Over the past twenty years, I have interviewed well over a hundred women and men who have approached us with their interest in becoming a surrogate partner.  Of those, I have trained forty and twenty of those have qualified as Surrogate Partners within our team. The International Professional Surrogates Association has been conducting training for surrogate partners for over thirty-five years and there are no more than twenty-five IPSA trained surrogate partners currently practising in the entire United States of America.  There are women who claim to be ‘sex surrogates’, particularly on the East coast of the US and an

Treating sexual dysfunctions without healing the causes is like pasting wallpaper over a cracked wall and hoping it will stick.  Treating symptoms by prescribing medications such as viagra or its offspring when the causes remain unhealed may actually make sexual problems worse, depute the attempts from the drug companies to persuade doctors that they are doing the right thing by 'kick-starting' the patient into action! (This is a bit like treating insomnia caused by real anxieties by prescribing sleeping pills without attending to the anxieties). The medical profession has classified premature ejaculation as untreatable. This is because there has not been a

Since the dawning of the ‘little blue pill’ era it has become commonplace for doctors to prescribe the ‘wonder drug’ or one of its fast expanding family for virtually any and all sexual problems that are presented at the general practice.  In some cases this is helpful and appropriate but in many cases is not, and in such cases more harm than good is done in the longer run by re-enforcing a view suspected by the patient that something is physically wrong rather than offering the patient hope that he, or she, has every right to look for and expect

To open up the ‘Gateway’ to sexuality without anxiety - which is within everyone without exception - to make the shift from “Outside-In” sex to an intimacy based “Inside-Out” experience of infinite possibilities, requires some changes to be made. These changes start in the mind.  The old saying that “sex is in the mind” is nowhere truer than at this starting point.  Unfortunately, as with most old sayings it has been misinterpreted to suggest that sex becomes sexier if the mind is active with sexual fantasy.  This is sadly not true.  In fact, most fantasies are being entertained by the

Our next challenge was to train our first surrogate partners. But before we could train them we had to find them.  In 1994, surrogate partner therapy was virtually unheard of in the UK and there were no surrogate partners anywhere in the country. Websites were few and far between and even email was used only by the technically initiated.  It was as though we stood on a cliff-edge: with a chasm between us—and the first trainee sexual surrogate partners in the UK. What type of people are we looking for? Where will they come from? What will motivate them? What

Over the previous five years, our programme had helped well over two hundred people, most of whom could not have been as effectively helped by any other treatment method. Yet we were—and still are for most people—a ‘last chance saloon’. When other treatment approaches have already been tried with little effect, our door is knocked. Clients who were referred to us, simply heard of the “clinic that specialises in surrogate partner therapy”. We had everything except a name. It was time to ‘come out of the closet’ and to make our treatment programme more accessible to those who needed this

The sole exponent of surrogate partner therapy in the UK in the 1970s was Dr. Martin Cole. Unkown to us, when Jane and I started our work in the UK it coincided with the stage in Martin’s life when he wanted to retire, but there was nobody to succeed him. If he had retired before finding a successor, surrogate partner therapy in the UK might have disappeared into oblivion. However, in 1994 my telephone rang; Dr Cole contacted me and told me how surprised and pleased he was to learn of our embryonic work in London. He handed the torch

“Do you use surrogates in your treatment programme?” At first, when such enquiries came in to the clinic I would dismiss the question, assuming that the person on the other end of the phone was a time-waster. Our clinic was simply above that sort of thing. Over a period of time, however, we received more and more calls of this type. I slowly, and reluctantly, began to take notice. What, or who, were surrogates, I wondered. How did surrogate partners work; how did they fit into an ethical programme for treating psychogenic sexual dysfunctions? I vaguely remembered reading about surrogate