There is a question I sometimes ask clients — carefully, and only when the therapeutic relationship is secure enough to hold it — that tends to produce a particular quality of silence. Not the silence of discomfort, exactly, though there is often some of that. More the silence of someone encountering, perhaps for the first time, a question they realise they have never genuinely asked themselves.
The question is this: do you know what you actually find erotic?
Not what you think you should find erotic. Not what your partner finds erotic, or what the culture has told you is normal, or what you have learned to perform convincingly enough that it passes. But what genuinely, specifically, in the particular geography of your own desire, moves you.
For many people, the honest answer is: not really. And this is not a failure of self-knowledge in any ordinary sense. It is the predictable consequence of growing up in a culture that simultaneously saturates us with sexual imagery and systematically prevents us from developing a genuine, nuanced, self-aware relationship with our own erotic lives. We are exposed to desire constantly. We are rarely invited to understand it.
The concept of the erotic template offers a way in. Developed most fully by psychologist and sex therapist Jack Morin in his landmark work The Erotic Mind, and drawn on — often implicitly — by clinicians including Esther Perel, the erotic template describes the unique, largely unconscious blueprint that each of us develops over the course of our lives for what turns us on. It is not fixed, but it is persistent. It is not destiny, but it is deeply informative. And understanding it — truly understanding it, with curiosity rather than judgment — is, in my experience, one of the most liberating things a person can do.
What Is the Erotic Template?
The erotic template is the sum of the associations, images, scenarios, dynamics, and emotional textures that constitute the particular signature of an individual’s desire. It is, in a sense, the answer to the question: what does eroticism feel like for you, from the inside?
For some people, it is primarily about physical sensation — specific kinds of touch, particular sensory qualities, the warmth of skin or the weight of another body. For others, the erotic template is far more psychological: it is about power and surrender, about being seen or hidden, about transgression or tenderness, about the specific emotional register of longing, pursuit, or being overwhelmingly wanted. For many people it is some combination of all of these, layered and sometimes apparently contradictory.
Jack Morin’s research led him to identify what he called the Peak Erotic Experiences — the most intensely arousing encounters or fantasies an individual reports — as the richest source of information about the erotic template. When he analysed thousands of these accounts, he found recurring patterns. The most erotically charged experiences, he discovered, almost always involve some combination of what he termed the four cornerstones of eroticism: longing and anticipation; violating prohibitions; searching for power; and overcoming ambivalence.
This last finding tends to provoke a double-take. Overcoming ambivalence — the idea that erotic charge is often generated not by uncomplicated desire but by the negotiation of some internal conflict or resistance — is counterintuitive enough to be worth dwelling on. It suggests that the friction in erotic experience is not incidental to its intensity but constitutive of it. The fantasy that has a hint of the forbidden. The scenario that is charged precisely because something in it was not supposed to be desired. The encounter that is erotically electric because it involves a quality of surrender that, in ordinary life, feels unsafe.
None of this means that erotic desire is inherently pathological or that fantasies are blueprints for behaviour. Morin is very clear on this point, and so am I. The erotic imagination is not a manual. It is a map of emotional and psychological terrain — often terrain that has its roots in early experience, in formative moments of longing, prohibition, or intense emotional aliveness — and understanding the map is very different from being commanded by it.
The erotic template is not destiny. But it is deeply informative. Understanding it — with curiosity rather than judgement — is one of the most liberating things a person can do.
How the Erotic Template Forms
The erotic template is not something we choose. It is something that forms, largely below the level of conscious awareness, through an accumulation of early experiences, emotional associations, relational imprints, and cultural messages that interact in ways that are unique to each individual.
Morin proposed that the template often takes shape around what he called the ‘erotic equation’: attraction plus obstacles equals excitement. The obstacles in question are not necessarily external. They may be internal: the sense of prohibition, the flush of transgression, the pull of something that feels slightly dangerous or socially unsanctioned. The specific nature of the obstacles that feel erotically generative — and the specific nature of the attractions they intensify — tends to reflect the particular emotional landscape of a person’s formative years.
This is why the erotic template so often carries echoes of childhood emotional experience, not in any straightforwardly literal way, but in the emotional register it recreates. A person who grew up in an environment of emotional unavailability may find that longing — the specific ache of wanting something not quite within reach — has become a central feature of their erotic template. A person who learned early that their needs were too much, that they should make themselves small and undemanding, may find that eroticism offers a rare arena in which bigness and appetite feel not only permissible but celebrated. A person raised in an environment of strict prohibition may find that transgression carries an erotic charge that straightforwardly sanctioned sexuality does not.
None of this is deterministic. The same emotional history can produce wildly different erotic templates in different people, depending on a constellation of other factors — temperament, subsequent relationships, cultural context, and the particular meaning each individual makes of their experience. But the connections are worth exploring, and in a therapeutic context, exploring them can illuminate aspects of a person’s erotic life that have been experienced as mysterious, shameful, or simply unexamined.
It is also worth noting the role of adolescence specifically. The period of early sexual awakening — when fantasy begins to take shape, when erotic imagery first registers as such, when the body starts to respond to stimuli in new ways — is a powerful moment of template consolidation. Whatever happens to be present, emotionally and imaginatively, at the moment of early erotic arousal tends to become associated with erotic charge itself. This is why adolescent experiences and early sexual memories are often so richly informative in a therapeutic context: they frequently reveal the first, freshest imprint of the template that later develops into a more complex, layered erotic landscape.
Shame, Secrecy, and the Hidden Template
Here is the clinical reality that I encounter most frequently when working with erotic templates: most people carry significant shame about their desires.
This is not surprising. The culture in which most of us have grown up has simultaneously eroticised an extraordinarily narrow range of experiences — young, thin, conventionally attractive, heterosexual, cisgender, spontaneously aroused, always ready — while pathologising, moralising, or simply rendering invisible the vast majority of actual human erotic experience. The result is a widespread private conviction, held in silence, that one’s own desires are somehow wrong, excessive, insufficient, strange, or shameful.
I see this across the entire range of presenting concerns. The person who is disturbed by the content of their own fantasies and has never told a soul. The person who has spent decades performing a version of sexuality that their partner expects and they have never questioned, because the alternative — actually saying what they want — feels impossibly vulnerable. The person who has concluded that there is something fundamentally broken in them because what they find erotic does not match the cultural script. The person who has never had an orgasm not because they are incapable of it but because genuine surrender to pleasure feels terrifyingly unsafe.
Shame is not merely an emotional inconvenience. It is a physiological state — one that activates the threat-detection systems of the nervous system and makes genuine erotic presence almost impossible. It is very difficult to be fully in one’s body, fully available to pleasure, while simultaneously monitoring oneself for signs of wrongness. The internal critic and the erotic self are not good bedfellows.
A significant part of what I do therapeutically around erotic templates is, therefore, the work of de-shaming. Not by dismissing or minimising concerns — some desires do raise genuine ethical questions, and those deserve honest exploration — but by creating the conditions in which a person can look at their own erotic life with curiosity and compassion rather than with reflexive self-condemnation. The therapeutic relationship itself, when it is safe enough, models the possibility of being fully known and not found wanting. And that experience — of bringing something hidden into the light and finding that it does not destroy the relationship, does not provoke disgust, does not confirm the worst — can be profoundly reparative.
Shame is not merely an emotional inconvenience. It is a physiological state that makes genuine erotic presence almost impossible. The internal critic and the erotic self are not good bedfellows.
The Erotic Template in Couples Therapy
When two people form a long-term partnership, they bring two erotic templates into the same relational space — and those templates may overlap substantially, or they may diverge in ways that neither partner has ever articulated, because neither has ever found the language or the safety to do so.
Much of what presents as sexual incompatibility in couples therapy is not, in my experience, a fundamental mismatch of erotic templates. It is the consequence of two people who have never genuinely shared their templates with each other. They have had sex — sometimes for years, sometimes for decades — but they have done so largely in the dark, each operating from a set of unexplored assumptions about what the other wants, what is permissible to ask for, what the rules of this particular erotic relationship are. The result is often a sexual repertoire that has calcified over time into a narrow, predictable routine that neither partner finds particularly satisfying, but that both have continued because changing it would require a conversation that feels impossible to begin.
The work of exploring erotic templates in couples therapy is therefore partly about information — helping each partner understand more about their own desires and communicate them more honestly — but it is more fundamentally about intimacy. The act of revealing one’s erotic template to a partner, of saying ‘this is what moves me, this is what I have never said out loud, this is the part of my desire that I have been most afraid to show you’ — is one of the most profound acts of vulnerability available to a human being. When it is met with curiosity and acceptance rather than shock or rejection, it can transform a relationship.
It can also, I should note, be challenging. Sometimes partners discover that their templates diverge significantly in ways that require honest negotiation. Sometimes what one person reveals triggers discomfort or insecurity in the other. These moments require careful therapeutic holding — creating space for both partners’ experiences simultaneously, ensuring that exploration does not tip into coercion, and helping the couple develop a shared erotic language that honours both their individual desires and their mutual wellbeing.
Neurodivergence and the Erotic Template
I want to turn to a dimension of erotic template work that is, in my view, seriously underaddressed in the clinical literature: the experience of neurodivergent individuals.
As an autistic person myself — diagnosed in my fifties, which means I spent decades navigating intimate relationships without that understanding — I am acutely aware of how profoundly neurological difference shapes the erotic template. And I am equally aware of how poorly served neurodivergent people are by most of the frameworks available to them.
Autistic individuals, and many people with ADHD, often have a distinctive relationship with sensory experience that profoundly shapes their erotic lives. Sensory sensitivity — hypersensitivity to touch, sound, smell, or texture — can mean that physical intimacy, which neurotypical frameworks treat as inherently pleasurable, is experienced as overwhelming, uncomfortable, or genuinely aversive in certain forms. The erotic template of a sensory-sensitive person is frequently shaped not by the standard cultural scaffolding of romantic and sexual attraction, but by highly specific sensory conditions that need to be understood and accommodated rather than pathologised.
For many autistic people, the social and emotional aspects of sexuality — the unwritten rules, the implicit communication, the expectation of reading and responding to non-verbal cues — carry a particular weight of anxiety and confusion. Sexual encounters, which are supposed to be sites of pleasure and connection, can become arenas of intense social performance anxiety. The result is sometimes a profound disconnection between intellectual and emotional desire — genuinely wanting intimacy — and the capacity to be present in the body during sexual encounters.
I also want to name the specific experience of autistic women, which is still dramatically under-researched. Many autistic women have spent years or decades masking — suppressing their authentic responses, performing expected emotional and social behaviours, accommodating others’ needs and preferences at the expense of their own. This masking extends into the erotic domain, often in ways that are not recognised as such. The autistic woman who has had sex she did not want because she could not decode the social signals that might have allowed her to decline it. The autistic woman who has performed enthusiasm for forms of intimacy that did not suit her sensory profile because she did not know that her preferences were valid. The autistic woman who has never developed a clear sense of her own erotic template because her attention has been so thoroughly directed outward, towards what others need, that she has never had the internal space to ask what she herself wants.
This is not a niche concern. Research increasingly suggests that autistic women are substantially over-represented in therapy populations, and that sexual and relational difficulties are among their most common presenting concerns. Any clinician working in the area of erotic life needs to be equipped to work with this population, which means understanding neurodivergence not as a complication to be managed but as a different form of human wiring that has its own internal logic, its own particular needs, and its own entirely valid erotic possibilities.
For many autistic women, masking extends into the erotic domain. They have spent years performing enthusiasm for forms of intimacy that did not suit them — because no one told them their own preferences were valid.
Working With the Erotic Template Therapeutically
So what does this work actually look like in practice? Let me offer a few orienting principles.
The first is curiosity without agenda. The therapeutic exploration of an erotic template is not directed towards any particular outcome — not towards making the template more ‘normal,’ more compatible with a partner’s preferences, or more in keeping with what the client thinks they should want. It is directed entirely towards understanding. What is here? What does it mean? Where might it have come from? What is it asking for? These questions, held with genuine non-judgmental interest, create the conditions in which genuine self-knowledge can emerge.
The second is distinguishing between the template and the behaviour. A fantasy is not a plan. An erotic interest is not an obligation. Much of the shame that people carry about their desires rests on a conflation of imagination with intention — the belief that wanting something means being the kind of person who would do it, or that having a fantasy is equivalent to endorsing it. Disentangling these is often enormously relieving.
The third is the question of integration. For many people, the erotic template contains elements that feel at odds with their conscious values, their relational commitments, or their sense of who they are. This is not unusual — it is arguably a feature of human erotic psychology rather than a bug. The work of integration is not about resolving the tension by suppressing either the values or the desire. It is about developing a relationship with the whole of oneself that is honest, compassionate, and sustainable. This is difficult, sophisticated psychological work. And it is, in my experience, among the most meaningful work that therapy can offer.
Finally — and perhaps most importantly — the exploration of the erotic template is work that ultimately belongs to the individual. A therapist can create the conditions, offer the framework, hold the space. But the genuine reckoning with one’s own desire, the willingness to look at what has been hidden and receive it with something approaching kindness — that is work that each person has to choose for themselves. And when they do, it tends to change not only their erotic lives but something more fundamental: their relationship with themselves.
A Closing Thought
Your desire is not an accident, and it is not a verdict. It is a history — compressed, symbolised, encoded in the particular grammar of your erotic imagination. Understanding that history does not require you to act on everything you find there. It does not require you to share everything with a partner, or to resolve every tension, or to arrive at a clean, comfortable, fully integrated erotic selfhood that fits neatly into a therapeutic framework.
It requires only this: a willingness to look, with honesty and without contempt, at what is actually there. To meet your own desire, however strange or complex or inconvenient, with something approaching the curiosity you would bring to any other profound aspect of your human experience.
In my experience, that willingness — tentative, imperfect, sometimes frightening — is where the most important work begins.
About the Author
Dr Olena Edwards-Skadowska PhD MA PGDip MBACP Accredited FMBPsS is the Founder and Clinical Director of London Trusted Therapy, a specialist psychotherapy and assessment practice at 115A Harley Street, London W1G 6AL. She is also the Founder of the London Academy of Modern Psychology (LAMP) and author of Anxie the Hedgehog (2024). She trained under Professor Del Loewenthal in existential-phenomenological psychotherapy and holds an Advanced Diploma in Relationship and Psychosexual Health (COSRT-accredited). She was diagnosed autistic in her fifties and draws on lived experience in her clinical and public-facing work.
