Skin and Soul™: Beyond the Pale with Gwenm A. Carsley

In this live episode of Skin and Soul: Beyond the Pale, I’m joined by Dr. Bruce Chalmer and Judy Alexander, the married co-hosts of Couples Therapy in Seven Words. Bruce is a psychologist and couples therapist who has spent more than 30 years sitting with couples at the edge of rupture, betrayal, longing, distance, and repair. His work circles around what he calls The Passion Paradox: the tension between stability and intimacy. The very things that make love feel safe can sometimes drain the risk, aliveness, and erotic charge out of it. And then there is Judy: teacher, principal, co-host, translator of theory into real life, and author, under the name Laria Zylber, of The Blue Tent: Erotic Tales from the Bible, a work of biblical erotica that reimagines ancient stories through desire, flesh, female voice, and what she calls sexual midrash. This conversation may move through couples therapy, sex, faith, long-term love, betrayal, romance, erotic storytelling, and what happens when two people still love each other but can no longer find the heat, honesty, or courage to reach across the table. Because romance is not dead. But it does ask something of us.

What happens when you mix a sex-positive grandma, a childhood spent figure-skating on frozen lakes, and a lifetime of dismantling religious shame… with modern parenting, porn, and kids with iPads? In this episode of Skin and Soul: Beyond the Pale, I sit with Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers — therapist, educator, and author of Sex, God & the Conservative Church and Shameless Parenting — for a wildly honest, surprisingly funny conversation about raising shame-free kids in an over-sexualized world. We talk about babies discovering their genitals in the bath, toddlers who just want to hug everyone, and why “hands in your pants at the dinner table” is not a crisis but an invitation to teach boundaries without shaming desire. Tina walks us through what real “family life education” looks like from 0–18, why one hundred tiny, awkward one-minute chats beat the one Big Talk, and how to start when you feel like you’re years too late. We go there with porn, phones and tablets, patriarchy, boys’ right to say no too, and how to help our kids recognize exploitation instead of becoming numb to it. We also talk about re-parenting ourselves, healing the little one inside who never got these conversations, and the strange grace that can show up with aging parents and dementia. This one is for the exhausted, tender, secretly terrified parents who still want their kids to know: your body is yours, your pleasure is good, and you never have to trade your soul to belong.

Suzanne Raja has spent decades working with women at the intersection of power, intimacy, leadership, and love. In this conversation, we go into the deeper terrain of The Well Loved Woman ~ not as a polished ideal, but as a lived experience. What does it mean for a woman to feel cherished without losing herself. To be met in her strength, her sensitivity, her hunger, her complexity. To stop performing competence and begin receiving love in a fuller way.We talk about feminine power, relational dynamics, the patterns women fall into when they have spent too long holding everything together, and the shift that becomes possible when a woman no longer defines worth through overgiving, over-functioning, or self-abandonment. This is a conversation about being deeply loved, yes—but also about becoming the woman who can inhabit that love without shrinking, armoring, or disappearing from herself.This one is about devotion. Softness with spine. Power with heart. And the kind of love that does not ask a woman to betray her own aliveness.

Producer Laura Z. Barket shares her journey through widowhood, motherhood, and finding aliveness again through theatre.

In this episode of Skin and Soul Beyond the Pale, Gwenm Carsley sits down with psychotherapist and author Phyllis Leavitt for a deep conversation on abuse, learned helplessness, family systems, boundaries, power, and repair.Together they explore how what begins in the home does not stay in the home. The child who becomes symptomatic, the family that cannot repair, the absence of healthy boundaries, the silence around pain, the pull toward blame, helplessness, aggression, and disconnection — all of it echoes outward into culture, community, and nation. Phyllis brings decades of therapeutic insight to the question of what happens when individuals and societies lose their capacity to listen, to tolerate difference, to stay in dialogue, and to heal.This conversation moves through trauma, witness helplessness, nonviolent communication, accountability, belonging, and the power of love not as sentiment, but as a real force in healing. It is a conversation about what breaks us, what hardens us, what keeps us repeating harm, and what becomes possible when we begin to repair.

What happens when usefulness ends and life finally slows down. In this episode, I sit with Dawn Marcotte, a Certified Professional Retirement Coach who works at the inner edge of retirement. Not the financial planning. Not the bucket lists. The moment when roles fall away and time opens up, leaving many people face to face with freedom, grief, desire, and a quiet panic they did not expect. We talk about identity after productivity, what surfaces when no one is waiting for you to perform, and how retirement can become a threshold rather than a retreat. This is a conversation about aliveness, unlived longings, and the courage it takes to meet yourself when the scaffolding disappears.

What happens when mastery at work doesn’t translate to intimacy—or aliveness? In this episode of Skin & Soul, Gwenm sits down with Flora Petri to explore the quiet disconnect many high-performing men live with: outward success paired with internal numbness. Together they unpack performance, burnout, erotic intelligence, and why so many leaders can command rooms yet feel absent in their own bodies, relationships, and pleasure. Flora shares her journey from corporate law and diplomacy into embodied leadership and why presence, pleasure, and intimacy aren’t indulgences, but the foundation of sustainable power. This conversation moves between boardroom and bedroom, asking what kind of leadership is possible when men stop performing and start inhabiting themselves. This is an episode about eros as intelligence.About power that can feel.

This conversation lives behind the image.Behind the polish. The visibility. The story we tell about having “made it.” Clarissa Burt grew up inside strict rules, left home at eighteen, survived abuse, and built a life that looked powerful long before it felt anchored. We don’t talk about confidence as a glow or a performance. We talk about what it costs. What it takes. What stays. This is a conversation about the quiet work ~ the rebuilding no one sees. About esteem as something practiced daily, not claimed once. About giving endlessly, and the far more vulnerable act of learning how to receive. About what happens when survival ends and there’s no applause to hold you up. What remains when the image falls away?Who are you when you’re alone with yourself? A conversation about maturity, endurance, and the interior life — the one that makes a life inhabitable.

In this unflinching conversation, we sit with Keeper Catran-Whitney - author, survivor, brother, and truth-speaker - about his memoir Helplessness: What Happens to Brothers When We Learn Our Sisters Have Been Molested by Our Parents. This isn’t just another story about trauma - It’s a crucible of emotional truth where guilt, silence, familial betrayal, and the destruction of being left unseen. Keeper opens the door on what most families never speak about. Helplessness is his forty-five-year journey through shock, shame, paralysis, and finally toward a fragile kind of hope - born not in denial but in the courage to face what was buried and forbidden. This memoir foregrounds what brothers experience when systems, culture, and love itself tell them to shut up, stay strong, and carry on, even as their world collapses. In this episode, Keeper and I delve into the emotional architecture of silence, how not talking becomes its own prison, how guilt morphs into a lifelong companion, and how reclaiming voice is an act of resistance and healing. We talk about men’s emotional health in the shadow of unspeakable pain, the absence of spaces that hold brotherly experience with tenderness and depth, and the grand societal myth that resilience means never breaking.

Rill’s understanding of desire comes from proximity, not theory. Working within the sex industry as an erotic dancer, hosting swinger events, styling adult film sets, and writing erotic fiction, she witnessed how sex, money, and power actually move. When formal pathways failed her, she created Seductive Art—focusing on visual stimulation, erotic dialogue, and sensual movement. This conversation strips away the fairytale and looks at desire as currency: how power shapes attraction, why honesty about sex is rare, and what awareness really protects us from.

In this episode, Brownell Landrum joins us to explore the pulse beneath her work A Love Story to the Universe - a conversation about soul mates, longing, synchronicity, and the quiet ways the cosmos answers the human heart. We also enter her newest project, The Art and Science of Wishing, rooted in peaceful, positivity, and purposeful, where desire becomes something sharper than hope and far more intimate than manifestation. Together we explore how wishing, when done from truth rather than fantasy, becomes a force that shapes reality. This is an episode about devotion, destiny, and the courage to want ~ fully, unapologetically, with the whole body.

In part 2 of our Embodying the Practice conversation, Andrew Marshall returns to talk about intimacy - with the medicine, and with the ones we love. We explore his experiences with Ayahuasca - the openings, the purges, the raw honesty of meeting himself and how that honesty now lives in his purpose and his relationships. What do we keep from our partners in the name of love?What truths sit unsaid in the body?And what does it take to speak from that place - unarmored, alive, fully present. This is a conversation about embodiment, truth, and the courage to see and face one's shadows when there’s nowhere left to hide.