Eileen Chao works with people who, for any number of reasons, are less than comfortable with sex. She also works with people whose religious upbringing has complicated their relationship with sex or taught them “that their body is not to be trusted.”Ms. Chao is a surrogate partner in San Francisco. Unlike in more traditional forms of therapy, in which practitioners are usually careful to keep clients at arm’s length, a surrogate partner “enters into a temporary relationship” with a client on an intimate level, she said. “It’s really for clients to learn relationship skills and also develop a relationship with their own sexual selves,” she said. Ms. Chao, 42, described her office as a “relationship laboratory” in which she initiates different experiments to help clients identify whatever their barriers to emotional and physical intimacy might be.

---

Persons: Eileen Chao, Ms, Chao, “, “ It’s, ” Locations: San Francisco