapy (2013) received the AASECT book award. The follow-up nuts-and-bolts workbook, Exploring Desire and Intimacy (2017), features a large format and over 50 pages of practices that can be copied or downloaded. In 2018, an updated edition of Expanding was published, which incorporates the flood of neuroscience that now affirms every aspect of the 4-D approach as optimal not only for great sex, but also great sex therapy.
The 4-D Wheel has now blossomed into the full-blown 4-D approach to sex therapy and network for professionals, with a growing international consortium of certified practitioners.
At the heart of our approach to all therapy and sexuality therapy and counseling is the engaging and innovative Four-Dimensional Wheel of Sexual Experience. This serves as an interactive map that guides your clients to explore the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of their sexual issues–including desire, pleasure, pain, intimacy, trauma, relationship discord, and much more.
The 4-D Wheel is the most non-judgmental and inclusive theoretical model that exists.
The Wheel is comprised of visibly distinct sections that differentiate the emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental aspects of personal experience; as soon as you introduce your clients to the Wheel, they can clearly see that their stories connect with all these aspects of their lives. Using the visual diagram may be enough to change the course of therapy- expanding their focus away from their problems and wounds, and toward positive paths to what they want.
Working with the Wheel is a unique approach that can help you to help your clients move out of stuck places, cultivate the nurturing relationships they wish for, and discover the joys of creativity, pleasure, intimacy, and passion in their relationships.
After introducing the Wheel, you also have the option of asking clients to get up out of their chairs and literally step into the Wheel, to explore the emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental aspects of the issues they have brought into therapy. Telling the story from the perspective of each quadrant enlists their body intelligence and provides rich layers for both you and the client- information that may never be accessed during talk therapy. Using the 4-D Wheel may seem deceptively simple, but processing the content that arises can offer profound shifts for clients, with integration that is complex and deep, even “beyond words.”
The 4-D Wheel serves both you and your clients.
The Wheel is useful for with individuals, couples, and groups, and especially beneficial for your most challenging clients who come to you with the following issues:
Sexuality: Using the Wheel helps your clients maximize options for change by differentiating among the emotional, mental, or spiritual components of physical issues.
Low self-esteem: Using the Wheel helps your clients discover options for a fuller sense of self and relationship.
Sexual Identity and expression: Using the Wheel helps your clients explore all that it means to be who they are: male, female, trans, gay, lesbian, queer, heterosexual, poly, monogamous—and to identify infinite other aspects of their sexual and erotic expression.
Communication problems: Using the Wheel offers a safe and potent forum where your clients can speak and listen mindfully from each of the dimensions: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
“Stuckness,” rigidity, defensiveness, resistance to change, attachment to past experience: When you introduce the 4-D Wheel to your sex counseling clients you inspire them to move beyond the negative patterns and stories they’ve been living by and consider new options.
FAQs
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There is no fee for becoming Certified as a 4-D Wheel Practitioner/Educator, or for annual re-certification.
Certification is maintained through annual demonstration of ongoing collegial contribution to the 4-D Network. If you cannot contribute in the ways we suggest and still want to remain part of the 4-D Network, there will be an annual fee and fewer benefits. Annual certification begins on date of signature (renewal notice will be sent 30 days before expiry)
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“Yes. I use the Wheel in conjunction with CBT. By doing so, I can help clients to enter into a more holistic healing process. Instead of consciously changing thoughts, with the Wheel, we explore alternative states of body, heart and spirit, and then we experience the corresponding difference in the mind.” -Lindsay Jernigan, PhD
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“Yes. Like many therapists and medical providers in the field of sex therapy, I work with clients with histories of trauma. When clients are dissociative and/or emotionally flooded, I’ve found that just identifying past trauma and talking about it does not engage the rich potential of the brain’s neuroplasticity. Using the Wheel has been a breakthrough in my practice because it offers a practical and efficient way to help clients literally move the new connections they create in their brains directly into their life experience.” -Keesha Ewers, PhD
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“Yes. I have found the Wheel to be one of the most helpful, adaptable, world-opening tools in my clinical kit. In settings where couples or co-workers are struggling to cooperate or understand one another, the 4-D Wheel brings their unconscious debilitating scripts to awareness and opens up the possibility of rewriting them. It invites the freedom to explore a sexuality where the body is a sacred vessel, the heart can open, and a journey of self-discovery and mutual self-revelation can take place between partners.” -Chelsea Wakefield, PhD
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“Yes. As a therapist working with a religiously conservative population, I find a sadly common scenario: men of all ages are self-diagnosed as pornography addicts and diagnosed by those they love and trust as well. The Wheel has offered me an opportunity to create a space where these men can explore their sexuality without negative judgments and without having to perform (or stop performing) in some specified way. Using the Wheel, I can invite them to examine their internal world and inhabit it in ways they had never been able to before.” -Kristin Hodson, LCSW
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“Yes. I focus on issues that arise with many kinds of partnerships and often very intense situations. The Wheel offers an enlightening and efficient way to help clients speak about otherwise impossible subject matter–to express feelings about queerness or manhood or parenting for the first time ever.” -Elliott Kronenfeld, LCSW
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“Yes. For example, I use the Wheel as part of my pelvic exam protocol for women with histories of pain and trauma. I place the Wheel on my desk and ask her to create one-word descriptors for how she experiences her own vulva- physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually- so that she creates both negative and hoped-for positive words for each. The pelvic exam is greatly enhanced by providing a common language we can use during the exam to locate areas of pain and of the release and pleasure she anticipates in the future.” -Debra Wickman, MD
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“Working with the Wheel, clients start to rely on their self-knowledge and intuition rather than asking the therapist for explanations, answers, and suggestions. I am continuously surprised at how smoothly catharsis emerges and solutions develop that I could never have dreamed of myself. The process enables a depth of story and meaning beyond any theoretical approach I had learned in my 15 years as a therapist.” -Kamara McAndrews, LMFT