PT 623 - Dee Dee Goldpaugh - Embracing Pleasure
Psychedelics Today
Psychedelics Today, LLC
4.6 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2025
⏱️ 77 minutes
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Summary
Joe Moore interviews Dee Dee Goldpaugh, LCSW about their new book Embrace Pleasure: How Psychedelics Can Heal Our Sexuality. The discussion covers the book's reception, critiques of over-medicalization, personal healing experiences, definitions of erotic energy and pleasure, historical repression of substances, and contemporary ethical concerns.
Key topics
Conversion therapy: historical use of psychedelics in conversion practices, risks today, and need for professional consensus to ban psychedelic-assisted conversion therapy.
Motivation: reaction to dominance of the clinical/medical model in psychedelics.
Author background: clinical social worker, ketamine-assisted therapy provider, sexual abuse survivor, early psychedelic integration work.
Personal healing: ayahuasca and San Pedro (Wachuma) experiences leading to embodied healing and pleasure.
Concepts defined: erotic energy as life force; distinction between healing pleasure and leisure.
Political framing: pleasure as anti-capitalist resistance; sustaining community and activism.
Links
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everybody and welcome back to psychedelics today. |
| 0:24.3 | This is Joe Moore. |
| 0:25.6 | Today on the show, we have a guest, D.D. Goldpaw, LCSW, psychotherapist, and author. |
| 0:33.4 | We get to discuss their new book, Embrace Pleasure, How Psychedelics Can Heal Our Sexuality. |
| 0:39.7 | We kind of, um, I've been waiting for this podcast for a while. We actually recorded one in person in Denver. |
| 0:48.2 | And as things kind of unfolded, decided to record again. And I'm happy we did. This is a really excellent one. |
| 0:56.2 | The book looks beyond the medical model of psychedelic therapy. |
| 1:02.2 | And, you know, we get to hear some of D.D.'s stories. |
| 1:06.2 | They share their own healing journey with ayahuasca and San Pedro, |
| 1:09.9 | which are pretty incredible stories and |
| 1:12.1 | um getting some fun definitions around um what is erotic energy what is pleasure how do they connect |
| 1:19.3 | to life force um examine how pleasure can be and is political and um certainly is a resistance to fear and depletion. |
| 1:30.9 | And so much more. |
| 1:33.3 | We get into a lot of great topics and I think you're going to love this one. |
| 1:35.6 | I don't want to kind of ruin it. |
| 1:38.6 | But, you know, check out this book. |
| 1:40.5 | I think it's a really important read, one of the better books of 2025, and really could change the conversation around psychedelic psychotherapy, psychedelics, and potentially also therapy. And I think, I think there's a lot of really important stuff here. So thank you, D.D. for all the hard work |
| 2:00.8 | and the careful consideration of a lot of these points, especially how we present them in the podcast, |
| 2:08.7 | given our strange and complicated times around pleasure these days. So, well, and forever. Not just these |
| 2:17.2 | days. Yeah, the book is called Embrace |
| 2:20.5 | Pleasure, How Psychedelics Can Heel Our Sexuality. You can get it in audio or print. Uh, we have some |
| 2:26.0 | links in the show notes. If you want to check it out there. Super sorry for the extreme delay in |
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