Embrace SPT Resource Group and Upcoming Class for Talk and Touch Pros
In this episode, Michelle Renee interviews the Embrace Surrogate Partner Therapy Resource Group about their mission to spread education and support for surrogate partner therapy. They discuss the upcoming training program called Hidden Treasures Touch Interventions from the Surrogate Partner Toolkit, which aims to provide professionals in the field with a comprehensive understanding of the therapy. The team emphasizes the importance of experiential learning and embodiment in this work and highlights the need for a standardized training program. They also discuss future offerings and the ongoing development of the field.
Takeaways
Surrogate partner therapy is a modality that combines touch-based somatic exercises with talk therapy to help clients explore emotional and physical intimacy in a safe and therapeutic environment.
The Hidden Treasures Touch Interventions training program offers professionals in the field an opportunity to learn and practice a range of exercises and techniques used in surrogate partner therapy.
Experiential learning and embodiment are key components of the training, allowing participants to gain a deeper understanding of the work and its impact on clients.
The training program aims to bridge the gap between touch-based practitioners and talk therapists, providing a comprehensive toolkit for professionals working in the field of intimacy and relationships.
Meet the Embrace SPT team (full bios are available here):
Lou Hanson - Washington, DC
Brian Gibney - Charlottesville, VA
Jeannie Miller - Washington, DC
Michelle Renee - San Diego, CA
For more information about Embrace and their upcoming class, please go to EmbraceSPT.org and they can be found on social media @EmbraceSPT. Meet the host: Michelle Renee (she/her) is a San Diego-based Intimacy Guide and Surrogate Partner. Michelle's website is MeetMichelleRenee.com and can be found on social media at @meetmichellerenee. Have questions you'd like answered by Michelle or her guests? Leave them at IntimacyLabPodcast.com.
Rough Transcript:
Michelle Renee (she/her) (00:01.767)
Welcome back to the Intimacy Lab podcast. I almost said the Embrace podcast. I'm Michelle Renne and I have a little cold, so if I sound a little different, bear with me. Today, we're going to be talking to the Embrace Surrogate Partner Therapy Resource Group team. I'm part of this group. We started, I don't know, how many years ago? Does anybody remember?
Brian Gibney (he/him) (00:27.834)
about maybe three, four years ago. Does that sound about right? We'll go with that. Time is weird.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (00:30.771)
It can't be that I don't know time is weird. Time we I guess we've all kind of known each other for that long. So it just feels like maybe we even unofficially started it well before it actually started. The Embrace Resource Group is a is us. We're a group of surrogate partners started in the mid Atlantic. But I'd say we're more of a not a location based group anymore, since I'm not there anymore. And I'm in San Diego.
But our mission is to really help spread education around surrogate partner therapy to the therapist and also just help support surrogate partners. We're not a client-based organization. We do get those requests sometimes and we have to kind of shush them over to other resources. But our main mission is to raise some funds to diversify our field of surrogate partners because as you can see by our faces here, we're all...
It's a pretty white industry in general, but we are representatives of that industry for sure. So we wanna diversify the field, but we also wanna make access to surrogate partner therapy more accessible to those that can't afford it. And so we're working on getting our nonprofit status. And one of the things that we have going,
to try to kickstart some of these fundraising activities is a training that we wanna talk about today. So first off, I want everybody to go around and kind of introduce themselves. Who are you? What are all the things that you do in the world and where you're located? And then people can get a little sense of who you are. And then we're gonna, of course, we can't not do a we're not really strangers card before we jump into the training talk. So, Lou, why don't you go first? And then you can just pass it around.
Lou (02:23.526)
Sure, sure. I am Lou Hansen. I am a surrogate partner trained in 2015. I do surrogate partner work part time, but I'm super passionate about it. I think it's just such a cool modality. I'm sure we'll talk about it lots and lots and lots across many different platforms. I'm also a licensed clinical social worker. I have an outpatient private practice in which I see individual adult clients, mostly
poly, kinky folks, queer folks, but also have the privilege of supervising surrogate partner work for my esteemed colleagues, which has been a really cool addition to my practice. And those are the two hats that I wear. Can never do them with the same clients at the same time, obviously. But yeah, and then I'm here with Embrace working to develop the field so that some of the gaps that we experienced when we were initially trained.
are lessening and lessening and lessening over the future generations of service.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (03:31.247)
Pass it.
Lou (03:32.595)
Okay, Jeannie.
Jeannie (she/her) (03:35.598)
Hi, I'm Jeannie Miller, She/ Her, and I am a surrogate partner, also an intimacy coach. I also practice platonic cuddle therapy. And I got into the SPT (surrogate partner therapy) field just a few years ago. I actually got a master's in social work.
a clinical social worker, worked in public policy for a long time. And then I just really felt a calling to do work with individual folks and work with a lot of queer and trans folks, but really all sorts of folks. And so glad that I fell in as I was getting into this work with this group of people and started talking about
all the things that we would really like to see to increase the awareness, the understanding, the sort of breadth of practitioners, the breadth of collaborating therapists, the breadth of access to this work. And I'm excited about the different projects are slowly rolling out with this, including the one we're about to hear about.
Now I'll toss it to Brian.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (05:03.746)
Thanks, Jeannie. Hi, y'all, I'm Brian Gibney, he, him. I'm a surrogate partner, sex worker, intimacy coach, educator, and advocate. I've been doing surrogate partner work for about seven years now, but a huge chunk of my work has been outreach and education, both to the therapeutic community, kind of serving as a bridge between the talk and the touch worlds. So I do...
a lot of work with Michelle through AASECT the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. We co-chair a special interest group there. And also within our profession by creating some peer support and networking groups because surrogate partners have a tendency to be, you know, historically very siloed. And I think it's really important for us to all talk to each other. So all of the things that we have been talking about,
in those peer networking environments, in those outreach environments, are really going to inform the class that we're gonna talk about with you today.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (06:13.567)
Yeah, I kind of want to like, okay, pause here. We're, you know, five minutes in it. I'm thinking who is the audience today? And we're going to kind of be talking to clinicians and other touch workers, though we know that the audience is going to include a wide range of others, whether they're, you know, clients of ours that have found the podcast or, I mean, heaven forbid, there's actual like random strangers out there listening to this podcast. Who knows? So
I think this will be an interesting episode for those that are not in our work. We should probably do a quick what is surrogate partner therapy, like blurb real quick. I guess we'll wait. We'll do our card first. Then we'll do a blurb just in case people are sticking around because they want to know more about the modality in addition to what we're offering, even though they may not qualify to take the class that we're going to talk about today.
So I got to get this business over with because I love these cards. Lou is the person that actually turned me on to these cards. So it's apropos that Lou is here to answer one of the cards. And I just picked a card that I thought would work for a group. Usually I'm like talking to one person on this. So kind of a goofy question today. We'll go through and each of us will answer what do we think the other person's go to karaoke song is. So.
I think we'll start. I'm going to put the spotlight on Lou and have all of us guess what Lou's karaoke song is.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (07:56.325)
Um... Hmm...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (08:04.151)
Let's see here. This feels really hard. As much as I know everybody in this group, this is gonna be an interesting card. Maybe I picked the wrong card. Maybe I should have picked something else.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (08:13.29)
Yeah.
Lou (08:14.062)
to speak a very small beat to say I do believe the last time I actually did karaoke was in this absolute wild little dive hole in the absolute wall dive bar in a small town in Japan when I was on my study abroad group. This is how long ago this was. I'm almost 40, right? And so being there. But the thing I remember was that like the cocktail, I call it a cocktail pit. That sounds so funny.
where the drinks were made was like recessed into the floor so that the folks serving you are like truly like at your waist and all of the walls were lined with velvet. It was like as a young adolescent who was just emerging into foreign culture, I was like, what the actual F have I stumbled into here and did karaoke there? So this is my reference point. So like if that place.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (09:04.663)
Maybe that's a better question. Maybe we should modify the question. Everybody tell the story of the last time they did karaoke. I think we're going to call an audible. Is that what that's called? I don't know. I don't know these words. I feel like that's what it is. Yeah, OK. So let's modify for this space. I think it's a much better question. When is the last time that each of us did karaoke? Because I was going to say.
Lou (09:08.39)
It was the last time I did it.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (09:17.634)
This is the intersection of two things I know nothing about, sports and music.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (09:31.363)
For some reason, Lou, I was trying to pull like a Pat Benatar song out of my head, and I'm not sure why. And maybe it would have been actually really appropriate for that time frame. Anyways, who else has a story of the last time they took karaoke?
Brian Gibney (he/him) (09:46.695)
You look like you've got some good juicy stuff.
Jeannie (she/her) (09:47.982)
I just, I don't feel, I don't know. I feel like I'm thinking of Pat Benatar songs that I know. And I'm like, you know, there's some bangers that I would do in karaoke, but I don't know that I would want to like attribute them to another person, cause very loaded.
Lou (10:03.247)
So fair.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (10:03.968)
The only song that comes to mind is Hell Is For Children and I'm like, huh. Yeah, there we go.
Jeannie (she/her) (10:07.402)
Yeah, no, there's love is a battlefield. Like it's, you know, I don't want to personalize any of that material. Last time I did karaoke was just a couple of months ago, last time that I was in Ottawa visiting my chosen family up there. And I, my people really got...
Brian Gibney (he/him) (10:07.81)
Wow. Yeah.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (10:11.31)
Classic, yeah.
Jeannie (she/her) (10:32.042)
got treated to me making quite a goofy spectacle of myself. And I cannot for the life of me now remember, oh yeah, I did like my current favorite song, which is Peter Gabriel's Salisbury Hill. But I also did something that was a bit saucier and was like doing a whole floor show and I couldn't tell you now what it was. It was a lovely little gay bar that has karaoke weekly. It has like 80% of who's there is like,
They're regulars that are so regular that they have assigned themselves regular seats. You know? Very cozy.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (11:08.695)
And are they really good?
Jeannie (she/her) (11:10.774)
Some of them are really good. And some of them are really charming.
Lou (11:17.794)
You know, as long as you're one of the two.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (11:22.991)
Brian, when's the last time you did karaoke?
Brian Gibney (he/him) (11:24.082)
Okay, so I have never done karaoke before. Never, never, never. So, no. So I, not only am I a very shy person, but I just don't get music, right? The part that I see in other people's brains where they are like resonating with the music where they're like, where they're getting in the groove, not present in me.
Lou (11:31.207)
I hear a group field trip coming on.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (11:35.515)
with Brian on this. I...
Brian Gibney (he/him) (11:53.682)
at all. So something like karaoke is completely lost on me and I find it like this really fun anthropological experiment to observe other people doing it, but nothing entertaining about it for me.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (12:10.959)
I have never done it in a bar. There's like the last time, there's only two times I've ever done it. And one was in my home with a girlfriend on a icy New Year's Eve in high school. But the last time was also a similar situation. I was at Ruby Ryder's. She was like, come for a karaoke party at my place. And I'm like, yeah, sure. A reason to hang out with Ruby. And I was already up in LA, so it made sense to drive out there.
And she has a whole fricking setup with a soundboard and like her and her, she lives with her daughter and her daughter's partner and they love karaoke. So they do this stuff, I guess, just like game night at their house. And I did get up and do a group sing along for
Oh, the name of the song. I'm such a bad culture person. Doesn't matter. I'll think of it another time. But anyways, I did participate just that one song but I'm like Brian, I'm not. I'm more of like a carpool karaoke. If you ride with me in the car, you're likely to have me sing along.
Um, but I am not a get on stage with a microphone. I, my mother was a singer and, and I just don't have her voice. And I think I don't find the fun in like just being in it. Now, my husband, he will pick like Iron Maiden and he will just, he's so enthusiastic. I'm sure all of you know him. You can imagine that he doesn't have an ounce of shame and he just goes up there and just loves what he's doing and does not give a shit.
what anybody else thinks. So I'm not that person. So I'm with Brian. So you're not gonna make me do this field trip.
Jeannie (she/her) (14:05.79)
Yeah, and I just want to make the case for this little discussion of karaoke being like very relevant to the work that we're talking about because I feel like so people approach karaoke in so many different ways. But for me, it's like, about in some ways, it's about
So karaoke is not like intimate relationships, not only in the sense that it actually, literally is a performance, but the way that you have, it is in the way that you have the most, in the way that you have the most fun with it, is to not take it so dang seriously and to find different things in it that make it like,
fun and weird and exciting. And to sort of be in the experience of doing it and the connecting with your people in doing it, and not actually like, trying to be perfect, like you like, I don't know, like I thought I had to do in the school talent show as a kid. So that's, that's my justification for that whole conversation.
Lou (15:25.811)
I love to do the Venn diagram of like karaoke and intimacy, the middle zone. One of the things that lands there is who cares what it sounds like if it feels good. This is what I'm what I'm visioning when you when you talk about a cheat day. Yes, absolutely.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (15:26.047)
I f-
Jeannie (she/her) (15:26.803)
Thank you.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (15:36.759)
Nice.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (15:43.159)
I often say most of like sex is enthusiasm and like just being happy to be there. And yeah, so great tie-in, Jeannie, that was amazing. Okay, so surrogate partner therapy, who wants to do? Brian, you do this all the time. Give us a quick overview in case people haven't heard any of my other episodes where I've talked about it.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (16:03.016)
Okay.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (16:08.194)
Sure. So normally when people start to explore intimacy in relationships, they have access to stumbling through and experimenting with partners where it is safe enough, where it is supportive enough, that they can figure out what they want. And can kind of create
authentic happy relationships there. Not everybody has that access to that for one reason or another. So what surrogate partner therapy is a way for clients to start to experiment with both emotional and physical intimacy in a safe container that is therapeutic as well.
So surrogate partner therapy always happens in conjunction with talk therapy. And the surrogate partner works with clients on somatics, so body-based self-awareness, communication skills, relationship dynamics, and that may or may not play out in physical and sexual intimacy, but that...
is often an option for many folks that are doing surrogacy.
Did I miss anything in my little elevator speech, folks?
Michelle Renee (she/her) (17:35.807)
No, I think that that's pretty usual. I've been throwing in a lot of talk around the platonic use of surrogate partner therapy also as I tend to do a lot of work with people that have.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (17:43.403)
Mm-hmm.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (17:50.447)
gone through a sexual assault or things like that, and we don't ever work in the erotic. It's really about just helping them feel safe in their bodies, just in being with a person, not specifically around a romantic relationship, progression, things like that.
Lou (18:06.134)
Yeah, also, sorry, I also know, Brian, you were spot on when you said, obviously, like, it's always done in conjunction with a talk therapist, but I think it can't be, like, you can't overstate that, like, it is a collaborative model for sure, and that the therapist and the surrogate are in conjunction, and it is this really unique space where a therapist gets to
Jeannie (she/her) (18:06.155)
Yeah.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (18:24.013)
Hmm.
Lou (18:34.818)
share with a surrogate what's coming up in one-on-one talk sessions with the client to say like, hey, there's some real tenderness or there's some real memories around such and such a thing that are coming up, tell me what you see. But also like in the other direction as well, the surrogate partner gets to see things and feel things and be like, huh, I don't know what that was quite about, but do you want to unpack that a little bit and hand off back to the therapist? And so in that way,
Lou (19:04.882)
more information than either a solo working touch practitioner or a solo working talk practitioner, the progression typically happens in a way that is deeper and also faster. And by faster, I mean like efficient. I don't mean like in time. I mean like the work is meaningful and really gets at important stuff. Although I think it is absolutely worth noting that while some people are like, oh,
Sexual stuff can happen in surrogate partner therapy, so people can just show up and be like, I'm worried that my body doesn't work in this way, can we practice blowjobs? It is like, I'm not gonna tell you that never comes on the table, but I am gonna say because of the way it's structured, because of what the focus of the work is, and it's about relational dynamics, it's about the trust and the safety and the self-awareness, that it is a slow build in that way, that there isn't this rush.
to check things off the activity list, it is much, much slower and deeper about how we support people in assessing, assessing where those skill levels are, assessing where their gaps are, providing psycho education and also deep lived experience of all these things to help build it back up and all with the support of a therapist at the same time, which is so cool.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (20:26.524)
Okay.
Jeannie (she/her) (20:26.578)
It is what I love about this work. There's so many things but part of it is yeah, just sort of being a team that the three people that client talk their best that be like, working together and sort of seeing things that we wouldn't necessarily see individually or just any two of us and the idea to what you said Michelle of like, of
sometimes, yeah, the sort of the erotic things never come on the table and honestly with Sometimes for me I think about is like Depending on what a client is coming in with I kind of hold in my mind as a question mark maybe this will come on the table and maybe it won't because like maybe you are figuring out what your relationship is to sexuality and Along the way
And to my saying, like the sometimes the way that you were thinking about like, you know, what, whatever you like, were thinking of as the problem coming in about like, Oh, my body isn't doing like a, the way to solve that maybe to maybe to start with dealing with a whole bunch of other things that you may realize along the way are actually a lot more important.
I mean, maybe not, in which case this modality may not be the right, you know, may not be what you're looking for, but maybe it opens up a whole bunch of other things. And then by the time we get into the sort of more specific, you know, like, things, if we do, it actually provides the foundation that's necessary because these we cannot disconnect
you know, our physical bodies from our emotional bodies and the ways that we connect. And we do, we work with the whole thing.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (22:33.171)
So I've been asked this question, like what is the difference between what we offer and what talk therapy offers? And I always say like, well, we get to touch our clients and that creates a different dynamic. It creates opportunities for new information to come up. What we come in with is the toolbox, right? We have these wonderful exercises that we get to do with the clients. We're in it with them. And...
Most, I don't know that I've worked with, I guess I've had one therapist that I've worked with that had experience, but most of the time, 99% of the time I'm working with a therapist that has no experience working with us. And I'm kind of training them and going through it with the client at the same time, although there's great classes out there. It's still different when you're actually in it and doing it, right? And so...
This brings us to this great offering that Lou and Brian have put together called Hidden Treasures Touch Interventions from the Surrogate Partner Toolkit. And this is what we want to talk about today because we're launching this offering here. When this podcast comes out on December 1st, we're going to have it live on the website so that clinicians and other touch pros, including surrogate partners or other people just working in touch that want to...
see what else is out there that they could potentially utilize in their own modality. It's not a surrogate partner training. You're not going to come out of this. Now you're a surrogate partner and you're ready to go. But for a lot of us, we either need a touch up in like we haven't gone through training in a while and it's good to come back and A, learn from new people. I think the broader our base of knowledge like
even in Cuddle Party, I remember going to other Cuddle Parties and seeing how other facilitators run them and going, oh, yeah, I never thought about that exercise in that way. So in this case, it's a great opportunity to A, refresh ourselves if we've already been through surrogate partner training, but also fill in the gaps. I know you guys are talking about topics that I didn't get in my training. So I'm really excited about this. So do you want to, who wants to jump in and kind of give a...
Michelle Renee (she/her) (24:54.336)
overview of what this training is.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (24:57.81)
Um, y'all mind if I give like a little setting the scene thing too, just like expanding on some of the things that you just said, Michelle. Um, so surrogate partner therapy has been around for a while. Um, in the late, late sixties, Masters and Johnson came up with the concept of surrogate partner therapy, of kind of marrying touch-based somatic exercises with talk therapy. Um, and it was really groundbreaking research and it was shown to be really, really effective.
for overcoming certain physical obstacles to sexual intimacy. But they didn't share really how it was done, right? They had all this great research, but there was never a step-by-step map of, we do this, we do this, we do this. So learning how to do surrogate partner therapy tended to be passed on word of mouth through informal trainings.
people kind of cobbling things together. And sometimes that meant people learned surrogate partner therapy from a therapist who had heard about it. Sometimes it meant people read about it in a book and they were practitioners already in certain types of touch work and they cobbled things together. Every now and again, people were able to get their education through institutions that train surrogate partners.
But even so, professionals were super siloed, right? Like we all kind of had our different way of doing different exercises.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (26:33.906)
Switching gears through my work with AASECT, I did a fall institute in 2019, where we really wanted to bring lessons that we learned from body work, from touch work, to the talk therapy community. And the talk therapists, their minds were blown, right? They were like, wow, we need, like, how did we not know about this stuff? And I found that very, very frustrating, that like,
there's this really important knowledge that we have, not just for like the clients that we work with, but they can be utilized by therapists in their own clinical work with couples.
So I'm hearing from the talk therapy community, oh wow, there's some great foundational skills that y'all have that we don't have access to. I'm talking to the surrogate partner community saying, oh wow, we don't have a really integrated network of touch practitioners where we can trade notes about what these different things are, what these different exercises are, how we do them, how we process them with clients, how we communicate about them to talk therapists.
So these classes are really an opportunity to tie all those things together, right? To have a venue where we can say, here are the core exercises that we do, this is why we do them, and now you all who are taking the classes are going to experience those exercises. You're going to practice those exercises with that theoretical knowledge, and then come back to us in group.
and process it together and be like how did that resonate with you? What did you notice in your partner in the way that we would do with our client?
Brian Gibney (he/him) (28:30.402)
So, yep.
Lou (28:30.542)
Yeah, I think you point out such a beautiful thing is that like we're gonna have a
delineated, but also within the context of professionals, a diverse audience of people that we're hoping to capture, including therapists, including people who are like, I think I might want to be a surrogate partner. Let me take a taster and see what this feels like, including surrogate partners who want to see how other people do it, including surrogate partners who are like, I was trained in a really bare bones model and I would like some ideas, including other touch professionals who are like, y'all seem to have some tools that would be really cool. All of these different people.
we're hoping to be in the audience and we're really gonna help everybody conceptualize for the work you do, what would this look like? If you are a person who does couples, I always say surrogate partners are surrogate partners. You absolutely have partners that you work with as a couples clinician to say, you can assign this homework to these folks.
and it's gonna be more legible to you, it's gonna be more accessible and easier to talk about and easier to decipher once you've had the experience of being like, oh, that's what that felt like, that's what that experience was, right? And so we're gonna help couples therapists talk about what does that look like to assign this for homework and which pieces of it feel okay to do in your office. Some of this stuff is like really good communication exercises, really basic platonic.
engagement stuff, but it's so diagnostic and it's so rich in the way that it gives us information about the way people are working and where their blockages are, right? And in the same way, we're hoping to look at people who are clinicians who only work with individual people. What if this is accessible to you? How would it show up? How would you talk about this and generalize that to other skills, other like self-attunement and self-advocacy skills that you...
Lou (30:28.302)
are tracking for individuals, and then for the touch professionals, what does this look like? How much of this fits into your practice and where? Where do you fold this in to engagement with people? And the best part about it is in addition to everyone having a real experience, feeling into it, getting some, even if you already know it, some expansive idea about how to use these practices, for a lot of people, this will be the first time they get to apply this with someone.
in their life. And so it is going to be like a fun partner thing. Many of these exercises, not all of them, I think there's a couple that we're going to do live. I think two that we're going to do live as a group because of the nature of the exercise that we can model and like tackle as the group on the zoom call and debrief there. But
The vast majority of the exercises that we're teaching, we're gonna model, we're gonna give some ideas, we're gonna give some framework, and then we're gonna send people off and say, do this with a partner in your own time and come back. And so people get to practice with a spouse, with a close friend, with a touch professional colleague, and have these experiences that can be so, they can be fun, they can be enlightening, they can be a place where you learn a ton about yourself, a ton about your partner, if you do it with a partner. Right, and so this is gonna be functioning on,
multiple really, really cool levels. So I'm, I have so much faith that people are just going to get a ton out of it.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (31:58.511)
I'm excited for clinicians to have a better understanding of what I'm writing about in my notes.
That's where I see it as like, I've had clinicians where I've offered like, maybe we should get together and do like a little bit of like taster of what does it, what is a hand caress? What is, what does it look like to really experience the may you or may I will you exercise? I'm really, for me, I'm really excited about getting a second run at.
learning about the food mandala. Lou walked me through that one time at her house and I just, I need it, I need more of it to really feel like I can embody that exercise with a client. And so for me, I'm really excited to be part of this class.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (32:51.342)
Yeah, I would, oh, Jeannie, I speak to one thing. Like, I'm excited about the richness that comes with this series, right? Like what Michelle was talking about was, you know, the embodiment, like the actual felt experience of doing this. It's one thing to read about things in clinical notes or in a book, or even to listen about it, you listen to them in a podcast, but to actually go through it and experience it.
Jeannie (she/her) (32:52.045)
Yeah.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (33:20.454)
with people that are trained professionals in this and then to come back and process it and be like, oh that experience that you had while you were doing that exercise, this is not uncommon and it often is reflective of xyz and then you get to go oh I didn't even know that, right? We so often we don't know what we don't know, right? What even if we're professionals and to have folks that have
Brian Gibney (he/him) (33:50.45)
with clinicians, with clients, with each other. To walk you through that, I think, is incredibly rich. So you can learn the brain stuff. You can understand what to do and how to do it, but also understand how it feels and how clients may feel while they're doing this, I think is incredibly valuable.
Jeannie (she/her) (34:10.834)
Absolutely. And this is the I mean, this is just the kind of this is what we started embrace, right, is to have more and richer conversations with more folks across fields. And, you know, when I first started talking to therapists about SPT, the way that I would often talk about it was, you know, if I was talking to folks who had done couple sex therapy, I could say
You probably give couples homework exercises sometimes, right? Let's say sensate focus exercises, other exercises, things around communication. Right, right. What we're doing is kind of like that. You might even recognize some of the exercises. What I come to realize over time, of course, is lots of... we don't just work with sex therapists. We don't... sometimes we work with folks who don't do a lot of couples work.
They and also a lot of the toolbox of practices that we use that you all are gonna walk through, they come from different places. Some of them are versions of things that sort of emerged out of the couple sex therapy field as homework for couples in therapy, but they've been iterated upon. We do them differently in different modalities.
Some of them have come from other places, from, you know, are evolved from ideas developed by maybe non-therapist sex educators, or from folks who are doing touch work, SPT, or other modalities, and they've all been iterated upon, and people do them differently. Even the therapists who may use versions of some of these practices as
as like homework for the clients that they work with. They probably don't do them like we do them. And some of them may never have actually practiced these things themselves. And so I think we're gonna have really cool conversations both about how we approach it, how we approach doing these differently, maybe in different settings, but also about...
Jeannie (she/her) (36:32.47)
what it's actually like to experience the thing rather than, yeah, I think that even though our whole deal in this work is about experiential learning, a lot of the conversations that we have, I think, with other professionals are often very heady. And I think this is gonna be a really, really cool way to approach it in sort of, you know,
talking as interdisciplinary professionals in a very experiential way.
Lou (37:02.914)
So I don't think it's good.
Lou (37:08.974)
I cannot emphasize enough, if I can jump in with a little story, what it is to be in it and have your own aha. I think a lot of us who are clinicians, I say with my clinician hat on, a lot of us who are surrogate partners are like, I'm here because I'm pretty good at some of this shit. I'm not.
in the top 1% of intimate humans in the world, certainly not, but like, you know a lot, you've taken your time to learn your stuff, you know where your baggage is, like, in general, we're pretty decently confident people about this stuff a lot of times. When I went in my surrogate partner training, I had this moment with my partner, and to set it up, like, I had met this person a couple days before, we're in some of the, like, beginning pieces of the work, we're doing this.
piece for my surrogate partner colleagues out there, we were utilizing the may I will you structure to navigate more of a like, okay, use may I will you to negotiate what you wanna do on a touch level kind of thing, which we do sometimes. And I thought I was having a lovely experience and this was great. And when we get to the group debrief after it, my partner says to the whole room of people including our trainer,
Yeah, but I did something that I didn't want to do. I was really just telling her what I thought she wanted to hear. And I lost my fucking marbles. And it's like, these are the moments where you get the experience of saying, I didn't realize that I had a thread in there that was so tender that as soon as somebody plucked it, it was like, whoa, I have some stuff around that, ouch.
But having that moment and seeing how it can manifest inside, like one structured exercise with someone you maybe don't even know super well, like to feel what it is to like touch that and shine the light on it and say like, okay, we found a tender spot. Like let's unpack it. Let's talk about what it is. Like that gives you such a felt experience of what this work not only can hold for clients, but how vulnerable it is for clients. Like that's what we're hoping.
Lou (39:28.782)
that people can touch and go like, oh shit, like to recognize the power and the vulnerability and kind of like what it takes and also what it feels like to access that within these structures, right? Because it is again, very heady to say like, well, if you see XYZ with someone in an exercise, it might mean ABC and it's like, okay, yeah, we know that, but what is it?
feel like for you to have something become embodied in a relational moment with another human and to have the light bulb go off and go, okay, that's the thing, right? It's so valuable and also to feel when that happens, what does it feel like to be held well? What does it feel like to have people supporting you in that moment? You get this beautiful taste of that sturdy container in a way that like you really can't.
trust unless you felt it.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (40:35.799)
Well, this class starts Sunday, January 28th. It's gonna be seven weeks. Every Sunday for seven weeks, they get what, 90 minutes? It will be recorded if you have to miss a class, but of course the richness is in being present in the discussion, but you know, we are all busy human beings. Anything else you think people should know?
Brian Gibney (he/him) (41:12.27)
I think we've covered it. I think we've covered some of the basic logistics. I think we talked about some of the juiciness that's gonna happen. I'm just looking forward to doing it.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (41:24.523)
Yeah, I'm excited. Information can be found at EmbraceSPT.org. It will be updated as we have more information. We're working on AASECT CEUs. We don't have a confirmation on that yet. So you can always check the website because we will update it as soon as we know what the status of that is.
Yeah, I'm excited and thank you Lou and Brian for putting this package together. This is going to seed a lot of future fundraising and educational opportunities for our community. So if you're listening to this and you're not a pro, so you don't really qualify to take the class, but you love what we're doing and you want to support us, you can also consider just giving us a gift.
either doing a one-time, are we calling it gifts, contributions? We don't have the, we don't have our nonprofit status yet, so it's not deductible yet. But it doesn't mean you can't throw us your appreciation. I have had a couple people from our intimacy professionals groups, Brian and I run East and West Coast groups. Recently
Jeannie (she/her) (42:27.21)
yet, soon.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (42:44.683)
Somebody messaged me and said, I just love what you're offering to the community. Can I send you a gift? And I said, I would love if you sent a gift to Embrace. That would mean a lot to me to see that show up there. Yeah, it's a, we do this work because we really feel drawn to it, but I know all of us give a lot of our time to our community. And I just, again, Brian and Lou, I can't thank you enough for what you're.
Brian Gibney (he/him) (42:53.611)
No.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (43:11.839)
offering here because it's going to fill in some gaps for me. And Brian has filled in so many gaps in my career path as my mentor for a long time now. And I know that when I was starting in this work, having him available to show me a hand caress in person was awesome. I know we can't all have access to that in person. This will be, I think, the next best way to work this stuff out as professionals, to bring it to our people.
understand our work or however you decide to show up for the space. Like, again, this is for pros. It's not for people that want to work on this in a DIY fashion with their partner. Please don't enroll for this. If you're not a professional, a professional in touch work or talk work, something that's related to this directly.
that will keep our space, what would be the word, much more at a level like colleague to colleague space. We don't need to come in and have to start education from the ground up. That would be a whole different offering to offer this to the general public. So that is not this. And I think we've priced it accordingly to encourage that not to be the situation. And...
Lou (44:33.326)
Also, as a quick spoiler, sorry, I didn't want you to run off with the closing without us saying like, also as a spoiler, these seven exercises are not by any means exhaustive of the tools in the Surrogate Partner Toolkit. And so we already have in queue the second seven part series that will roll out later in 2024. And we are just like generally so excited. We are.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (44:39.087)
Yeah.
Lou (45:01.106)
always invested in amassing new tools saying like, I found this thing, I incorporated into my work, I want to share it with other people, how do we do this? And really building a good, we don't want any professionals to be reinventing the wheel. We want couples therapists to know what these things are so they can have as robust of a toolkit as possible. We want all of our touch professional colleagues to have access to any of this because we are invested in changing the lives of
people in the world and like really bringing healthy intimacy practices and healthy self-awareness and self-advocacy. So like everybody deserves this stuff. It's just gonna keep coming. It's gonna keep coming. So get it while it's hot.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (45:44.523)
Oh, thanks everybody for being here. We're on social media at Embrace SPT. I will definitely be putting this podcast out everywhere I can possibly find a spot to shove it. We have all our connections.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (46:02.219)
Is there anything else we'd like to add?
Michelle Renee (she/her) (46:08.015)
Thanks everybody for being here. If you're just really curious about being part of surrogate partner therapy as a clinician or as a surrogate partner, you can contact us through EmbraceSPT.org. If you're a client or a potential client of surrogate partner therapy, my recommendation is always to talk to your talk therapist about the work and have your talk therapist reach out to a surrogate partner in your area or one of us to help.
you locate a surrogate partner in your area.
Michelle Renee (she/her) (46:43.719)
That would be my order of operations preferably is to have your therapist reach out to us first. If you don't have a therapist and you want to do this work, of course, you can find a surrogate partner maybe in your area, maybe not. You can always try to reach out to one of us if we're a closest option and we might be able to help source that for you or with you. I shouldn't say for you, but with you.
Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.
Lou (47:15.118)
Thank you for hosting us, Michelle.
Jeannie (she/her) (47:17.102)
Yeah, thanks, Michelle. Ciao, everybody.
