What does the process look like?
Once trust and the ability to set boundaries has been established, the surrogate/client relationship is built on a foundation of experiential exercises that teach skills of self-awareness and self acceptance. These skills are taught through a combination of sensate focus exercises and intimacy building practices such as shared/mutual experience and depthful conversation. Behaviors are addressed through relaxation, sensate focus, successive approximation, and systematic desensitization to allow the client a more extensive physical experience – one that is conscious and connected to their emotional state and underpins emotional development.
Beyond these exercises, the surrogate models exemplary relationship building skills, intimacy and mutuality. By accumulating the experiences above and integrating them into the relationship through conversation, authentic interactions and practices around consent, introspection, and conflict resolution the client has the opportunity to witness and participate in a new way of relating to another human as well as a possible new perspective of their own sexuality.
How the process works:
The client and therapist discuss the possibility of a surrogate partner
The therapist discusses with the surrogate to ensure this is a good fit
Once all parties feel they would like to move forward, the therapist, client and surrogate meet in a triadic meeting (in person, or on zoom), allowing the client and surrogate to meet and for the client to ask any additional questions directly of the surrogate
Once the decision has been made to work together, the flow of the sessions looks like this:
Client and Therapist meet
Client and Surrogate meet
Surrogate and Therapist meet
Client and Therapist meet again
…and so on
Triadic meetings may be useful or necessary as we move throughout the process in order to assess progress, assist in breaking through a block or resolve an issue that arises.
*Note: for those clients that are not local, an intensive model is available, please reach out for more information
It is imperative that the surrogate and therapist be in regular communication and that the client is processing what is arising in the work with their therapist. Often, therapy sessions begin to focus on the work being done with the surrogate.
The work is broken into roughly 4 different phases, and we don’t skip ahead.
Phase 1- consent, trust, and boundaries as well as sensate focus based work.
This phase focuses on building the relationship with your own body by learning to tap into sensations through touch as well as learning to build trust with another human.
Phase 2- sensual awareness and body image
This phase builds on phase 1 to deepen the intimacy, incorporate additional parts of the body, and draws attention to sensuality. In addition, we spend time with body awareness and acceptance as that is a key component for building intimacy.
Phase 3- mutuality and erotiscm
This phase takes all the skills learned previously and turns them towards eroticism. We take small steps together that feel achievable because of everything we’ve built up to this point.
Phase 4- conscious closure
Every relationship comes to an end, and this is no different. With consultation with the therapist, the work comes to an end when the goals have been met, or the client feels they can generalize their learnings out in the world. We discuss closure and then practice doing it in a healthy way in order to learn how to do this effectively.
