Rick: The Body Keeps the Silence - Surrogate Partner Therapy Mirror Work
- Miranda Wylie
- Jun 14
- 10 min read
Surrogate Partner Therapy: Mirror Work
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.
Someone reached for the TV remote and abruptly changed the channel. A woman was washing her hair, only her bare shoulders visible, but the implication was that she was naked. This was all it took for Rick’s parents to stiffen and clamor for the remote to make the image disappear: a shampoo commercial. His parents never gave an explanation as to why they couldn’t watch this ad and Rick never asked. He was a child paying attention to actions that formed a code and a silence that spoke volumes.
Shame doesn’t always materialize in words, sometimes it’s transferred in silence or in an action without explanation like turning off the TV at the suggestion of a naked body. Again, it was a shampoo commercial so imagine the tense silence and not just changing the channel but turning off the TV entirely when confronted with a sex scene. Rick had learned something that no one intended to teach him, or perhaps something that his parents intended to teach him without having to say it out loud: bodies, nudity, sexuality are dangerous. Your noticing is dangerous. We don’t talk about this. We just turn it off.
Actually, I’m not even sure if dangerous is the correct word. It could be that bodies are private. Desire is shameful. Don’t enjoy your body like the woman so flagrantly bathing herself. Or it could be messaging in line with the church Rick’s family attended: women are innocent and men corrupt them. Therefore, don’t look at a naked woman on the TV as you will corrupt her. The interpretations are many and to that end, the lack of clarity becomes part of Rick’s wounds to heal.
The uncertainty in these ambiguous messages about the body that Rick was left to decode alone in childhood was now being turned over in his mind with an adult lens and with the assistance of Jon, his talk therapist, and myself, his surrogate partner. In this triadic model we were unearthing the silent messages of shame. A child given a clear explanation could argue with it. A child given silence can only absorb it.
Silence showed up again in another story, this one from when Rick was 7 or 8. Rick spent time at a babysitter’s house with his brother and another child, a girl. After a few rounds of tag in the back yard, they got creative and created a new game based on the logic of play and humor rather than intention. Tag became “slapping butts” which was really less slapping and more like limbs flailing to tag the rear rather than the shoulder which is actually more challenging if you think about the mechanics of it all. The adults found out. That tense silence that was commonplace in gathering around the TV was present on the drive back home. Rick never saw the babysitter again. He never saw the girl again. No one told him why. He internalized the silence.
Two situations, same approach: silence and shut down. Rick was left again to fill in the blank, and after the direct messaging from his church that men corrupt women, the most logical explanation was that he was at fault. He internalized that he did something. I am the reason this disappeared. My wanting to play, my body touching a girl’s body, my touch causes harm.
This belief that he caused harm, that bodies are harmful was installed so early and so quietly that by the time Rick was an adult it didn’t feel like a belief anymore. It felt like a fact. In surrogate partner therapy we want to reveal these so-called facts, de-escalate them to beliefs assigned to you and then offer an alternative option.
How? It’s a collaborative process that is woven through our practice of touch, communication, and vulnerability. It was Rick who added more explicit verbal consent in our Sensate Focus touch exercise. But even with this added layer he still struggled.
After a round of upper body touch, Rick was exasperated. He said, “I just kept thinking you can touch breasts and you aren’t. What’s wrong with you?” The escalation of including breasts in our touch exercises had also escalated his anxiety, his “task energy” as he called it of having to do the thing correctly, his fear of being a man pawing a woman.
And so I decided to offered something new. A mantra. A mantra is a word or phrase repeated often in meditation but can be utilized in any circumstance. I find them helpful to return to in moments of stress or moments of de-escalation in the retraining or rewriting of our mind and stories. I offered Rick a few, playing around with the words, watching his face for the one that landed. Some were close. And then:
I am a vehicle to experience and express love.
His whole face changed. He grinned, his eyes bright. The huggable, tender and charming Rick that I first welcomed into my space emerged.
“Yeah. That’s profound,” he marveled.
“Play around with it, make it yours. Does the word vehicle need to change to the word body?” I asked.
He practiced and beamed. “It’s perfect. I am a vehicle to experience and express love,” he said.
This mantra was a direct counter to the corruptor story — not a denial of it, not a forced positivity, but a genuine reorientation. He wasn’t a threat or a corrupting force moving through the world, leaving damage in his wake. He was a vehicle. A conduit. Something through which love could move in both directions — experienced and expressed, received and given.
With this mantra in place Rick was ready for the next step. Mirror work.
This is an exercise though never referred to as “the mirror exercise.” I think because I like to fully acknowledge the work part. Mirror work is effort. It’s challenging. As many times as I have done it with clients it still is confronting. It’s often the most vulnerable I am with clients because I have to do the work. I can’t just demo.
Mirror work is this: you stand naked in front of a full-length mirror and tell the stories of your body addressing all parts of your body from head to toes. You share what you see, what used to be, what is now, what you’ve made peace with, what you fear, love, loathe, what you’ve been told and what you believe to be true that maybe isn’t. This is a partnered exercise with two distinct roles: one person looking in a mirror in reflection of themselves and one person off to the side bearing witness. The person bearing witness does not interject with questions or commentary, even and especially if trying to flatter the person. This is not a “does my ass look good in these jeans?” exercise.
I went first. This is not incidental. Primarily in mirror work but in other ways as well I will not ask my clients to be vulnerable in a way that I’m not willing to be myself. This is what makes surrogate partner therapy so unique and transformative. In mirror work the playing field is more level. While, yes, I have done it before, I am still challenged by mirror work.
As I made small adjustments to the lighting, the fan, and my glass of water placement I asked myself if I was avoiding starting. Possibly. I exhaled loudly and made a squealy noise that I’ve come to recognize as discharging anxiety. I took another big exhale and undressed. It was the first time we would see each other naked. And in this mirror work process nudity could feel clinical yet deeply personal and exposing.
Naked, I walked a few steps over to the mirror and took my place. I was not ready but there was no going back. This was my job and today was mirror work. I closed my eyes, placed a hand on my chest and felt the rise and fall of my breath. I found my grounding, opened my eyes and began. I shared many stories, insecurities, worries, triumphs and joys about my body. And then when I was done I grunted relief like a child forced to eat another bite of vegetables at dinner.
“Wow. That was unlike anything I’ve experienced,” Rick exclaimed.
While dressing my body with clothes again I muttered things about the process, mentally recalibrating from a creature contending with their human form to an intimacy guide shepherding another body into erotic wholeness. The toggle can be exhausting. It was with relief and gratitude that I found my place on the bed and settled into bearing witness.
As Rick made his way from seated to standing, he took easy items of clothing off first like his socks and made small talk. He didn’t know what he would talk about, or if he could go as long as I did. Small talk can be a way to regulate a nervous system. And then, naked, trying to find the exact place he wanted to stand, Rick still stammered.
“Remember, I took a minute to ground before I began. I encourage you to do the same,” I offered my last bit of instructions before settling into my quiet role.
After a few exhales and hand shaking while muttering, “Okay. Okay. Okay,” Rick went for it.
He stood in front of the mirror for thirty minutes.
Thirty minutes is a long time to stand in front of yourself. Long enough for the self-consciousness to shift into something else, long enough for the rehearsed things to run out and the real things to surface. He moved through his body the way someone moves through a house they’re seeing differently for the first time — some rooms easy, some rooms harder, saving the hardest for last.
His coveted curly hair, adored by family. He kept a buzz cut — curls be damned. Now, the curls were long gone. The buzz cut had been traded for a shaved head to minimize the visibility of his thinning hairline. “I wish I had appreciated my hair,” he said wistfully. His calves. “I never miss a leg day,” he said with a little laugh, stood a little straighter, and admired his calves.
And then, last, his penis.
His foreskin carried shame by osmosis. No one had laughed or made a mean comment, but in the school gym locker room he saw his difference. The locker room carried its own kind of silence. Its own remote control. He worked hard to hide his penis in these moments. It was preemptive before anyone could react.
His penis had scars, too. Literal ones. One from a rupture of the foreskin during sex, a condition where the tissue was too tight. One from friction, from years of masturbating as a teenager without lubricant, from fast and furious tugging commonly referred to as “the death grip.”
Rick stood with all of it. Named it.
As his story was coming to a close, he shifted his gaze from his feet back to the mirror, meeting his own eyes. He adjusted his posture, not dramatically. It was a small shift, the lengthening in the spine, a settling of the shoulders. And yet the energy of the room changed. He looked different. He looked like someone who had just remembered something true about himself.
Proud. Solid. Present.
We closed with affirmations that years ago would have had me roll my eyes and truthfully still do. But I can’t deny the power of these words in rewriting the story of your body.
I see you. I value you. I trust you. I love you.
After Rick dressed we laid on the bed and shared our experiences. Rick was shocked to learn he had talked for thirty minutes.
“I feel lighter somehow,” Rick said. “It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. And also, some aspects that I thought would be easy were hard.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“You seeing my uncircumcised penis. And I can’t believe I told you about the scars,” he said.
I offered, “It’s scary to show the parts of ourselves that we’ve kept hidden. Literal or metaphoric. Thank you for letting me in.”
We continued to talk about our bodies, the insecurities they hold and how getting ahead of the insecurity can help us. Stating something about our body that has held shame before we let the person see this part of us can alleviate our internal stress. It begins by stating to a potential lover, hookup or partner: “Here’s a thing I want you to know about my body.”
For me it’s my sweaty hands and feet. For Rick it was his penis how it looked and how it “performed.” More on the performance piece later, for now we focused on the look.
Rick practiced, “Here’s a thing I want you to know about my body. I have foreskin.” He laughed when he finished because he could imagine a future partner responding with the easy confidence of an adult shrugging and saying with a bit of an eye roll: I’ve seen an uncircumcised dick before.
“Yes, they probably have. And you stating this is more for you, not them. You can add on and make it sexier and inviting with a ‘I’d like to show you what kind of touch feels good before you touch me,” I said.
His face lit up. The idea that this moment of reveal could be sexy and not humiliating was revelatory. There was relief in imagining that. The lightness of it. The possibility of play with vulnerability. How sex and intimacy could be two adults, in a room, being honest with each other.
Of his own accord, Rick wanted to continue with daily affirmations in the mirror. I trust you. Something clicked when he said that one. It was a direct address to his own body — a counter to the interpretations of those around him. His parents acted weird about bodies and sex. He could trust his instinct about that.
It was their shame, not his.
I trust you. Not I forgive you. Not I’m sorry. I trust you. Moving forward together.
We hugged before he left. And then again. And then again. Four times in total — not counted in the moment, just accumulated, the natural result of two people who had just done something real together and weren’t quite ready to let go of it.
There is a closeness that builds in surrogate partner therapy that is its own kind of medicine. It’s not quite romantic, not quite sexual — something more like comradery. And that day, we both ended the session lighter having left something in the mirror, having shed a bit more insecurity, having transmuted shame into pride. We are the authors of our bodies.
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.
For an audio versions of this essay that I recorded and more writing check out Substack.
