Rick: The Room and The Key - Surrogate Partner Therapy and Core Desires
- Miranda Wylie
- 1 day ago
- 10 min read
Surrogate Partner Therapy: Core Desires
This is a multi-part series. While the essays can stand on their own to have the full experience, I invite you to read Part 1: Rick: Before He Walked Through the Door and Part 2: Rick: The Silence Keeps the Score.
She straddled him on the couch of her college dorm room. They had been together a short while — long enough for a protocol and rhythm in their sex to have been established, but short enough that everything still carried a charge.
“Don’t,” she moaned in his ear. “Stay inside.”
In addition to using birth control, they had been practicing the pull-out method — a ritual of restraint that had become its own kind of tension between them. But that night she pressed him closer before he could slip out.
And then she came. Hard. His orgasm caught up to hers and they came down together, tangled and breathless, the room quieter than it had been a moment before.
It was the first time he came with her without using his hand. His body, for once, doing the thing he had feared it never could.
This was Rick’s most reliable fantasy. The relationship with his college girlfriend fizzled after six months, undone in part by his anxiety about sex. But from this relationship, he gained his body’s one clear yes in a life that had otherwise been organized around anticipating no. He had returned to the experience of the couch and her voice in his ear so many times. He didn’t know why it turned him on so much. He assumed it was simply because he didn’t have much else to draw from. At 33 Rick had only one short-lived relationship and one erotic experience worth revisiting.
He had never considered why the experience was so hot for him.
Until now.
~~
In surrogate partner therapy I don’t ask my clients to do anything I wouldn’t do or haven’t done. Often I give clients the same resources I use. We all have intimacy wounds to heal, even the surrogate guiding you. One such tool I use and extol is Insight Timer. At minimum I source a guided meditation from Insight Timer once or twice a day. Some clients take to the meditations more than others. Rick admitted that he hadn’t expected much. But he is, by his own description, a “diligent and good student.”
It was Sarah Blondin’s “Becoming Your Own Beloved: Ritual in Self-Love” that got him.
“I didn’t even know I was crying until I felt wetness on my cheeks,” he shared with me on our eighth session.
I smiled and nodded. I knew these tears, the ones that emerge, slowly, as you listen to Sarah’s calm refrain, “I love you. I am listening.”
Sarah speaks of the separation and rejection of self. Something I would have given more of an eye roll in my twenties, but the arrogance of youth has long been traded for something quieter. The arrogance of youth thinks we can fight our way through conditioning. Experience knows we have to listen our way to find our wholeness.
It’s remembering what was always there beneath the noise.
Rick had spent most of his life in his head: analyzing, problem-solving, monitoring, grading. He was trying to make sense of the cultural and familial, spoken and unspoken messages. And yet what his body had been waiting for was a quiet moment to rest and speak.
I love you. I am listening.
The phrase landed somewhere deep and unfamiliar, like a hand reaching into a room that had been locked for a long time.
I don’t teach people how to do anything other than this – find that room and the lost key. You know the room, you have the key. I may be the first one with my hand on the doorknob, but only you have the key and can open the door.
Three months in surrogate partner therapy and for the second time outside of our sessions, Rick’s body had spoken before his mind could edit. The first time, maintaining innocent touch with a friend — a result from our early nervous system regulation work. Now this. Unplanned tears that rolled out of him like taking a deep breath — instinctive, necessary.
Rick was listening. The door and key found. Could he open the door?
In talking through why the meditation had struck him so intensely, I asked, “What did you hear when you listened? What is it that you want?”
“I honestly don’t know. That’s why I’m here,” he said.
I nodded and let him continue.
“I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to let this fear have such a strong grip on my life. I think in the meditation I heard how unkind I am to myself and it filled me with a deep sadness,” he said.
He went on to describe how he had heard of unconditional love but hadn’t really known what it actually meant. Maybe he had never felt it.
“I think I’m trying to be a certain person, be perfect somehow, and then I’ll be able to have love. And then, in the meditation she is asking us to give love to ourselves, and I was like, I can’t do that. I mean, how does one do that?”
We had been circling perfectionism for weeks. It showed up often in our time together. In the way he monitored his touch during our Sensate Focus touch exercises. He feared being seen as that guy — the predator who paws at women, the man who feels entitled to take, his arousal too present, the man who corrupts women. Or that guy that is meek, afraid to touch at all, flaccid. In trying to strike the right balance of that guy, in other words, be “the perfect guy,” Rick was totally lost.
“Can you really achieve perfection in intimacy?” I asked. It wasn’t a test question. It’s a question that naturally surfaced. One I had never directly asked myself or anyone. But I realized that asking this question unpacks a lot of our belief systems.
Rick looked down. I knew he probably wanted to make a self-deprecating joke about how he wouldn’t know.
“Is perfection even an appropriate word to use with intimacy?” I pressed gently.
The question hung in the air between us.
“Or are being perfect and being intimate opposing sentiments?”
The silence stretched. Finally, he lifted his head. “I guess... if they’re opposing, then I’ve been trying to do something impossible.”
“Yes. I think so,” I said.
When you follow this question all the way down, perfection and intimacy are opposing forces. Perfection requires a fixed standard, a measurable outcome, a grade, the gold stars, the A+. Intimacy requires the willingness to be curious, to be surprised, to be moved, to be present with whatever is actually happening rather than what you planned for. Perfection is a closed door, like an arrival. Intimacy is an open one.
Rick absorbed my musings. His shoulders dropped, just slightly. Like some weight he’d been carrying had finally found somewhere else to land.
“To be clear, being a good partner is different than being perfect. At that, what does being good mean? We have to arrive at these definitions together in our relationships,” I said.
If there is one thing I want my clients to understand it’s that intimacy is messy. It involves risk. Ultimately, withholding intimacy due to perfectionist thinking is a strategy to avoid the thing we fear the most: failure. Rick did not want to fail, so he didn’t try.
Rick had absorbed, primarily from porn but also from cultural messaging embedded in media, the idea that sex follows a particular uniform shape. A man takes the lead. A woman receives. Bodies perform on cue. Everyone arrives ready and leaves satisfied. This is the one movie we have all been shown: a narrow, airless script of what desire is supposed to look like.
With his college girlfriend he had been trying to perform in a movie he didn’t actually want to be in. And his body had been refusing, quietly and persistently, to play its assigned role.
Around this time, I introduced Rick to the work of sex therapist Dr. Jack Morin, specifically his concept of the Core Erotic Theme or core desire as I call them. In his foundational book The Erotic Mind, Morin proposed what he called the Erotic Equation: attraction plus obstacles equals excitement. The premise is that desire isn’t simply about wanting someone. It’s about the particular charge created by the interplay between attraction and what stands between you and its fulfillment.
More than that, Morin observed that our core desire — the fantasy or scenario that takes us from zero to sixty, reliably, every time — is not random. It is a coded language, unique to each person. Our psyche holds a script and at the center of that script, almost always, is the residue of a sexual imprint, a core wound, a deep emotional injury from our early life. The script is trying to help us see ourselves, trying to show us what we need, but we have to get quiet to hear it.
Your core desire is not despite your wound. It is because of your wound. This is where your pain is transmuted to desire. Your body will naturally seek resolution through pleasure. It’s a conversation, a dance. We just have to allow it to happen. Honestly, for me, this transmutation is one of the most miraculous things our body does.
To find Rick’s core desire I led him through a meditation. I asked him to drop into his body, to let his mind go quiet, and to recall the fantasy — actualized or not — that takes him from zero to sixty. The most relied-upon spank bank material. The one that works every time.
Then I read him a list of feelings and asked him to notice which words gave him a jolt. Not which words he thought he should feel. Which ones his body responded to before his mind could intervene. Some words he reported easily: appreciated, connected, loved, capable, collaborative.
“Most everyone wants and needs to feel these things. Are there any others that stood out?” I asked.
I asked Rick to reflect on the scene he fantasized and what were the feelings that really light him up, had some edge, maybe harder to admit, or might even invoke some embarrassment?
He sat forward. The nervous laugh came first. Then he stammered, “Naughty. Out of control. Taken. Used.”
He watched my face for a reaction of judgement. Instead, I delighted and got closer to him on the couch.
“Yes. Those. Tell me about the scene you imagined.”
The dorm room. Her voice in his ear. Stay inside.
The lightbulb was slow and then sudden.
He recounted that she didn’t want him to pull out. He remembered her pressing closer before he could slip out. He recalled how hot it was to have a naked woman straddling him on a couch. He loved feeling her ass and seeing her writhe on him. He remembered she came first and was loud.
“Who was in control?” I asked.
“She was,” he said, without hesitation.
“It was clear she wanted you?”
A pause. A breath. “Yes.”
“And she was taking what she wanted?”
“Yes.”
“And you... were okay with that?”
“Yes,” he said, finally meeting my eyes.
Then the sudden part clicked.
“So, you weren’t the corruptor,” I said. “Maybe she was even using you.” I smirked.
His eyes widened. “I never thought about it like that.”
He chuckled. I did too.
Being taken and used doesn’t fit in the heteronormative romantic script for men. But these words, these feelings he wants to experience in sex are more raw, more specific, more him. It’s his desire, not culture’s. Stepping outside of the heteronormative story we are all handed — the story where men lead and desire is clean and uncomplicated — means first reckoning with the shame of wanting something different. Of being different.
“You don’t have to be the one who takes the lead,” I said.
“Tell me this, does the dorm room story stand out because of the relationship you and she had, or the action or the setting?” I asked.
“It’s not about her specifically. It’s not about the relationship.” He paused. “I think I could feel that way with a one-night stand,” he said quietly. “It’s about a woman who knows what she wants.”
“Yes. That part.” I confirmed.
This is what Morin called the resolution pathway — the core desire is to feel the opposite of the wound. The alternative pathway is repetition with agency which is what it sounds like: recreating scenarios that replicate the core would but with agency this time.
For Rick the bible story lesson that boys corrupt girls followed by his parents’ silence and shut down after the “slapping butts” version of tag, and the general silencing of anything remotely suggestive of naked bodies in his house (remember the shampoo commercial that got turned off?) created a belief, or wound, that his touch harms.
Naughty, out of control, taken, used.
She takes from him. He doesn’t take from her.
She was in her desire, in her pleasure, with her full and enthusiastic yes. He is assured that she wants sex and even likes feeling a bit used for sex.
I sat with Rick in reverence as the picture came into full focus and we connected all the dots. Being with someone as they step into their truth is not triumphant, not at first. It is tentative. It is the careful naming of something that has been hidden for so long it feels dangerous to say out loud. It’s holding the key to the lock with shaky hands.
“But, like, that’s not very masculine?” he posited.
“There’s a world in which a woman whose wound is sexual shame finds it liberating — and necessary — to be in control.”
Rick sat with this for a long moment.
His desire wasn’t broken or limited or dependent on a particular person or a level of emotional intimacy he hadn’t yet achieved. It was specific and it was portable and it was his. It was possible. It was possible to find someone self-assured. Someone who leads. Someone who presses closer instead of pulling away.
That woman exists. More than one of her, in fact.
The homework I gave Rick was tender and specific. First: reflect on the core desire, sit with it, let it be true without immediately dismantling it with shame. Second: connect with someone about his core desires. Normalize talking about sex. Rick suggested his brother, and I thought this was a great idea considering they came from the same household, the same silence, the same messages about bodies and desire. Rick suspected his brother might be kinky and also wrestling with living outside of the heteronormative masculine script. And there it was: two brothers from the same family, both finding different doors back to themselves.
Third, and most importantly: hold himself with self-compassion. Because stepping outside of dominant culture — recognizing that the one movie you have been shown is not the only movie, that your desire is not a deviation but a truth — this takes courage. And courage, as Jon, his therapist, had told him weeks earlier, is the act of not cowering in the face of fear. You don’t need courage for things that aren’t risky, or hard or scary.
It can be scary to hear the messages of our bodies, of our inner world. It can be overwhelming to connect your core wound to your core desire. It can also be liberating. To no longer reject, shame, or be unkind to yourself. To discover your room, your keys, and open the door. To no longer separate but find erotic wholeness.
I saw it. He saw it.
I love you. I am listening.
Surrogate partner therapy is available to single individuals ready to do the work in the triadic model. If you’re ready to unlock the door to your core desire, I’d love to have a conversation. Fill out this form and I’ll be in touch.
For an audio versions of this essay that I recorded and more writing check out Substack.
