Dr. Genevieve Marcel

Licensed Professional Counselor Associate|Clinically Supervised

My path was not linear, which I think serves the work. I began in the sciences — my undergraduate training was in microbiology — and that empirical foundation never fully left me. But I was always more drawn to questions about meaning than mechanism, and eventually that pull became impossible to ignore. I came to existential psychotherapy through philosophy as much as through clinical training. The thinkers who shaped me most - Yalom, Rollo May, de Beauvoir, Sartre - were asking what it means to live authentically, to face uncertainty, to want something and not know why. When I found the intersection of that tradition with sexuality and desire, it felt like the only honest place to work. Sex therapy done well is never really about sex. It is about how people inhabit their lives, their longing, their fear of being truly known. I completed my graduate training in clinical psychology at Pepperdine University and went on to earn a doctorate in clinical sexology, finishing with distinction. The academic path mattered to me, but what shaped me more was the slow recognition that desire is one of the most philosophically serious territories a person can enter — and that most clinical frameworks treat it as anything but. Liaison grew from that conviction. I wanted a practice that could hold both the clinical and the intellectual with equal seriousness.