Rick: Before He Walked Through the Door | Surrogate Partner Therapy Sessions
- Miranda Wylie
- 3 days ago
- 14 min read
Surrogate Partner Therapy: The First Sessions
Before a client walks through my door, I already have pieces to their puzzle.
I know what they were brave enough to say out loud, maybe for the first time ever, on a twenty-minute intake call with me, a near stranger, notwithstanding what they gleaned about me from the internet. I know what the therapist has observed over months or years of sitting across from them once a week, watching the patterns, noticing what gets said and what stays tucked away.
By the time Rick arrived at my door on an April afternoon, I had already been let into his world. First in my intake call a few weeks prior and then in an hour-long conversation with Jon, his therapist of nearly a year and a half.
Surrogate partner therapy operates in a triadic model. And this configuration is most successful if the talk therapist and the surrogate partner therapist are genuinely in collaboration, not just exchanging pleasantries, but thinking together about a shared client, trusting each other enough to be honest about what each of us is seeing. I hadn’t worked with Jon before, but he earned my trust quickly.
Along with being a licensed professional counselor, Jon holds a master’s degree in Pastoral Counseling. He is skilled at helping people of Christian faith learn to have a healthy relationship with their sexuality, a combination that is rarer than it should be. Jon is sex positive; he does not shame. And he told me something in our first call that oriented my understanding of who Rick was before he sat down across from me.
Rick was 33, identified as heterosexual and he had been, by his own choosing, celibate for fifteen years. Rick had come to Jon with a self-diagnosis of porn addiction and erectile dysfunction. Jon listened and then gently and carefully told him: that’s not what this is.
What it was, Jon explained to me, was shame not pathology. Rick had a repressive religious upbringing that had left significant residue. He grew up with confusing messages about sexuality from both religious purity culture and watching hard core porn starting by the 7th grade. He had deep shame about what he described as performance issues that had shaped, or rather, misshaped, his entire relationship to intimacy and his own body. His last and only relationship had been in college. A short one. It had ended badly, or at least it had ended with his body doing what shame laden bodies do under pressure, which is to shut down, and he had been carrying that as a verdict ever since.
Rick had been using pornography the way most do — a way to get aroused by yourself. He wasn’t compulsive. If anything, he was sexually afraid, and he had found an outlet that didn’t risk disappointing anyone. Because Rick had struggled to maintain an erection with his college girlfriend he feared disappointment. Failing her and him. But disappointment is not dysfunction. His dick worked! He was able to masturbate to completion. Jon helped him understand the difference between erectile dysfunction and unreliable erections. And that watching porn does not an addiction make.
In the triadic model the client, the talk therapist, and the surrogate partner therapist work in parallel. The client meets with each provider individually. The therapist and I stay in communication, exchanging observations, calibrating our approaches, making sure the emotional and somatic work are complementing each other. The therapist tends to the family history and the language for what’s happening inside. I work more with the body and what happens on an experiential level.
By the time Rick found his way to me, he had already been doing real work with Jon. In addition to reframing his relationship to sex, they had been tracing the roots of Rick’s fear of conflict. His living situation with a passive aggressive roommate had become a kind of ongoing laboratory to examine Rick’s tendency to make himself small, to absorb other people’s discomfort rather than name his own. In therapy, they had been working on what Jon described as Rick owning his voice, his interests, and his desires. On becoming comfortable being a sexual being — not fearing it, not glorifying it, just letting it exist as a part of him without an architecture of shame collapsing on top of his sexuality.
Rick’s formative first sexual experience had cemented a belief that his body wasn’t complying with his desire. Rick was starting to see the flaws in his thinking about dysfunction and porn addiction but felt stuck on where to go next. He was kinda hitting a wall in talk therapy but was not ready to take the leap of starting a dating profile or even approaching someone he found attractive at a party. Despite having a robust social life, he felt behind his peers. They had all figured something out that he was struggling to. Was it just him?
In my conversation with Jon, he shared an anecdote about Rick. On an airplane, Rick had been seated next to a woman, and they’d gotten to talking. What unfolded was the kind of easy conversation that catches you off guard and when you zoom out for a moment you catch the fluttering feeling in your chest and have a gasping thought: “Ohmigod! Are we flirting?”
Instead of fully immersing himself in the ease, spontaneity, and mystery of this moment, Rick became terrified. Not because anything bad was happening. But because something good was. Because it might turn into something. Because if it turned into something, he might disappoint her. Hurt her. Lead her on. His nervous system had interpreted possibility as threat.
That story stayed with me. Rick was a man who could not let a good thing keep being good because he was bracing for the moment he would ruin it, even a casual flirtation with someone in his orbit for a few hours.
In his first email to me Rick wrote: I’ve finally realized something needs to change.
That word finally told me more than the rest of the sentence. There is a quality to that kind of finally. It isn’t desperation, though desperation may have been present at some point. He had passed through desperation and come out the other side as resolved. Surrogate partner therapy is often someone’s last hope at making change. After unpacking emotional baggage in talk therapy, surrogate partner therapy is like a liminal space post therapeutic realization and post “real world” self-actualization. It’s the rehearsal before the opening show.
Considering the plane anxiety story, I expected Rick to arrive defended and armored. But who walked through my door was someone I immediately wanted to hug. He was warm. Genuinely, openly warm — the kind of warmth that isn’t performed, that you can feel before anyone has said anything particularly meaningful. His smile was big and brown eyes bright. He had a nervous laugh that was completely endearing, the laugh of someone who knows they’re nervous and finds it a little funny and can’t quite stop doing it. He was ready to make change, clearly, but not in the over-eager way that sometimes signals someone trying to manage your impression of them. He was ready the way someone is ready when they have done a lot of preparation and are now simply here, present, committed.
We settled into our respective spots: me in the chair, him on the couch across from me. Before we did anything else, I told him something I told every client at the start of our work together.
“Thank you for the trust and for your vulnerability,” I said.
He let the words land. It wasn’t relief exactly, but something like recognition. Like he had been waiting for someone to say that.
When I sensed he was able to hear a bit more I continued, “You’ve already done the hardest thing by committing to this 6-month process. Everything else we do builds from this act of courage. This is no small thing. Thank you for being here,” my eyes moisten as they tend to when beginning our time together. I am sincerely honored to help shepherd people through this liminal stage.
I explained that if the first session is only thirty minutes, that is fine. There is no destination we have to reach today. In fact, the destination has already occurred just by you walking through the door I offer.
“We will move at the pace of your nervous system. Do you know what I mean by nervous system?” I asked.
“Like fight or flight?” he asked.
“Yes. And we gotta include our friends freeze, fawn, and flop.”
He shot me a look of skepticism that said: I’m here because of erection issues where are you going with this? It’s not the first time I have experienced this look.
I gave a quick breakdown of the sympathetic (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) systems and my favorite line about how we can’t digest our food when being chased by a bear. Sex is best when we are in the parasympathetic operating system. When your body is in a rested and relaxed state, pleasure, arousal, erection becomes easier to access. Your body has not known this with another. The truth is that your body has only been trying to protect you, not disappoint you.
His skepticism had turned into excitement. “This makes so much sense.” He softened more into the couch and continued, “I can recognize a flee and freeze pattern in personal situations and fight at work which I think helped me.”
“Yes, all of these states can be helpful. They are survival strategies. You might need to access your fight response in a toxic work culture,” I said.
“Yeah, it definitely was. I paid the price.”
I felt something settle between us. Not just client and provider. Something more like mentor and mentee. A shared project. Like handing tools over to someone to learn how to use them.
I asked him to locate himself on a scale of one to ten (one is calm and ten is activated with some flavor of fight, flight, freeze). He said seven. I taught him straw breath, exhaling slowly through lightly pursed lips. This was a simple way to downregulate, to indicate to the body that the threat has passed.
“Has anything shifted?” I asked.
“Maybe 6.5 now.”
“Okay. Good. And also, don’t people please me on your number,” I teased. “It’s okay if what I offered doesn’t help. We are here so you can better understand the signals of your body. It will be a waste if your response isn’t accurate which, by the way, your response can be ‘I don’t know.’ Many people don’t know how to register the stress response of their body on a nuanced level.”
From there we shifted to what might be considered small talk, if small talk could include commentary about unrealistic expectations about erections and sexual assault. He shared that based on my writing, we have the same viewpoints on capitalism, how patriarchy damages men as well as women, and about the way certain cultural scripts around masculinity had been quietly devastating for him. I loved that like me, he wanted to understand the current and historic cultural scripts that shape how we show up in relationships. He didn’t just want to fix a problem. He wanted to understand the systems that had created the issues and where he sat in it.
Rick had absorbed the message, primarily from porn but also from other media, that his worth was in his sexual performance. He was also deeply affected by the #MeToo movement and was hyperaware of being seen as a threat to women. I affirmed what he already knew but now had a new language for. His nervous system was in the frozen state with 15 years celibacy to show for it. He was caught between two cultural messages about virility and threat. He wasn’t a sexual god or sexual predator. But he feared being seen as either.
“I mean, I wouldn’t mind being seen as a sex god if I could deliver,” he joked.
“Oh! Nice,” I leaned back and laughed. “We’re gonna have fun,” I said.
We smiled and chuckled together. Humor, I’ve found, is vital in healing. Rick’s was still intact.
Rick’s goals, as he named them in that first session, were to become comfortable with vulnerability, with intimacy, with touch. He wanted to disrupt what he now referred to as a mental ED: his mind intercepting any possibility of arousal with a woman and immediately grading his performance, predicting failure, and catastrophizing.
I added the goal of shifting out of an outcome orientation (whether his body did the specific thing) toward something broader and more humane: the pleasure landscape. This I told him is a whole terrain, rather than a single point on the map. I told Rick what I could promise and what I couldn’t. I couldn’t promise a particular outcome. I couldn’t tell him that after a set number of sessions everything would work the way he wanted it to. What I could tell him was that this process would give him a better understanding of himself, his desires, his patterns, how he communicates, and what safety feels like in his body.
I gave him homework: notice when you get activated, meaning when your body wants to fight or gets stuck. You don’t have to fix or overanalyze it, just notice. Maybe deploy a straw breath. Begin to build a map of your own nervous system. Where are the tripwires? What does activation feel like in your body before your mind knows it’s happening?
“I’m really good at solving problems,” Rick said.
I smirked and said, “I don’t doubt it. And in this space it will be less about problem solving and more about just being. Noticing. We will tend to your nervous system and utilize tools to keep you down-regulated (5 and below on the scale) but that is different than a problem to solve.” There was more to say about presence and attunement and boundaries, but he was tapped out.
My first session with a client is capped at 1 hour and we build up to the standard session length of 2 hours at the client’s capacity. Rick came back the following week for another hour. And the week after that, he showed up and asked if we could go a little longer. He made it to one hour and forty-five minutes.
By the third session, we had moved into the first Sensate Focus exercises — the foundational practice of surrogate partner therapy, developed by the sex researchers Masters and Johnson, in which touch is explored without goal or agenda. Touch for the sake of touch. Touch as its own complete event.
We started small. A hand. An arm. Seven minutes on each side, giving and receiving. I went first. I touched his hand and forearm slowly, attentively, the way you touch something you are genuinely curious about. Then we switched. We touched in silence and then reflected on our experience shared after the timer gently dinged.
In receiving, Rick was compelled to do something. He wanted to be a good receiver and offer praise or to reciprocate.
“Here’s the thing. You are doing something. By allowing me to touch you, by saying yes and meaning it — that is doing something. Your yes is an act,” I said.
He contemplatively nodded and said, “Wow. I will have to think more about that.”
As much as receiving caused internal strife, giving was harder. As I settled into the couch and gently closed my eyes I reminded him that he could start the timer whenever he is ready. He put the timer down. Slowly took a long exhale. Waited. Then set the timer and reached for my arm. While his touch was gentle I could feel his energetic body buzzing.
Afterwards he shared the running commentary in his head: Am I doing it right? Am I spending too long on each finger, or not long enough? Is she annoyed? Am I being intrusive by touching her here?
“I felt like a man pawing at a woman,” he confessed.
There it was.
At bible study, when Rick was just barely double digits in age, without warning the boys and girls were separated for a lesson. The boys were given a message: girls are innocent and boys corrupt them.
Rick’s confession with the use of the word “paw” was a core belief coming to the surface. Rick believed his touch was clumsy at best and threatening at worst. This message of men corrupting women had been stored in Rick’s body as truth and had left him in a frozen state. I had this mental flash of Rick in all these moments in his life, fearing how he would be seen and consciously, or not, running a mantra in his head: don’t touch her, you will corrupt her, don’t touch her, you will corrupt her.
Tenderly I looked at him and said, “Your touch felt really nice. I would tell you if it didn’t. I have agency.”
We were building trust. And also, I became aware that this corruptor story was playing out in real time, even when the stakes were low: his fingertips on my arm.
By the fourth session, Rick came in for the full two hours. The container we would hold from here on. We continued with Sensate Focus. We moved to an area of the body more intimate and vulnerable: the face. In receiving he was able to let go of having to perform appreciation. The corners of his mouth softened. He found relaxation and not fully a quiet mind, but quieter. In giving, his worry still surfaced. He felt like he was bothering me. Imposing.
“Have you had feedback that your touch is bothersome?” I asked.
He thought about it. “No. I think it’s just that it’s been so long.”
His answer confirmed that his worry was not from feedback from another, but a story from inside. A story so rooted, so often repeated that it had started to feel like fact.
It was Rick who came up with the solution, not surprising considering that he said he was gifted at such. He suggested that before each Sensate exercise, he ask for explicit verbal consent. Not because consent wasn’t already established, but because hearing yes out loud, in that moment, directed at him, was the antidote to the voice that crept in and said you are corrupting her. My yes would offer truth to counter the lie.
So that’s what we did. Before he touched me, he said it clearly: I would like to touch your arms, your face, your upper body. Would you like that?
He measured each word carefully. I said yes with direct eye contact and then added, “If that changes, I will let you know.” Building to ongoing consent where he can trust I will be in integrity with my yes takes a trust that is built over time. And first he needs to trust and accept my yes. To let it land. To give his fear a place to return to. What he was learning slowly, session by session, breath by breath was that his presence was not an imposition. That his touch was not a threat. That a yes, freely given, was information he was allowed to believe.
Adding in the explicit verbal consent allowed a shift to surface. Instead of a mental script about doing it right or being bothersome, he got curious. He started noticing the temperature, the texture, the small and intricate geography of a hand. He stopped trying to give correctly and started actually touching. His touch was soft and steady. There were notes of something nurturing in his touch, and something else — something quieter and warmer.
Budding sensuality.
He didn’t know it yet. But it was there.
Four sessions. Five hours and forty-five minutes of accumulated time together. The session lengths told their own quiet story: one hour, one hour, one forty-five, two. Not a schedule I had set, but a pace his nervous system had chosen. His body knew exactly how much it could hold and he was listening.
He mentioned, somewhere in those early sessions, that when accidental touch happened with friends like piling into a restaurant booth or a car with friends, he would immediately and apologetically recoil. It was an automatic quick movement. But recently, when he and friends crammed in a van for a weekend getaway and his legs pressed slightly against a woman’s legs, he didn’t move. He didn’t jerk away. He’d stayed. And then he froze, his attention hyper fixated on their legs touching. He monitored himself for weirdness, wondering why something so small was still so hard.
“We were both wearing pants. This wasn’t even skin to skin contact,” he laughed bashfully.
I watched him describe this and saw the familiar double-arrow: he’d cleared one bar only to find another one waiting. “That freeze was the corruptor critic showing up. But your leg voted before the mind could intervene,” I said.
These are the small stories that hold multitudes. Without knowing Rick’s bible study core belief that men corrupt women, this story might have felt like an odd share, unnecessary even. But I understood the importance and I could be with him in the win and draw it out more. We can build from this moment. His story was being rewritten. A new puzzle in the making.
“You stayed!” I celebrated.
He blushed. “Yeah, I did.”
Surrogate partner therapy is available to single individuals ready to do the work in the triadic model. If you’re wondering whether this might be the missing piece for you, I’d love to have a conversation. Fill out this form and I’ll be in touch. If you want to work with Jon find him here: Weavings Wellness.
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