Over the previous five years, our programme had helped well over two hundred people, most of whom could not have been as effectively helped by any other treatment method. Yet we were—and still are for most people—a ‘last chance saloon’. When other treatment approaches have already been tried with little effect, our door is knocked. Clients who were referred to us, simply heard of the “clinic that specialises in surrogate partner therapy”. We had everything except a name. It was time to ‘come out of the closet’ and to make our treatment programme more accessible to those who needed this approach to sexual therapy. By now the Internet age was dawning. To make our work accessible, we needed a website and an identity.
Riding up the escalator on the London Underground, I experienced a strange sense of quietness come over me. It was as though the volume of the noise around me in that busy station was turned right down, so that I couldn’t hear anything at all with my physical ears. I could see the people: watch them standing, talking and laughing with one another—but there was no sound. From deep within me came a still, small voice. I could say it was audible, except it wasn’t. It was a silent voice, but to me on that day, it was as clear as any voice that I have ever heard before.
“ICASA”, it whispered.
“ICASA”…
‘Intimacy, Consciousness And Self Awareness’…
”ICASA”…
I rode up and down that escalator several times before the normal sounds around me returned to my physical ears. In 1998, The Centre for ICASA was established in a large house—in a small country hamlet—in the UK countryside. The work that had been conceived over five years previously had now been born.
