Why Won't My Surrogate Hurry Up & Fuck Me?

I feel like most of my life these days is explaining surrogate partner therapy to people.

I don’t mind. I love the work and feel like spreading the word about it is kind of my ministry. But I notice that after talking about SPT with people, especially would-be clients, they still seem confused or even misheard important components of what I have said. Sometimes I wonder if people are so blown away that this is a real thing that it spirals them into some kind of dissociated state where they can’t hear me— like an astronaut floating away in space.

I also think that me calling myself a sex worker is confusing. I am, but, you’re obviously all confused by it. So here is an analog that I think is clarifying:

If you want to have a great meal, you can go to a restaurant, or you can go to a cooking class. The restaurant provides a service, the cooking class provides an education. Give a man a fish, teach a man to fish– you get the idea.

Most ‘gratification-based’ or ‘traditional’ sex work (these are terms I made up) are like going to a restaurant. You pick your price point and desired experience, you get what you order, you sit back and relax. Surrogate partner therapy is like going to a cooking class– you’re learning skills, it’s safe to fail, and if it goes well you leave knowing how to make cacio e pepe at home. Both are great, and neither is better than the other—they’re just different.

Why am I telling you this? Well, because I often have clients who think I’m not fucking them fast enough. Some get angry, some have meltdowns, some try to manipulate me and/or the therapist. So I started writing, trying my best to really address the issue of client urgency in the work— why I’m not fucking my clients as fast as they want me to, basically. Here’s what I came up with: explaining again what SPT is and how it works, outlining a general arc of the work its minimum time commitment. I then talk a bit about contraindications to the work, and presentations who should expect it to take longer. Finally I talk specifically about client urgency and when it requires termination or referral, clarify presentations that are not a good fit for SPT (and those that are), and conclude with some thoughts on whorephobia. But also I kinda talk about whorephobia throughout, because I think its a major component of client urgency.

I mainly wrote this for me as a way to process, but I expect some version of it will be required for potential clients going forward and thought maybe ya’ll would want to read it too. xx

Okay, so how does Surrogate Partner Therapy work?

Surrogates use experiential education to help clients learn how to be in relationships. The curriculum of SPT is a series of exercises that emphasize interpersonal communication, emotional awareness, co-regulation, sensuality, and potentially erotic-level skills. Though the skills are important, the most important part of the work of SPT is the relationship between the surrogate and client. It can be helpful to remember that surrogate partners were created so that unpartnered clients could attend couples therapy, where these skills were originally taught. For this reason emotional safety and trust must be established between the surrogate and client in order to advance through the work.

The surrogate is highly trained to teach these skills and to attune to and assess for the client’s relational roadblocks. The work of surrogate partner therapy is psychotherapeutic in nature and thus necessitates the involvement of a mental health professional, such as a psychologist or psychotherapist. The surrogate is a co-clinician who brings their authentic self (tempered with compassionate generosity of course) to the therapeutic relationship– their perspectives on the client’s behavior, resistance, affect, or physiology reveal things the psychotherapist would never witness, given the boundaries of their therapeutic relationship. For this reason, it’s extremely important that the therapist respects the surrogate’s contributions and has taken additional training to help them unpack any bias or whorephobia they might have.

After every session with the surrogate, the client meets with their therapist to process what came up for them during or after their session with the surrogate. After both sessions, the therapist and surrogate share notes with one another on the case to ensure the client is held and progressing appropriately.

How long does it take?

Most clients do not arrive at SPT until after years, and sometimes decades, of frustration and loneliness. By the time they get to me there is usually some level of desperation on their part: they want to solve their problem, and they’d prefer to solve it ASAP. To be clear, I also want to solve their problem. But in order to do so, I need them to trust me. Some of the exercises are silly, we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about our feelings– there are no shortcuts. This is why I emphasize over and over again that surrogate partner therapy is therapy. It takes time and involves a lot of processing– and for this reason it is best suited for people who are willing to introspect and try out new things. Clients who are primarily concerned with satiating their erotic hunger are going to be extremely frustrated by the pace of the work. These potential clients are better suited to working with a traditional sex worker (I’ll be publishing an e-book about how to do this soon, so make sure you’re subscribed).

Here is a very basic breakdown of the progression of the work we do in SPT:

Phase One: Nurturing

Diagnostics & Assessment

Building Rapport

Foundational Skill Building: emotional, somatic, and sensorial awareness

Navigating Consent

Core Relaxation Tools

Phase Two: Sensual

Body Image Work

Intermediate Consent Exercises

Increasing Sensuality & Non-Erotic Intimacy

Sex Education

Self & Other Discovery: Body mapping

*Dating Practice

Phase Three: Erotic

Mutuality

Advanced Skills

Eroticism

*Trouble shooting certain sexual dysfunctions

* = if relevant to client’s presentation

Contraindications related to timing and progression of the work

The above breakdown, which does not account for any potential deviations, would take around 50 hours in total to complete (this is an estimate for me based on my work with previous clients). This does not include the client’s one-on-one therapy sessions (which are to take place between each of our sessions), nor does it include consultation with the client’s therapist. It also doesn’t include triadic sessions with myself, the therapist, and the client. Triadics are mandated when goals change or complete, when we progress to a new phase of the work, or there is an impasse between any two people in the triad.

Clients do not automatically progress through the phases of the work. Some phases are more challenging for certain presentations and may require that the work extends beyond the original anticipated timelines. Just like any relationship, there is a lot that can come up that may surprise us.

Some examples:

1. For clients with attachment trauma, or who have difficulty mentalizing/emphasizing with others, the first part of the work may need to be extended until true rapport and relational safety is built between the client and surrogate. Alexithymia may also slow down the work.

2. For clients navigating body dysmorphia or gender dysphoria, we may need to extend in the second part of the work, which involves non-erotic nudity. Emotional regulation is foundational to progression, so we will move at the pace of the client’s nervous system, should dysregulation present.

3. Phase three may need to be extended for clients navigating sexual dysfunction, to give us extra time to integrate and embody the work, including practicing navigating failure by playing with it intentionally.

4. Clients with sexual trauma, especially childhood sexual trauma, can expect the overall pace of the work to be significantly longer (usually several years).

In general, the more goals or presentations the client has, the longer the work will take.

Client Urgency and Termination

When a client present with urgency it is usually because they want to get to the erotic level as quickly as possible. The emotion of urgency is in itself not a problem, pretty much all clients present with some level of urgency. However, when client urgency manifests in undermining the surrogate’s boundaries, expertise, or personhood, a triadic meeting will need to occur to gain clarity and decide the next indicated action for the group.

1. If the triadic meeting reveals that the client’s erotic hunger is their primary motivation for entering SPT and then rushing the process, termination and referral to a traditional sex worker may be indicated.

2. If the triadic meeting reveals the client cannot stay regulated in the face of surrogate boundaries, then the client lacks the necessary emotional maturity to do the work of SPT at this time. A referral to a DBT program may be appropriate.

3. If the triadic meeting reveals that the client is incapable or unwilling to mentalizing with the surrogate, either due to whorephobia or an empathy deficiency, the work should be terminated out of respect for the surrogate’s safety.

The surrogate, therapist, and client must all be on board as a group in order for the work to advance. SPT is not a series of exercises one completes as quickly as possible in order to “get to” have sex with the surrogate. Therapists need to educate their clients that it is in their best interest to move at a pace that allows them to integrate and metabolize the work, and that buy-in from all three members of the triad is necessary for progression.

Clients who are not a good fit for SPT (non-exhaustive):

• Clients with sociopathy, untreated borderline tendencies, or other cluster b presentations

• Clients in active addiction

• Clients who are unable to self-regulate

• Clients who struggle to mentalize/empathize with others

• Clients who are financially unstable or housing insecure

• Clients with untreated rejection sensitivity dysphoria

• Clients who are primarily looking to satiate erotic hunger

• Clients who would otherwise be labeled ‘high acuity’

• Clients without a therapeutic component to their presentation

Clients who are a good fit for SPT (also non-exhaustive):

• Clients with sexual dysfunction as a result of a psychological issue (e.g.. erectile dysfunction or rapid ejaculation due to anxiety)

• Clients returning to dating after a long period of abstinence (e.g. coming out later in life, gender transition, widows/widowers)

• Clients with SA/CSA trauma who have done trauma-specific therapy and are stable

• Clients with little-to-no interpersonal relational experience (commonly called ‘late-in-life-virgins’)

Concluding thoughts: On whorephobia

The work of surrogate partner therapy, just like the work of any relationship, is profoundly confronting. It is also beautiful and life changing. It requires generosity on the part of the surrogate, and this generosity necessitates that her insights, expertise, agency, and safety are valued by both the client and therapist. When either the therapist or client dehumanizes the surrogate, she is no longer safe to give generously or authentically, and the work becomes debased and corrupted. If she were to continue progressing in this dynamic, it would degrade both herself and the work in general. For this reason, remaining vigilant against any potential whorephobia in the treatment room is of the utmost importance: the therapist must take the surrogate’s flagging of it seriously. If she does not, the surrogate is left with no choice but to terminate the therapy, which can be disastrous for clients who may already have attachment issues and an ebbing level of hope.