12. "GOOD JOB, BESTIE": HOW TO LOAD LANGUAGE WITH HISTORY

The Soul Has Teeth — What Jungian Kink Theory Gets Right, and the One Room It Never Walks Into

Last week we talked about Khalil Sinclair. The man who rebuilt Jade’s container after Devon shattered it, the third character in this whole thing, the one whose entire job in the story is to make himself unnecessary and make you love him for it. And I told you that the stillness Khalil walks into a room with isn’t decorative, it’s the container itself. That his dominance is a craft, a discipline he studied and refined over decades, something that belongs to him whether or not there’s a partner on the receiving end. The tuning, not the music. I want to pick that exact thread back up today, because here’s the question Khalil left sitting on the table. That craft he spent decades refining, the vocabulary he handed Jade for what was happening to her body on those early Tuesdays — where does that language actually come from? Who wrote it down? And who got left out of the writing? That’s where today’s piece lives. Today we’re getting into the depth psychology of kink, the Jungian frame for what’s actually happening when two people walk into a scene, and the one enormous thing the newest, most ambitious book on the subject walks right up to and refuses to enter. This connects to everything I’ve been building with Jade and Theo, so if you’re new, welcome. You can start right here. ARTICLE CONTEXT So I want to try something I’ve never done on this podcast, which is talk you through a book. Not as a review, I’m not out here rating things, but as a window into the reading I’ve been doing on my own to write this serial honestly. There’s a stack on my desk that made Jade and Theo possible, and today’s the first time I’m cracking it open in front of you. We’re starting with the one that sent me looking for the rest of it. Douglas Thomas, The Deep Psychology of BDSM and Kink: Jungian and Archetypal Perspectives on the Soul’s Transgressive Necessities. Routledge put it out in 2023. The subtitle alone tells you the man came to play. Transgressive necessities. The soul’s, no less. I picked it up while I was elbow-deep in writing this thing, because I wanted to know what the current thinking was on why kink does what it does to people. Thomas is a Jungian analyst out of Pasadena, teaches at Pacifica, and the book reads like a clinician who has spent years sitting across from kinky clients and decided he was done pathologizing them. His whole move is to take Jung — the framework his own followers have been clutching like heirloom pearls for a hundred years — and walk it straight into the dungeon. And I want to tell you what it gets exactly right before I tell you about the room. THE CONVERSATION Here’s the argument, in my words. Kink isn’t pathology. It isn’t deviance. It isn’t a chapter waiting to happen in somebody’s DSM. It’s individuation. Soul work. The thing Jung spent his entire life mapping and never quite had the nerve to follow down into the actual underworld of the body. Thomas pulls from The Red Book, leans hard on James Hillman’s archetypal psychology, and reads a Master/slave dynamic not as trauma to be untangled in therapy until the client finally gives it up, but as an encounter with archetypal material. Persephone and Hades. Dionysus tearing through the Apollonian container. The descent, the ordeal, the dismemberment that comes before coherence. Subspace isn’t dissociation. Ordeal isn’t self-harm. The dungeon sits closer to a temple than a clinic. And he does the one thing almost no Jungian has had the spine to do, which is free Jung from his own — and I’m quoting one of the book’s blurbers here, Russell Lockhart — his “compulsory heterosexist mode of individuation.” Jung built a system that ran on the anima-animus straight-marriage coupling as the engine of wholeness, which meant queer folks, kinky folks, anybody whose erotic life refused the marriage plot got filed under arrested development. Thomas names that and steps over it. He uses Jung against Jung. He uses Hillman, who was always more porous, more polytheistic, more willing to let the soul be many things at once, to crack the door open. For a kinky romance writer? That’s a real gift, and it helps to say what kind. He gives you language for intensity. Numinous. Imaginal. Soul-making. He lets you write subspace as something other than a girl checking out. He lets you write a Dominant as something other than a man with control issues and good forearms. That vocabulary is worth having, and I keep it. But notice what it’s a vocabulary for — it’s for the dark, the descent, the ordeal. It names the going-down beautifully. It has almost nothing to say about the coming-up. Hold that, because it’s the whole argument I’m going to make later. Here’s the room. Thomas knows there’s a problem. The book gestures at it more than once. He understands the master/slave dynamic in American kink can’t be unhitched from American chattel slavery. He’s got a Black submissive in one of his case studies — he calls him “Black boi Kaseem” in the Master Jess relationship — so he knows Black bodies are in the spaces he’s describing. He nods at the fraught terrain. He even tells us, his own words, that BDSM “considers the collective archetypal sources of historical trauma.” That’s the gesture. And that’s where the gesture stops cold. What Thomas never does — what the book in its current form can’t do — is sit inside the contradiction the way a Black practitioner sits inside it every single time she walks into a play space. Stay with me on the Jungian logic, because this is the part that matters. The shadow, in Jung, is the part of the psyche the conscious self has exiled. But the shadow assumes a universal subject, somebody with the luxury of choosing what he represses. White American culture’s shadow includes the violence of slavery. The plantation lives in the white psyche whether the white psyche claims it or not. So when a white Master collars a white slave in 2026, that scene is also, whether the participants want it to be or not, an encounter with a collective shadow carrying four hundred years of actual, documented, chain-of-custody ownership of actual Black people. Thomas’s framework can hold that. His framework should hold that. The book, in practice, doesn’t. And the wild part is the people who could’ve held it for him were right there, already on the shelf. There’s no real engagement with Amber Musser’s Sensational Flesh, which makes sensation itself an analytic for understanding what it means to be embedded in structures of domination. Nothing sustained on Ariane Cruz’s The Color of Kink, the first monograph on race play, which won an MLA prize and argues that BDSM is, for Black women, a productive place to think through Black sexual practice and a way of accessing and contesting power. Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection, with its theory of counterintuitive power found at the very point of violation — that’s archetypal-meets-historical thinking, that’s exactly the conversation Thomas’s book should be in, and it isn’t there. Mollena Williams-Haas isn’t there, and Mollena is to American discourse on race and kink what Audre Lorde is to Black feminist poetics. Her central insight is that as a Black woman she does race play by default, because her Blackness gets read into any scene whether she intends it or not. That’s the exact thing his archetypal frame needed to wrestle, and it never lays a hand on it. And there’s no Jennifer Nash, whose The Black Body in Ecstasy makes the argument the whole field needed somebody to make out loud — that Black women’s pleasure can be read as pleasure. An archive of ecstasy and not only a ledger of injury. Nash is the one who keeps you honest after the history sinks in, and I’ll come back to her, because she saved me from my own worst instinct while I was writing. So why does a missing footnote in an academic book matter to us, the people actually writing these scenes? Because the omission doesn’t stay on the page. It walks into the room. A Black submissive walks into a dungeon. The room reads white. The implements are old. The iconography of leather culture is rooted in post-World War Two gay white veteran subculture, and the language she’s handed for what she’s about to feel is Master, slave, property, ownership, collar. Those words don’t mean for her what they mean for the white practitioner kneeling next to her. He gets to descend into archetypal territory, play with Hades, do his soul work, and Thomas’s framework honors all of it. She’s doing soul work too. She’s also doing a second thing he never names, moving through a vocabulary whose literal historical referent is her own ancestors. The collar has a literal cousin in the iron collar. “My property” has a paper trail in this country. Kneeling in front of a man summons an entire collective archive whether she summoned it or not. When a foundational text leaves all of that unspoken, the silence teaches everybody who reads it — white practitioners included — that her position doesn’t need marking. That she’s a variation on the universal subject rather than a person standing in a different relationship to every word in the room. The book becomes one more piece of architecture built to receive the white body without modification, and it trains a whole community to mistake that architecture for neutral. And that silence, for us, hardens into two failure modes every Black and brown kinkster already knows by heart. The first is the cold room. Nobody hangs a sign. Nobody has to. When the literature everybody points to, and the workshops built on it, and the language everybody defaults to all assume a white subject, she reads the absence instantly, the way you read a room that goes quiet when you walk in. The play party where she’s the only one. The munch where the organizer’s eyes do that little recalibration. The Dominant who has clearly never once considered that “I own you” might travel a different distance to her ears than it did to the last three submissives he said it to. None of it requires cruelty. Indifference does the work cruelty used to do, and it does it cleaner, because you can’t call somebody out for a thing nobody said. The second is the opposite, and it’s just as tiring. Tokenization. The community clocks her difference and decides it’s the interesting part. Now she’s not a submissive who happens to be Black, she’s the Black submissive, the one whose presence proves the space is progressive, the one a white Dom wants because race play with her would be edgy and transgressive and real. Same body the cold room renders invisible, the tokenizing room renders hypervisible. Cruz wrote the literal book on this. The Black female body as the place other people work out their own relationship to power, with or without her consent to the assignment. This is the part I need the writers listening to feel in their teeth, because it’s the part that shows up on the page when you get it wrong. A Black character written into a kink scene by an author working only from Thomas inherits the same two failures. She comes out either raceless — a white character with melanin applied like a coat of paint, her Blackness something the prose never registers — or she comes out as a walking race-play premise, her body the plot’s spice rack. Both are failures of craft. Both grow from the same root. The writer never learned her position was different, because the framework never said so. And the fix is not to write her trauma onto every page. That’s its own flattening, a body that exists only to ache. The fix is specificity. She walks in carrying a history the room pretends it doesn’t have, and a writer who knows that can let her negotiate it, refuse it, reclaim it, descend through it, ignore it on a Tuesday and reckon with it on a Thursday. The full range of a person instead of a position. This is the exact thing that sent me back to the theory in the first place, and it runs straight through last week’s episode. Khalil handed Jade a vocabulary. That’s what I told you he was doing on those early Tuesdays, giving her language for what was happening to her body so the experience had somewhere to land. But the words available to him to hand her — submission, surrender, the whole architecture — came out of a literature that, by and large, never pictured the two of them in the room. And here’s why that matters to this story, because it’s not a diversity footnote. It’s the engine. Remember the wound cooperation I broke down last week. Jade’s deep wound is that integration is impossible, that you cannot submit to someone you love without getting destroyed, so body and heart stay in separate rooms and never touch. And the dynamic with Khalil was healing and also had a ceiling, because the containment that made it safe was the same containment that kept integration off the table. Here’s what I want to add to that today. The frictionless, body-only, raceless descent — the exact one the white-default frame hands you, the clean container with no room marked for what it costs a Black woman to kneel and hear the word property — that frictionless version is itself part of what cooperated with her wound. A descent with no extra room in it is a descent that never asks her to integrate anything. It lets the body go down and come back up and never makes her carry the whole of herself into the scene at once. The unmarked map isn’t neutral for Jade. It’s an accomplice to her defense. So when I write the marked version — when Jade walks into a scene carrying a history the room pretends it doesn’t have and has to decide, on the page, whether she’s bringing it in tonight or setting it down — I’m not adding authenticity on top of the romance. I’m building the obstacle the romance has to overcome. Integration has to cost something or her arc is just two people having nice Tuesdays. The thing it costs her is exactly the thing Thomas’s frame erased: the full weight of carrying her body, her heart, and four hundred years into the same room and choosing to stay. That’s why I went back to the shelf, and what that actually was is the realest thing I can tell you about how this series got written. There’s no MFA for what I’m doing. There’s no program where you go to learn how to write a Black submissive into kink and into love without flattening her into either a wound or a fantasy. So I built one for myself. A whole DIY syllabus, a deeper kink education I assembled out of necessity because the formal one doesn’t exist, and I’ve never talked about it out loud before, which is really what today is. Not me starting some review segment. Me pulling you into the actual reading I’ve been doing alone at my desk to get these two people right. The stack that made the book possible. And the first thing the syllabus showed me was where the gap was. Then it showed me who’d already been standing in it. Cruz. Mollena. And Nash, specifically, so I wouldn’t make the other mistake — the one where you take the history seriously and overcorrect into writing a Black woman as nothing but the weight she carries, a body that exists to ache. Nash refuses that. She gives you the Black body in pleasure, claiming its own ecstasy on its own terms. Jade gets her ecstasy on her own terms or she’s just a thesis with a pulse, and I don’t write theses, I write women. And here’s the part that makes the whole series possible, the part the white default literally never pictured, and it’s the same point I was circling with Khalil last week. Both these men are Black. Now, Theo saying mine to Jade and meaning it, that part comes easy to him, that’s not his mountain. The word that costs him everything is the one he has to say about himself. Dominant. And to understand why that one syllable is a whole excavation, you have to know what a Black man gets taught about the authority in his own body. Theo came up hearing it out of love, from people trying to keep him alive. Lower your voice. Don’t loom. Smile more. You don’t want to be that Black man. The world’s going to decide you’re dangerous, so shrink yourself before it does. So the commanding thing that lives at his center, the thing that is just his nature, got filed as a threat before he was old enough to have a word for it, and then every woman who couldn’t meet it confirmed the filing, called it too intense, too controlling, too much, a production. The message from the culture and the message from the bedroom fused into one instruction. The authority in you is suspect. Contain it. So when Theo finally claims Dominant, that word is doing two brutal things at once, and neither one of them is the thing the white-default frame would even think to look for. It has to overturn the racial tax, the lifelong lesson that a Black man leading with his full weight is a Black man asking to be feared. And underneath even that, it has to walk him through the death of the good guy. Because here’s the part he’s most scared of, the thing the rope chapters make him sit in before he ever picks up the jute. The darker appetite is real. He wants her immobilized. He wants to bite, to mark, to hold her down and watch her take it. And that desire lives in the same psychological neighborhood as the man who abused her, and Theo knows it, and it terrifies him that it’s in there at all. The good guy, the careful, contained, acceptable man he built to earn love his whole life, that man cannot also be a sadist. So claiming Dominant means letting the good guy die, and standing in what’s left, and finding out the darkness was never Devon’s kind. Devon used the helplessness to take. Theo uses it to give. Same appetite, opposite covenant, and the only way he learns the difference is by admitting the appetite is his to begin with. The white-default version can’t write that word doing that work, because in the white scene Dominant is a role you put on, a hat, a fun Tuesday. It never had to also be the ego death of the man the world demanded you be. The only version of Dominant that carries the racial tax and the good-guy funeral at the same time is the one worn by a Black man who was told his whole life that his own authority would get him killed or left. Khalil can teach him the mechanics. Khalil cannot die that death for him, because it isn’t Khalil’s death to die. That’s the ceiling Khalil named about himself, in a different key. The word that finally makes Theo whole is a word only Theo can say, and the reason only he can say it is the same reason the unmarked map was never going to get him there. The map never knew there was a body on the table that had been taught to be afraid of its own hands. A writer working only from Thomas flattens both these men into a raceless authority figure or a body-double for the historical Master, and flattens Jade into either a raceless sub or a walking wound. Get all three wrong and you don’t just lose authenticity. You lose the entire mechanism that turns this from a kink story into a love story. And here’s where I’m not with Thomas at all, and I don’t want to soften it into “we mostly agree.” His whole frame is built on one premise, that the realest thing happening in a scene is the descent. The underworld. The ordeal. The dismemberment before coherence. The truth lives in the dark, and you go down to find it. That’s the load-bearing wall of the entire book. And I write the genre that exists to say: no. The realest thing in the scene is the care. I write cozy kink with Black characters, and cozy kink is not a descent that ends gently, it’s a flat contradiction of the idea that you have to go into the dark to get to something true. The depth was never only in the ordeal. The depth is in being held. The tenderness isn’t the reward you earn after the soul work. The tenderness is the soul work. So I’m not taking Jade down into the dark and then mercifully bringing her back. That framing is still his framing, just with a nicer ending bolted on, and I reject the chassis it’s bolted to. His vocabulary for intensity is useful and I use it the way you’d use any good tool, but his theory of where meaning lives does not describe my fiction, because my fiction is the standing argument against it. The collar and the silk robe and somebody pouring the tea, the hook by the stairs, the body that finally gets held instead of only handled — that’s not the soft part after the real part. In my work it is the real part. The intensity serves the tenderness, not the other way around. Thomas hands you a beautiful map of the way down and calls it the whole territory. I’m writing the country he never mapped, the one where home is the destination and the dark was just a place you passed through to get there. That matters double for Black characters specifically, because the culture has spent four hundred years insisting our deepest truth is the ordeal, that the wound is the realest thing about us, that you know us best at the moment of our suffering. A frame that locates all the meaning in the descent, in the dark, in the dismemberment — for Black characters that frame isn’t just incomplete, it’s the oldest lie about us wearing new clothes. Nash is the whole rebuttal and it’s why I keep her closest. So when I write Jade tender, cozy, soft and safe and loved in the ordinary daylight, I’m not giving her a break from the depth. The daylight is the depth. Letting a Black woman be held and easy and unafraid is the most radical thing the scene can do, because the whole inheritance says her realness is in her pain. The history’s in the room, and the history is the obstacle. The love isn’t the soft reward on the far side of it. The love is the thing the whole story was always about, and the dark was only ever a place she walked through to prove she didn’t have to live there. That’s the whole story. THE SCENE WHERE YOU WATCH IT HAPPEN I’ve been up in the theory this whole time, so let me bring it all the way down onto the page, because I wrote the thing I’ve been arguing for and I want to show you where it actually lives in the work. Two chapters. In the serial, they run one after the other, and I built them as a matched set on purpose, one the excavation and the other the payoff. The first one puts Theo on a low stool in the back of a tattoo shop with a hank of stiff rope in his lap, learning to condition jute by hand from the very man who held Jade before him. And I want you to catch what the rope is doing in that scene, because it’s the whole episode sitting there in a length of six-mil jute. New rope comes off the spool hard and full of machine oil, fuzzed with fiber that’ll scorch a body on a fast pull, and you don’t leave it that way, you run the stiffness out of it by hand until it lies smooth against her skin and doesn’t drag. Khalil tells him she picked the rope that has teeth, the one that bites, because the bite is part of what brings her down, and the work of the evening isn’t to sand the teeth off it, the work is to condition the thing so the teeth land as care instead of harm. That is the argument, in rope. Not a dungeon that softens the dark into nothing. A man learning to hold the dark so it does what she needs it to do. And underneath the rope, Khalil goes after the thing in Theo I told you about earlier, the good guy who’d rather be guilty than small. Theo walks in there convinced he’s the reason her body breaks, that his intensity is the injury, that the safest thing he could do is dial himself down to a size that won’t hurt her. And Khalil takes that apart with a patience that reads like cruelty until you catch what he’s doing. He tells Theo the weight was in her body before his hands ever got near it, that he’s not the weather, he’s one front moving through a system that was already turning. And then he names the actual wound, flat, no mercy in it. A man who decides he’s the sole reason the woman he loves suffers is still a man making her suffering about him. He’d rather be guilty than small. That is the ego death, right there. Theo has spent his whole life being told the authority in him is too much, and he answered it by turning the authority into a crime he could at least confess to, because being the villain of her story felt safer than finding out he wasn’t that central to it at all. Khalil won’t let him keep the crime. He makes him put it down. And in the middle of all that, Khalil hands him the distinction that is the entire counter-thesis to Thomas, and he does it over oiled rope instead of citation. There’s the Dom who takes, he says, where everything points back at him, his pleasure, his authority, the satisfaction of being minded, and she’s the instrument and he’s the song. Real thing, people build good love on it. And then there’s the Dom who provides, where every move points at her, who leads because leading is how he loves her. Same rope, same command, same hands, different engine underneath, and here’s the line I’d carve over the door of this whole podcast, the woman feels which engine it is in her body before her head catches up. That is a Black man telling another Black man that the meaning of the scene was never in the descent. It’s in the engine. It’s in which direction the whole thing is pointed, at his power or at her wellbeing, and the body knows the difference before the mind can argue about it. Thomas’s frame can’t see that, because it’s still looking for the truth in the going-down, in the ordeal, in the dark. Khalil’s looking for it in the covenant. In what the dominance is for. Then the next chapter is the payoff, and it’s told from inside Jade, and it’s the part I need people to actually feel, because this is where the whole argument stops being an idea and becomes a Tuesday. Theo comes home heavy, carrying something out of that session he doesn’t set down at the door, and Jade is up in the bedroom folding the same blouse three times because her body’s bracing for a trip to a city that has cost her before. And he doesn’t process his heavy thing on her. He doesn’t make her carry it. He takes the phone out of her hand the way you take a hot pan off a burner before somebody gets hurt, and he tells her the whole plan is that she doesn’t have a single thing to do for a while except be right there and let him have the watch. And what he does next isn’t the ordeal. It’s regulation. He works her body not to take her apart for the drama of taking her apart, but to lift a whole locked-up week off her, to drain the anxiety out the bottom of her so she can breathe, and he holds her through the crying that comes with it without once making her explain the crying or perform that she’s fine. That is the daylight use of the dark. The descent is in service of the tenderness, not the other way around. And then, and this is the part that undoes me every time I read my own chapter, he goes down to the kitchen and he makes her chicken and dumplings from scratch, browns the chicken and builds the broth and rolls the dumplings out on her counter with a water glass because they still don’t own a rolling pin, and when she can’t eat he bargains with her, two real bites and she can have some dick before they finish packing. The scene doesn’t end in a dungeon. It ends at a kitchen table with their knees knocking under it and a woman who couldn’t feed herself all week finally eating, because the man who loves her turned all that intensity toward getting a hot meal into her body. That’s the whole thing. That’s the counter-thesis with a pulse. The dark was the doorway. The kitchen was the point. Two chapters, and not one sentence of theory in either of them, and everything I’ve been arguing all episode is just sitting in there, in a length of conditioned rope and a pot of dumplings, waiting for somebody to notice the care was the content the entire time. THE ROM 101 MOMENT If you’re writing power exchange with a Black character and this is sitting on you, here’s the question I’d carry to the page. Not “how do I show her trauma.” Burn that question. The question is: what does this specific word do to this specific body, in this specific room, with this specific person holding the other end of it? Write the negotiation. Let her clock the word. Let her decide, on the page, whether she’s carrying it in tonight or setting it down. Give her the Tuesday where she ignores it completely and the Thursday where she reckons. Then — and this is the Nash part, don’t skip it — write her pleasure as pleasure, fully, generously, on her own terms, so the reader never once mistakes her for a lesson. One word, one room, one body. That’s the whole prompt. CLOSE (60–90 seconds) Thomas wrote a real book with real value, and I’ll keep saying that. The descent he maps is the cleanest articulation in print of why these scenes carry the weight we’ve always said they carry. I’ll hand it to white authors building white characters in white dungeons and tell them it’s the best Jungian treatment yet published. I just won’t hand it, on its own, to a writer building a Black submissive, because the same map that fails her fails her Dominant too, and the writer who only has his map will write somebody who’s either raceless or all wound. The Black submissive working it out in her own body when her partner says mine — she doesn’t need me to hand her a syllabus. She’s been living in that extra room her whole life. The literature’s the thing that owes her the map, not the other way around. And the map gets made by writing it. By somebody willing to use what’s useful in the dark Thomas describes so well, and then refuse his whole theory of where the truth lives, and write her into the light on purpose, into the tenderness, into an ordinary Tuesday where she’s just a woman in a silk robe being loved and the loving is the entire point. The dark was never where she lived. It was just a thing the old stories said was the realest part of her, and it isn’t. The realest part is the daylight, and the daylight is the part I’m writing, and the daylight is the part the white-default literature keeps forgetting Black people get to have. I want to know what you think, especially if your experience in these spaces looks different than what I described. Come find me on Substack, leave a note, be nosy. That’s what we’re here for. THE READING LIST This is the syllabus. The DIY MFA I built for myself because nobody was offering it, and this is the first time I’ve put the whole thing in one place for anybody but me. I’m not telling you to read it to be allowed in the room. I’m showing you what’s on my desk and the order I’d come at it if I were starting over today. * Mollena Williams-Haas — the Perverted Negress blog and podcast, her chapters in Best Sex Writing, her Open Deeply interviews. For the lived contradiction. Read her first. * Ariane Cruz, The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (NYU Press, 2016). The scholarly ground floor. * Douglas Thomas, The Deep Psychology of BDSM and Kink (Routledge, 2023). For the archetypal frame. Third, on purpose. * Jennifer Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Duke University Press, 2014). For pleasure as its own archive, not only injury. The one that keeps you honest. * Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014). Sensation as analytic. * Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NYU Press, 2010). For counterintuitive power, the reclaimed bottom. * Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011). The ethnographic record on race in San Francisco kink communities. * Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Flesh versus body. * Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (Oxford University Press, 1997). For why the past isn’t past. * Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Orbis, 1999). For the religious context she’s also working through. * The historical record of Men of ONYX, ONYX Pearls, and Black Leather In Color — the Black-centered kink communities that built what the literature’s still catching up to. Get full access to Filthy Fiction with Feelings at filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe [https://filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

18. THE KHALIL CHARACTER STUDY: THE TUNING, NOT THE MUSIC

The Khalil Character Study: “The Tuning, Not the Music” Over the last two weeks, I walked you through Jade’s kink profile and Theo’s kink profile — who they are as a submissive and a Dominant, why every preference on their lists is wired to a wound, and how those wounds built the specific architecture of what they each want. And if you sat through both of those, you noticed there was a third person standing in the doorway of every conversation. The one who rebuilt Jade’s container after Devon took a wrecking ball to it. The one Theo drove out to Little Five Points to learn from. The one who spent seven years holding something that was never his and never once lied to himself about whose it was. This week we’re talking about Khalil Sinclair. Not as a supporting character. As a man. Because “The Audition” is live, y’all have finally met him, and I have got some things to say about what you just read. [SIGNPOSTING] Same format as Jade’s and Theo’s studies, but this one’s going to sit different, because the man at the center of it isn’t one half of the central romance. He’s the third architecture. The one who built the bridge the other two are walking across. And the craft question I want to live inside today is the hard one — how do you write a character whose entire purpose in the story is to make himself unnecessary, and somehow get the reader to fall in love with him on the way out the door? I also want to finally get into the thing I’ve been circling since the Shadow Work episode, which is what happens when two people’s wounds don’t crash into each other but cooperate. When two sets of defenses line up so clean that together they build something that looks like healing and has a ceiling poured right into the foundation. He and Jade are the case study, and I think it’s one of the least-written dynamics in all of kink romance. [THE MAN: WHO HE IS BEFORE THE ROLE HE PLAYS] So let’s talk about Khalil Sinclair the man, before we get anywhere near the Dom, because by the time I’m done you’re going to understand they were never two separate things to begin with. Here’s the why of him, and everything else in this episode hangs off it. This is a man whose calm is not a temperament. It’s a discipline he had to build, because the alternative was a body that never quite came down on its own. There’s a watchfulness that lives close under the surface in him, the kind that doesn’t switch off when the day ends, and what he figured out somewhere along the way is that control is the thing that quiets it. Structure settles him. Ritual walks him back into his own skin. So when you watch him move slow and deliberate through a room with not one wasted gesture, you are not watching a man performing serenity for your benefit, you’re watching a man doing the exact thing that holds him together, out loud, in front of you, and being generous enough to let you borrow the steadiness while he’s at it. That’s what Theo actually walks into in “The Audition.” Not a host expecting a guest, but a man already deep inside his own process who happened to leave the side door unlocked. And the first thing that registers, before Theo can even put words to what he’s looking at, is that the room is already holding a temperature, and he can either come down and meet it or stand there feeling loud until he does. Catch that, because it isn’t hospitality and it isn’t a power move. It’s just what this man’s presence does to a space whether there’s anybody in it or not. The steadiness was there before Jade ever wandered in off that sidewalk, and it’ll still be there long after she’s gone, because it was never built for her. It was built to keep him standing. She just got to live inside it for a while. And then there’s the house set back behind the shop, and I’ll be straight with you, the house is where he stops being a type and turns into a person. Because the same control that makes him unshakable in a scene is the exact thing that’s kept him alone, and the house is where both of those truths are sitting in the same room. This is a man who grows orchids the way other people pray. Who reads poetry in the quiet and comes apart at a Coltrane record and would sooner walk into traffic than let you witness either one in a scene. The house is the part of him the rope work doesn’t get to touch, the self underneath the role, and when Theo stands in the middle of it and pictures Jade there across all those Tuesday nights, what actually lands isn’t jealousy. It’s evidence. Proof that another man already held what Theo himself was too slow to reach for, and held it well, and held it lonely. [THE WHY UNDERNEATH THE WHY] Now I want to go one layer deeper than I did in the kink profiles, because a man like this doesn’t get built by accident, and I want you to understand what’s actually generating the calm and the distance and the beautiful boundaried thing he made with Jade. I’m not going to walk you through his whole history. The how and the when live in my notes, not in this episode. What I want is the why, because the why is what you can actually write from. Start here. Somewhere in him is a child who learned, early and for keeps, that his feelings were a burden somebody else couldn’t afford to carry. So he compressed them. He got easy. He got useful. He became the one who never added to the load, and he decided his own storms were things he’d weather alone and present to the world only after they’d passed. That’s not a quirk. That is the foundation the entire adult is standing on. The man who can hold anyone else’s overwhelm for hours and cannot, will not, say “I’m overwhelmed” out loud to save his life — that man started as a kid doing the math on whether his sadness was going to cost more than the household had. Second thing, and this one runs even deeper. He came into the world already braced for someone to leave, because the first person who could have stayed didn’t, and he never got a reason. So he made himself a private rule that has governed every connection since. Don’t get caught off guard. If the leaving is coming anyway, be the one who built the exit, name the ending before it can name itself, make the goodbye your decision as much as theirs. That’s the engine under everything that looks like wisdom in him. The clean boundaries, the temporary-by-design dynamics, the gift he has for letting people go gracefully — none of it is enlightenment. It’s a man who decided a long time ago that he would rather pre-grieve every loss than ever be surprised by one again. And the third thing ties the first two into a knot. He learned that he was worth keeping only as long as he was useful. Worth lived in function. So he became extraordinary at being needed and never once let himself examine whether being needed was the same thing as being wanted. He serves. Constantly, beautifully, expertly. And he will not let you serve him back, because some part of him is certain that the second he stops providing, the reason anyone stays disappears with it. Hold those three things together — the child who hid his needs, the boy braced for abandonment, the man who only feels safe when he’s useful — and you have the complete blueprint for how he loved Jade. Which is where this gets devastating. [THE DOM: HIS SPECIFIC ORIENTATION] Here’s the distinction every writer working with more than one Dominant needs to sit with, because it’s the whole reason these two men aren’t interchangeable even though they both lead from care. Theo’s dominance rises up out of attachment. It’s a way of loving one specific person, which means it needs that person to exist at all, and if you pulled Jade out of his life it would go looking for somewhere new to land, because it was never separable from how he bonds in the first place. His dominance is a function of his heart reaching for somebody. The man across the room from him runs on something else entirely. His dominance is a discipline he built on purpose, the way you’d build a practice or a faith, and it does not need a particular person to be real. He’d be exactly who he is alone in an empty house. And here’s the part the surface read of him always misses — he didn’t come to this looking for someone to dominate. He came to it looking for a way to survive his own nervous system, found his way to the truth that power held in service could regulate the thing inside him that wouldn’t rest, and then went and got himself a whole scholarly frame so he could understand why the thing that saved him actually worked. The practice came first. The partner was always the one who got to receive it, never the reason it existed. Which is precisely how he could hold Jade for seven years and stay standing. The same containment that made him safe for her is the containment he keeps wrapped around his own wanting. He could love her the entire time, never let it bleed into the work, and never let the work fall apart, because holding the unbearable thing steady and refusing to act on it is not some side effect of his dominance. It is the dominance. It’s the whole skill. He brings the identical stillness to his own grief that he brings to a body suspended in rope, and he carries it the way he carries everything, which is silently, completely, and without ever once making it your problem to hold. That’s how the two feelings get to live in him at the same time without canceling out. He is genuinely, fully glad she found the integration he was never going to be able to give her. And he is privately gutted that the one thing she needed was the one thing his own wounds had locked away years ago. Those don’t resolve into a single clean emotion. They just coexist, and that refusal to collapse into one feeling is the entire difference between a man and a plot device. There’s a line from Hafiz he hands Theo in the episode — the heart as a thousand-stringed instrument that can only be tuned with love — and then he says the thing that’s been living rent-free in my head since I wrote it. Seven years of tuning her, never once playing her. He named his own wound out loud, to another man, in his own house. He knew exactly what he was and exactly what he wasn’t, and the weight of knowing the difference is the thing he’s carrying when he locks the shop on a Tuesday and crosses his own courtyard to a house that still smells like her. [WHAT HE’S ACTUALLY DOING TO THEO IN “THE AUDITION”] Now let’s get granular, because I don’t think most people catch this on a first read. He is running a scene on Theo the entire episode. From the second Theo comes through the side door to the moment he walks back out into the evening, the man is doing the only thing he knows how to do, which is build a container, read the person inside it, and quietly find out whether that person can hold what’s about to be set in his hands. The tea is the first test, and it doesn’t look like one. He pours for both of them without asking, and that pour is a command wearing the clothes of hospitality. Theo doesn’t clock it, but a decision just got made for him and he took it without a flicker of resistance, and that’s the whole point. The question on the table is whether this man can receive direction without bristling, without needing to plant his own flag in the ground, without making the moment about himself. Theo drinks. He passes. And notice what’s underneath the ritual for the man pouring, because this is the why again. He doesn’t make tea to drink it. He makes it to slow himself down, to remind himself the work is sacred and not a performance, and to read the person waiting on it. The tea regulates him before it ever tests anybody else. He’s steadying his own hands while he reads Theo’s. Then comes the speech about wanting to put hands on him, and that one is not a confession, it’s controlled disclosure built to set the terms of the thing they’re about to make together. He doesn’t say it to shame Theo or load him down with guilt, he says it so the resentment is sitting on the table instead of festering underneath everything he’s about to teach for the next six months. That is a Dom clearing the floor before the scene. That is negotiation. And making Theo say it back to him in his own words is the exact move he’d use to confirm a sub understood a safeword before anything started. Same technique, different room. Watch how he owns the geography, too. They open in the shop, the public-facing professional space, and then he moves them back into the Victorian, the deep couch, the private rooms where the real work gets done, and Theo doesn’t choose that move. He hears “come on” and he follows. Another quiet command, another quiet pass. The poetry’s doing the same work from a different angle — he teaches through image instead of instruction, won’t explain himself, just hands you a line and lets you live inside it until you arrive at the meaning on your own. He’s not flexing his reading list. He’s handing Theo a vocabulary for what’s coming, the identical gift he once handed Jade for what was happening in her own body, because that’s his method top to bottom. Give a person the language first, then let the experience pour in and fill it. But here’s the moment I actually want you to hold onto, the one where Theo reads him back. He’s been running that room a long stretch, controlling the pace and the temperature and the air in it, and then Theo asks him, quiet, whether that’s what he did for all his clients. And his hand stops. A fraction of a hitch before the cup reaches his mouth. He drinks anyway, because he is not a man who lets a tell stand uncorrected, but the hitch already happened, Theo already saw it, he knows Theo saw it, and not one more word gets said about it by either of them. That right there is the moment he recognizes Theo. Not as Jade’s man, not as the one who took too long, but as somebody who can read a room the way he reads a room. Theo just demonstrated attunement, the first skill of any real Dominant, without even knowing he was being graded on it. And the man recalibrates in real time and tells him so, says he’s better at this than he was being given credit for, and that’s the instant the teaching actually becomes possible, because the teacher just realized he isn’t starting from zero. And then he holds the heaviest thing for the doorway, because of course he does. The truth that Jade once tried to quit Theo, tried to end the friendship, couldn’t make herself do it. He sets that down in Theo’s hands right at the threshold, on his way out into the world, and none of that timing is an accident. This is a man who has spent his whole adult life structuring other people’s emotional experiences, and he knows to the minute when a piece of truth will land with the most weight. Not cruelty. Precision. Making sure Theo walks into that dinner carrying the actual stakes — not a decade of a woman waiting, but the harder, realer thing, a woman who tried to leave and chose him anyway, and a quiet instruction not to make her regret it. That’s a Dom handing a man the truth and trusting him to be strong enough to carry it. [THE WOUND COOPERATION: WHAT THEY BUILT, AND WHY IT WAS NEVER MEANT FOR FOREVER] Okay. The thing I’ve been wanting to get into since Shadow Work. In that episode I broke down wound collisions, two people’s damage crashing together and throwing off conflict you can see from space. Khalil and Jade are not that. They’re the quieter, harder thing, the one the characters themselves can’t see while they’re inside it. They’re a wound cooperation. Let me lay it out. Jade’s wound tells her to keep the body and the heart in separate rooms, because integration is where the danger lives, because surrendering to someone you actually love is how you end up in pieces on the floor. So she splits the kink off from the love, and she never lets the two of them touch. And the thing she built with him over seven years served that split flawlessly. She got safe submission. Body only, contained, boundaried, no romantic risk anywhere in it. Clean container, absolute rules, and she never once had to face the terror of kneeling for somebody who could actually break her heart. And I need to be clear before I complicate it — that arrangement healed her. What got rebuilt in those seven years was real and necessary and load-bearing. Her body got proof that surrender could exist without abuse, the trust Devon detonated got laid back down brick by brick, and she would not be the woman she is without every one of those Tuesdays. But here’s the catch, and it’s the whole episode. While the dynamic was healing the Devon wound, it was quietly protecting the deeper one underneath. The Devon wound says submission is dangerous, and that one got healed. The deeper wound, the one Devon didn’t create but absolutely reinforced, says integration is impossible — and the dynamic never laid a finger on it. It couldn’t. Because the very containment that made the whole thing safe was the containment that kept integration permanently off the table. And now watch how his wounds answer hers, because this is where it gets devastating. Her wound says don’t integrate. His whole architecture says you don’t have to, and I built that to mean exactly what it costs. The man who prepackages every ending so he’s never caught off guard by a leaving — he structured the entire thing as temporary from the first day. Healing work, and when you’re healed, you’ll go. He told himself that was wisdom. It was self-protection. If she was always going to leave anyway, he got to author the leaving, make it clean, make it his. The man who only feels safe when he’s useful got to be endlessly, expertly useful and never once had to risk being wanted instead of needed. Her fear of integration and his fear of being left, his terror of being seen as anything other than the one who provides — they didn’t fight each other. They shook hands. They built a beautiful room together where neither one of them ever had to walk through the door that scared them most. That’s wound cooperation. Two people’s defenses lining up so perfectly that what they build is genuinely intimate, genuinely good, and still carries a hard ceiling in its bones. The ceiling being that neither of them ever has to face the precise thing that terrifies them. She never has to integrate. He never has to be vulnerable, never has to say “stay,” never has to find out whether he’s worth keeping when he isn’t being useful. They could live in that container forever, both of them served, both of them safe, and neither one of them would ever grow past the wall where it stops. And the gut-punch is that he knows. He has always known. Listen to him say it himself — that he can give her pain wrapped in kisses and praise on one end and aftercare on the other, with some crying orgasms in the middle, but the one thing he cannot give her is the pain of loving somebody without knowing whether they’ll stay. That’s not modesty. That’s a man naming the exact shape of his own cage. He cannot give her the risk of staying because he has never once been able to take that risk himself. The thing she needed to grow is the thing he was most wounded against providing. And he held the container anyway, because what he could give her still beat what she walked in with, even knowing it fell short of what she needed, even knowing it meant watching her drive home every single week to a life he wasn’t part of, even knowing it meant seven years of being the tuning and never the music. So here’s the craft question, because this is the part most kink romance won’t even attempt. How do you write a dynamic that is healing and limited at the same time? Not one or the other. Both, fully, at once. What these two built was not a mistake and it was not a failure. It was a real, functioning, generous relationship that also carried a ceiling guaranteed to keep Jade from reaching where she finally needed to go. And the ceiling is nobody’s villainy. It’s not his fault and it’s not hers. It’s just what happens when two wounds cooperate instead of colliding. A collision is loud and it announces itself. A cooperation is silent, and it passes for peace, right up until the day somebody — him, because it’s always going to be him first — looks up and realizes the peace had a price the whole time, and he’s the one who’s been quietly paying it. [WRITING THE CHARACTER WHO MAKES HIMSELF UNNECESSARY] Let me close the craft argument by naming what kind of character he actually is, because the genre would shove him into one of three boxes and he doesn’t fit a single one. He’s not the rival. There’s no jealousy in him, no territory to defend. The first thing he does when Theo walks in is set the terms under which he’s going to help the other man become what Jade needs. That’s not rivalry, that’s compersion expressed through craft, generosity routed through the only language he fully trusts. He’s not the wise mentor floating above it all at a safe emotional distance, either. He is all the way invested, carrying seven years of feeling he never let touch the work, and that hitch before the cup reaches his mouth tells you precisely how much. The investment is the thing he’s holding. The containment of it is the skill. Those aren’t in tension. They’re the same act. And he is not the bitter ex. Not stuck, not pitiable, not nursing a grudge. He’s a man who made a choice — to hold what he could hold, give what he could give, and release what was never his to keep — and who is now making a second, harder choice on top of it, which is to teach the man Jade actually loves how to carry the thing he’s been carrying alone this whole time. What keeps him from tipping over into saintly is that none of it is free. The generosity costs him, and he doesn’t feel good while he pays it. He chose the cost because the alternative, keeping Jade locked in a container that would never let her integrate, was worse than the pain of teaching somebody else to hold her better than he can. The generosity lives in the choosing, not in some serene feeling of peace about it. A character who chooses to give while quietly bleeding from the cost will always land harder than one who gives because he’s just naturally that kind of guy. And that, right there, is the whole craft of it. One moment where the reader sees what the role is costing him. One tell. One crack. The fraction of a hitch before the cup reaches his mouth. That’s the entire price of admission to turn a supporting character into a person. You don’t need a subplot. You need a single moment where the reader understands this character has a whole interior life the story isn’t telling, and the weight of everything you’re not showing makes everything you are showing land twice as hard. [ROM 101 MOMENT — CRAFT EXERCISE] [https://romance101.substack.com/] If you’ve got a supporting character whose main job is serving the central couple’s arc — a mentor, an ex, a best friend, a therapist, a former lover — try this. Give them one moment where the reader sees what the role is costing them. Not a monologue. Not a confession. One physical thing, where the composure cracks just enough to show what’s underneath it. A hand that pauses on the way to a cup. A silence that runs a second too long. A nod that comes a beat slower than it should. One tell, one crack, and then let them close it right back up, because that’s what people actually do — they let it show for a fraction of a second and then they put it away, and the reader catches the fraction and builds the rest of the man out of it themselves. That fraction is the whole character. Everything else he does in the story — the teaching, the giving, the letting go — lands harder because the reader now knows what it’s costing him to do it with a steady face. You don’t need a subplot. You need one crack, and the nerve to leave it alone after. Khalil Sinclair is not the love interest. He’s not the villain. He’s not the wise old mentor handing down wisdom from a safe distance. He’s a man who loved a woman inside the only container he knew how to build, who held that container for seven years knowing full well it would never be the thing he wanted it to be, and who, when the moment came, poured the tea, said the hard thing, and started teaching the man she actually loves how to do the job he’d been doing alone all along. The tuning, not the music. And the thing about tuning is that when it’s done right, nobody in the room ever hears it. They just hear the music and assume it was always going to be that beautiful. “The Audition” [https://filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/p/s2ep6-2-the-audition-theo]is live on Substack. Go read it. Then come back and tell me what you think his answer was to Theo’s question, the one neither of them ever said another word about. I know what I wrote. I want to know what you read. See you next week. xo, Tasha Get full access to Filthy Fiction with Feelings at filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe [https://filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

16. THE ARCHITECTURE OF THEO'S DOMINANCE & THE INTIMACY PARADOX

AD SPOT: MIDNIGHT IN AUSTIN [https://www.tashalharrisonbooks.com/goodfilthbookshop/p/preorder-midnight-in-austin-before-we-fell-2] Hey, subbies… If you read Little Boxes, you already know all about Jade and Theo and their NYE ritual. One trip a year. Four days that belong to nobody but them. Four days where she doesn’t have to manage her face. This year he brings his wife. Midnight in Austin is the second book in my Before We Fell series, and it’s the slowest burn I’ve got. No cheating, no easy way out. Just a woman who learned that being small is how you keep people, and the one place she never had to do it, with a witness in the room. Read Little Boxes [https://www.tashalharrisonbooks.com/beforewefell] first. Austin is where the bill comes due. Coming June 21st 2026. Stop by tashalharrisonbooks.com for the deets! Last week we walked through Jade’s kink profile. Who she is as a submissive, why every preference on her list is wired to her wound, and why the bravery of her submission is in choosing to stay present inside her own surrender instead of hiding behind compliance. If you haven’t listened to that one yet, go back. Today builds on it, and then it builds past it. Because today is a double feature. First we’re doing Theo — who he is as a Dominant, why he’s wired this way, and how his wound shaped everything about how he holds power. And then, once you’ve got both profiles in your head — hers from last week, his from today — we’re going to do the thing everybody actually wants to talk about, which is what happens when these two finally meet. Because here’s the spoiler that isn’t a spoiler: they fit. The harder question, the one that runs the whole story, is why fitting that well is the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to either of them. If Jade’s episode was about the courage of surrender, Theo’s half of today is about the courage of admitting what you actually are. Which, for a man who has spent his entire adult life being told that what he actually is constitutes a character flaw, turns out to be the hardest thing he’s ever done. And he’s a civil rights attorney, so the bar for hard things is not low. Same rules as always. This is a character study and a craft conversation, not a scene recap. Spoiler-free. First half is Theo’s kink architecture — who he is as a Dominant and why. Second half is the intimacy paradox — what happens when two people whose wounds match perfectly still manage to hurt each other, not because they’re mismatched, but because proximity to the thing you actually need is more terrifying than distance from it. If you’re a writer, the first half is a blueprint for building a Dominant whose kink isn’t a costume he puts on for sex scenes, and the second half is a blueprint for writing romantic conflict that doesn’t need a villain or a misunderstanding to sustain it. If you’re a reader, this is the psychology underneath the command voice and the rolled-up sleeves and the way he angles her coffee mug just so. THE MAN BEFORE THE DOMINANT Just like last week, I’m not starting with the kink. I’m starting with the man. Because Theo’s dominance doesn’t make sense until you understand what happened to it before it ever got to be expressed. Theodore Matthews is forty-five years old. Civil rights attorney. Northwestern undergrad. University of Chicago Law. He left a partnership at a corporate firm in Seattle to take a pay cut and do the work he went to law school for in the first place. He is precise. He is structured. He is the man who alphabetizes spice cabinets and reorganizes the grocery cart by category and irons his jeans on a Tuesday morning because that’s just how he’s built. He researches everything. He has a rough outline for exploring the BeltLine on his phone. He remembers your three o’clock deadline from a phone call you had with someone else last Wednesday. And here’s the thing about Theo that you have to understand before we talk about kink. Every single quality I just described — the precision, the structure, the intensity, the focus, the need to plan, the inability to just let things be casual — every single one of those qualities has been identified, by the women who loved him, as a problem. Cameron told him he was too intense. Too controlling. That sex with him was exhausting. That he needed to relax, be spontaneous, stop trying to orchestrate everything. Sarah told him sex with him felt like a production. That he couldn’t just be in the moment. That his elaborate planning was about his need for control, not about her pleasure. That his focus was suffocating. That she needed equality, not whatever this was. Two relationships. Two women. The same complaint in different words. You’re too much. What you are is a burden. The way you love is work for the person receiving it. Please be less of yourself so I can be comfortable. And Theo, because he is a good man who loves the women in his life and wants them to be happy, took that feedback and internalized it as truth. Not as mismatch — as truth. He didn’t think “maybe I was with the wrong person.” He thought “maybe I am the wrong person.” He spent years learning to suppress the intensity. To soften the commands into requests. To apologize for taking charge. To perform a version of spontaneity that felt like wearing someone else’s skin. To edit himself into a shape that wouldn’t make the people around him uncomfortable. That’s the man who shows up in Atlanta. A man who has been dominant his entire adult life and has no idea, because every expression of that dominance has been pathologized by the people closest to him. He doesn’t know he’s a Dom. He just knows he’s too much. And those feel like the same thing to him, because nobody has ever told him they’re different. HIS PRIMARY KINK: CREATING THE CONTAINER Theo’s deepest kink is not a specific act. It’s not commands or bondage or orgasm control, although he gravitates toward all of those. His deepest kink is creating the structure that allows someone to surrender completely — not because they’re overpowered, but because they trust the container he built enough to let go. I want to sit in that for a second because it’s the thing that makes Theo different from most Dominant characters I’ve read. He is not interested in taking power. He is interested in building the architecture that makes someone want to give it. His dominance is about the container, not the command. The command is just what the container sounds like when it speaks. This is care-based dominance. Service dominance, if you want the formal language. And the psychological profile of a service dominant is almost a perfect overlay of who Theo already is: high conscientiousness, perfectionism, strong executive function, a need for his competence to be recognized as devotion rather than control. He plans because planning is care. He structures because structure is safety. He orchestrates because the person he loves matters enough to warrant the same sustained attention he’d bring to his highest-stakes professional work. When this orientation is directed at a partner who wants spontaneity and finds structure suffocating, it reads as controlling, excessive, exhausting. That’s what Cameron experienced. That’s what Sarah experienced. They were right about what they were feeling — being with Theo was overwhelming for them. They were wrong about the diagnosis. The problem wasn’t that Theo was too much. The problem was that Theo was offering dominance to women who weren’t wired to receive it. The same behaviors that ended his marriage are exactly what the right person has been starving for. The planning that felt like a production to Sarah feels like worship to a woman who craves being the center of devoted attention. The intensity that exhausted Cameron is the same intensity that makes Jade’s nervous system settle for the first time in years. The command voice they both told him to soften is the same voice that makes something low in Jade’s belly tighten when he says “Use your words, bestie.” The behaviors didn’t change. The receiver changed. And that recognition — “I wasn’t too much, I was Dominant with non-submissive partners” — is the central insight that heals Theo’s entire wound. But he doesn’t have it yet at the start of the story. He’s still carrying their voices. Still apologizing for taking charge. Still performing a softer version of himself because he’s been taught that the real version is dangerous. THE SPECIFIC PREFERENCES AND WHAT THEY MEAN AT LAYER THREE Let me walk through what Theo is drawn to and what each preference is doing psychologically. Because just like Jade, every kink on this list is an answer to a question his wound is asking. Orchestrated pleasure and scene planning. This is his signature. This is the thing that makes Theo, Theo, and it’s also the thing that destroyed both of his previous relationships — so I want to spend real time on it. Theo will plan an entire evening or an entire day around his partner’s pleasure. Every detail intentional. He’s thinking about what ingredients to buy for dinner — not because he’s a foodie, but because he remembers what she mentioned craving three days ago, whether she’s had enough protein, whether the meal should be heavy enough to ground her or light enough to leave her hungry for what comes after. He curates the music — not a playlist, a progression. Something ambient while she arrives, something with a pulse as the evening deepens, something with bass she’ll feel in her chest at the moment he’s been building toward for hours. He tested the volume levels while she was at work. He decides what she’ll wear — not because he’s controlling her wardrobe, but because the act of selecting her clothing is a decision she doesn’t have to make, and putting on what he chose is the first submission of the evening. He’s thought about the lighting. The temperature of the room. Whether there’s water on the nightstand for after, because leaving her thirsty after a scene would be a failure of care. None of this looks like kink from the outside. It looks like a man making dinner for his girlfriend. But the architecture underneath — the intentionality, the sustained focus, the hours of devoted planning in service of her experience — is dominance in its purest care-based expression. Every decision is a command he doesn’t have to speak. Every element he’s arranged is a wall of the container he’s building. And the container is designed to do one thing: make it so easy for her to surrender that resistance would require more effort than letting go. Sarah called this a production. Jade experiences it as prayer. And here’s the layer-three truth about why Theo needs to orchestrate. It’s not just that he’s good at it. It’s that orchestrated pleasure is the one context where every quality he’s been told to suppress becomes a virtue. The planning that was “too much” becomes devotion. The sustained intensity that was “exhausting” becomes focus. The inability to be casual becomes the evidence that she’s worth taking seriously. He needs to orchestrate because orchestration is the only language in which “too much” translates to “exactly enough.” Command and obedience: “Come here.” “Open your mouth.” “Hold still.” “Look at me.” Theo is aroused by giving commands and having them followed — not as a power play, but as intimacy. Every woman he’s been with has resisted his leadership. The act of someone choosing to obey him, wanting to follow his direction — that is proof that he’s not too much. That what he is can be a gift rather than a burden. Commands from Theo aren’t about controlling another person. They are about creating clarity. Removing ambiguity. Making the moment simple enough that both of them can be fully present inside it. And his command voice — the tone that drops naturally when he’s turned on, the one Cameron called controlling and Sarah called too intense — is instinctive. He doesn’t put it on. It arrives when he stops editing himself. The command voice is what Theo sounds like when he’s being honest about who he is. And the fact that Jade’s body responds to it — the fact that her belly tightens and her shoulders drop and something in her reorganizes itself around his authority — is the first piece of evidence that the voice isn’t a flaw. It’s a feature. It’s been a feature his whole life. He just never had anyone tell him that. Orgasm control: This is Theo’s primary tool, and it’s the kink that most precisely mirrors his wound. Because think about what orgasm control actually requires. Sustained, unflinching focus on his partner’s every micro-response. The patience to build for twenty, thirty, forty minutes without rushing toward the finish. The decisiveness to say “not yet” when she’s desperate. The intensity to hold the edge without blinking. The ability to read her body so accurately that he knows when she’s at the threshold before she does. Every quality his exes punished him for is exactly what makes orgasm control devastating in the hands of someone who does it right. He was told his intensity was a problem — orgasm control requires intensity as its primary ingredient. He was told his focus was exhausting — orgasm control demands sustained focus. He was told his need to orchestrate was too much — orgasm control is orchestration elevated to art. And the layer-three truth underneath all of that. Orgasm control is about being trusted with someone’s pleasure. Being given the authority to decide when they get to feel good. That’s an enormous amount of trust. And for a man who has never been trusted to lead without being resented for it, being handed that authority — and having the person beg for more of it instead of asking him to ease up — is the most healing thing that has ever happened to him. Impact play: Theo enjoys impact, but his relationship to it is different from Jade’s. She needs impact for somatic release. It’s her off switch, her nervous system reset. Theo needs impact for connection. He prefers hands over implements because he wants to feel the hit too. He reads body language obsessively during impact. Not monitoring in an anxious way, but attuning. Tracking the difference between a gasp that means “more” and a gasp that means “that’s the edge.” Using impact to ground, to focus, to intensify the connection between his hand and her body. He gets off on the response more than the act. The sound she makes. The way her skin flushes. The way her body arches toward him instead of away. That response is the evidence his wound needs — proof that his intensity, when directed at someone who wants it, produces pleasure instead of pain. Produces trust instead of resentment. Produces the arch toward, not the flinch away. And here’s where I have to choose my words, because there’s a layer under Theo’s relationship with impact that the story unpacks at its own pace, and I’m not going to get out ahead of it. So I’ll say this much and then leave the rest alone. For Theo, the gasp and the flush and the arch toward instead of the flinch away aren’t just proof that his intensity is wanted. There’s a part of him that wants the response badly enough to wonder about himself — a wanting that points somewhere he hasn’t let himself look directly, because in his wound’s arithmetic, a man who wants that is one short step from being the thing every woman warned him about. He doesn’t have a name for it yet. When he finds the name, it’s going to land harder on him than anything Cameron or Sarah ever said, and where that goes is one of the turns I built this story to earn. So that’s all you get from me today. What I will name is the shape of the fear, because the fear isn’t the spoiler — the fear is the wound. What terrifies Theo about his own desire is not the desire itself. The shadow isn’t the want. The shadow is the shame around the want. And his arc, eventually, is learning that the fear isn’t wisdom — that being afraid of hurting the person he loves is exactly the evidence that he won’t. Praise and verbal dominance: I want to connect this directly back to what I said in Jade’s episode, because Theo’s relationship to praise is the other side of her coin. Jade needs to receive praise. Theo needs to give it. And what wrecks him — what undoes Theo completely — is hearing it back. Not praise from him to her. Praise from her to him. Affirmation that his dominance is wanted. “Please.” “Don’t stop.” “I need you to —.” His name said with surrender in it. Begging. Begging undoes him entirely, because begging is proof that his intensity produced wanting instead of withdrawal. That she doesn’t need him to be less. She needs him to be more. And what he does not want — what will shut him down — is anything that echoes actual emotional abuse. Cruel degradation. Language that makes submission feel shameful. Anything that sounds like the voices that told him what he is constitutes a flaw. He can be rough. He can be commanding. He can be intense to the point of overwhelming. But cruelty is the line, and the line exists because he knows what cruelty did to the woman he loves, and he will cut off his own hands before he sounds like Devon. Bondage: Rope appeals to Theo’s perfectionist nature. He would take knots seriously. He would study technique with the same thoroughness he brings to case law. He would love the process of preparing someone’s body methodically — positioning, adjusting, making sure the tension is right, checking circulation. Bondage for Theo is dominance expressed through craftsmanship. Every knot is a decision. Every wrap is attention made tangible. And the result — his partner restrained, positioned exactly where he placed her, unable to move except within the parameters he set — is the visible proof that she trusts him enough to let him build a cage she could break out of but chooses not to. Protocol and ritual: Theo is turned on by structure within scenes — not 24/7 lifestyle protocol, but intentional patterns that mark the erotic space as different from the rest of their life. Specific ways of asking permission. Rituals around beginning and ending scenes. Consistent language or gestures. Predictable structure that makes surrender easier because the container is familiar. This matters for Theo specifically because ritual is the opposite of spontaneity. It’s deliberate, focused, structured — everything Cameron and Sarah told him was wrong with how he approached sex. With the right partner, ritual becomes sacred rather than suffocating. It becomes the evidence that he’s been right all along about what intimacy should feel like. Aftercare: Theo is exceptional at aftercare, and the reason is architectural, not learned. Care-based dominance requires aftercare the way a building requires a foundation — it’s not optional, it’s structural. If you build a container for someone’s surrender and then abandon the container when the scene ends, you haven’t done dominance. You’ve done damage. Theo’s aftercare would be thorough, physical, present, but he also does something I rarely see in kinky books: the post-scene processing. He’s not checking his phone. He’s not rolling over or treating the come-down as something to get through before returning to regular life. For Theo, aftercare isn’t the end of the scene. Aftercare is where the scene proves it meant something. It’s where he confirms that he held what she gave him and didn’t drop it. And his need to provide aftercare is as deep as her need to receive it, because aftercare is the final expression of the thing his whole wound has been chasing: being trusted with someone’s most vulnerable self and proving worthy of that trust. LET’S TALK ABOUT WHAT HE WON’T DO — AND WHAT THE WON’TS REVEAL Theo’s limits are different from Jade’s in origin but equally revealing. He won’t degrade. Not because he can’t but because, as previously stated, cruelty is the line, and the line exists because he knows what cruelty costs. He won’t ignore boundaries or resistance, because the difference between dominance and abuse is the submissive’s ability to stop the scene at any given time, without hesitation. He won’t do 24/7 authority exchange outside of negotiated contexts, because he knows the difference between dominance and control. Dominance is what he offers inside the container they build together. Control is what Devon did everywhere. Theo’s refusal to extend his authority beyond the negotiated space isn’t a limitation of his dominance — it’s the proof that his dominance is trustworthy. And there’s a limit that’s harder for him to name, because it’s less about what he won’t do and more about what he’s afraid of doing. He’s afraid of going too far. Afraid his intensity will cross a line he doesn’t see. Afraid the part of him that wants to push will become the thing everyone warned him about. That fear is itself a kind of limit — not a hard boundary but a governor on his engine, the thing that makes him check in one more time than he needs to, soften a command that didn’t need softening, pull back when he should lean in. His arc is learning that the fear isn’t wisdom — it’s the wound pretending to be caution. And the day he trusts himself enough to lead at full intensity without the governor running is the day his dominance finally becomes what it was always meant to be. FROM TWO PROFILES TO ONE DYNAMIC So now you’ve got both of them. You had Jade last week. You’ve got Theo now. And you’re probably sitting there doing the math I know you’re doing, because everybody does it: okay, these two are obviously perfect for each other. Her “not enough structure” meets his “too much structure.” Her need to surrender meets his need to lead. His orchestration is her worship. Her obedience is his permission. They fit. They interlock. So what’s the problem? The problem is that complementary wiring is the beginning of the story, not the end of it. And the thing nobody tells you about finding someone whose wounds match yours perfectly is that perfect matching doesn’t prevent friction. It produces a specific kind of friction that is worse than incompatibility. Because incompatibility you can walk away from. You can say “we don’t fit” and go find someone who does. But when you fit — when the fit is so precise that your body recognizes it before your brain has language for it — you can’t walk away. You’re in it. And now the wounds have nowhere to hide. That’s the rest of this episode. The intimacy paradox. What happens when two people whose kinks are complementary still manage to hurt each other — not because they’re mismatched, but because proximity to the thing you actually need is more terrifying than distance from it. THE ARGUMENT: WHY COMPATIBILITY IS TERRIFYING Let me set up the argument before I get into the patterns, because I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding in how most romance novels handle D/s dynamics, and I want to name it. Most kink romance treats compatibility as the resolution. The characters spend the first half of the book discovering they’re kinky compatible, and once they figure that out, the rest of the story is either external obstacles or a brief miscommunication before the HEA. The assumption is: if the Dom and the sub are wired for each other, the hard part is over. They found the match. Now they just have to communicate and everything will be fine. That is not how it works. Not in real life, and not in A Soft Place to Land. Here’s what actually happens when two wounded people discover they’re kinky compatible. Their desire is highest when they’re most honest — but honesty is what they fear most. Think about that for a second. Jade’s most honest self is a woman who wants to surrender completely to the man she loves. She wants to hand him everything. Her body, her autonomy in the scene, her pleasure, her trust. That is her deepest desire, and it is also the thing Devon weaponized. So the closer she gets to real surrender with Theo — not performance, not compliance, actual letting go — the louder Devon’s ghost screams that this is how she got destroyed last time. Theo’s most honest self is a man who wants to lead with full intensity. To command. To orchestrate. To plan her pleasure for days and execute it with the sustained focus that Cameron called exhausting and Sarah called a production. That is his deepest desire, and it is also the thing every woman in his life has told him is a character flaw. So the closer he gets to real dominance with Jade — not the careful, softened, apologetic version, but the full thing — the louder Sarah’s voice tells him this is the part of himself that makes people leave. Their deepest compatibility is the thing their wounds are most afraid of. That is the intimacy paradox. And it produces patterns that look completely different from the kind of conflict most romance novels are built on. PATTERN ONE: PERFECT SUBMISSION MEETS SUPPRESSED DOMINANCE The first pattern is the one I think is the hardest to catch on the page because it looks like success. Here’s what happens. Jade submits. Perfectly. She follows every command. She doesn’t resist, she’s not bratty, and she doesn’t push back. She looks like the ideal submissive. Beautiful in her obedience. Giving him exactly what he asked for. And Theo reads that perfection and thinks he’s overwhelming her. Because the only version of his intensity he’s ever seen reflected back at him is the version that made women flinch. So when Jade goes quiet and compliant, he doesn’t think “she’s surrendering.” He thinks “she’s scared of me,” because it’s the opposite of who he knows her to be in everyday life. And he does what his wound has trained him to do. He softens. He backs off. He edits the next command into a request. He dilutes his intensity to make himself safer. And Jade feels him wavering. She feels the container wobble. And for a woman whose nervous system was trained by Devon to monitor the stability of the person holding power over her, a wobbly container is a threat signal. Not because Theo is dangerous — because uncertain dominance was one of Devon’s tells. Devon ran hot and cold. Devon’s authority was unpredictable. So when Jade feels Theo pull back, her wound doesn’t interpret it as “he’s being careful.” Her wound interprets it as “the container isn’t holding.” So she does what her wound trained her to do. She over-controls. She manages the scene. She starts making decisions that aren’t hers to make inside the dynamic, because if the Dom isn’t steering, she has to steer or something bad will happen. And Theo sees her controlling and thinks: I failed. I’m not enough to hold her. She needs to lead herself because I can’t do it. And the cycle tightens. She performs more perfectly. He softens more carefully. She controls more anxiously. He withdraws more completely. Both of them are convinced they’re protecting the other person. Both of them are feeding the other person’s deepest insecurity with every protective instinct they have. Now, here’s the craft point for writers. That cycle looks like a communication problem. And if you’re framing it as a communication problem, you’ll solve it with a conversation in which they both say “I was scared,” then hug and move on. But it’s not a communication problem. It’s a wound problem. They could have the conversation, and the cycle would still restart the next time his intensity showed up and her compliance kicked in, because the conversation doesn’t rewire the nervous system. The nervous system has to learn, through repeated experience, that his intensity doesn’t mean danger and that her compliance doesn’t mean fear. That takes time. That takes scenes that go well and scenes that don’t. That takes failing and repairing and failing the next time differently. You can’t talk your way out of a wound. You have to live your way out of it. PATTERN TWO: THE HESITATION CASCADE The second pattern is a variation of the first, but it starts from Theo’s side instead of Jade’s, and it escalates differently. Theo hesitates. Not dramatically — he doesn’t freeze or shut down. He just edits. He was going to say “get on your knees” and what comes out is “would you like to kneel?” He was going to grab her hair and what he does instead is rest his hand on her shoulder. He was going to plan an elaborate evening and what he does instead is suggest they order takeout and see what happens. Each edit is tiny. Each edit is invisible if you’re not watching for it. And each edit is Theo’s wound performing the version of himself that won’t make someone leave. Jade feels every single one. Not because he told her he was editing — because her body is calibrated to the quality of someone’s authority the way a tuning fork is calibrated to a frequency. She spent seven years with Khalil. She knows what decisive leadership feels like in her nervous system. And she knows what uncertainty feels like. And Theo’s edits register as uncertainty, even though what they actually are is fear. So her body responds to the uncertainty by trying to create the stability he’s not providing. She starts making choices. Suggesting positions. Guiding the scene. Not bratting — managing. The way she manages everything else in her life. She’s trying to build the container from the inside because she can feel that it’s not being built from the outside. And Theo sees her managing and his wound says: see? She has to take over because you can’t do this. She needs to lead herself because your leadership is a burden. You are not enough. And he withdraws further. And she manages more. And the dynamic becomes two people working very hard in opposite directions — him trying to be less so she’ll be comfortable, her trying to compensate for his less because the container needs someone to hold it. The thing that makes this pattern devastating to write is that both people are acting out of love. He’s softening because he doesn’t want to hurt her. She’s managing because she doesn’t want the scene to collapse. They are both doing the most caring version of the wrong thing. And the caring is what makes it unfixable from the inside, because how do you tell someone “stop being so careful with me” without sounding like you’re asking them to be careless? That’s the sentence neither of them can say. Jade can’t say “be more Dominant” because her wound reads that as inviting the thing Devon did. Theo can’t say “let me lead” because his wound reads that as the thing Cameron and Sarah resented. They both know what they need. Neither of them can ask for it. And the not-asking is the wound doing its job. PATTERN THREE: THE PARADOX ITSELF The third pattern contains the other two, and it’s the one I named this segment after. Their desire is highest when they’re most honest. The moments of deepest connection between Jade and Theo happen when both stop performing. When she surrenders authentically rather than feigning compliance, and when he leads with full intensity rather than editing himself into something palatable. In those moments, the dynamic is everything it’s supposed to be. She lets go. He holds. She drops. He catches. The fit is so precise it feels like fate, like their bodies were designed for this specific configuration, and the intimacy of it is staggering. And the intimacy is exactly what triggers the terror. Because Jade’s authentic surrender means she just handed the man she loves the same power Devon used to destroy her. And Theo’s authentic leadership means he just expressed the same intensity every woman before Jade told him was the worst thing about him. They got what they wanted. They were fully themselves for thirty seconds. And now every alarm in both of their nervous systems is screaming. So they retreat. Jade back into performance. Theo back into suppression. The connection weakens. They try harder, which means they perform harder and suppress harder, which pushes them further apart. And the dynamic becomes unsustainable — not because it doesn’t work, but because it works too well. The moments of real connection are so intense that the terror of losing them makes both people pull back preemptively. Better to never reach the height than to fall from it. That is the intimacy paradox. The very thing that makes them most compatible is what their wounds tell them is most dangerous. And the only way through it is to keep reaching the height, keep feeling the terror, and keep choosing to stay instead of retreat — until the nervous system learns, through repetition and survival, that reaching the height doesn’t end in destruction. That the fall they’re bracing for isn’t coming. That this time, this person, this dynamic is different. That’s the work. And it’s slow. And it’s not linear. And it can’t be solved with one good conversation or one perfect scene. It has to be lived through. Over and over. The same terror, met with the same choice, producing a slightly different result each time, until the wound’s prediction stops being accurate and the body starts to believe what the heart already knows. WHY THIS IS HARDER TO WRITE THAN INCOMPATIBILITY I want to sit in this for a second as a craft conversation, because I think most romance writers — myself included, in earlier work — default to incompatibility as the source of romantic conflict because it’s easier to dramatize. If your characters don’t fit, the conflict is visible. They argue. They misunderstand each other. They want different things. The reader can see the problem and root for the solution. But when the conflict comes from compatibility — when the problem is that they fit too well and the fitting is what’s terrifying — the conflict is invisible. It lives inside the characters’ bodies. It looks like success from the outside. The sex is good. The dynamic is working. Nobody’s fighting. And underneath all of that, both people are performing slightly less authentic versions of themselves because the real versions are too scary to sustain. Writing that kind of conflict requires you to trust your reader to feel what the characters are hiding. You can’t have a big blow-up scene where someone storms out, and the problem is on the table. You have to write the almost-imperceptible moments where a command gets softened into a request, where compliance gets a fraction too perfect, where a body that was melting suddenly holds still in a way that isn’t surrender but survival. The conflict is in the micro-adjustments. In what doesn’t happen. In the gap between what a character wants to do and what they actually do. And the reader, if you’ve done the wound work, if they understand what each character is carrying, the reader will feel that gap. They’ll read Theo editing a command and know why. They’ll read Jade going silent and know the silence isn’t peace. They’ll be sitting there thinking “just be yourself, just tell the truth, just stop protecting each other,” and that frustration, that ache, that desire for the characters to do the brave thing they can’t quite do yet, is the engine of the story. That’s better conflict than a fight. That’s better tension than a misunderstanding. That’s two people whose wounds are doing the only thing wounds know how to do — protecting the person from the thing that hurt them last time — and the tragedy is that the thing that hurt them last time is not the thing that’s in front of them now. They’re defending against an enemy that isn’t in the room. And the reader can see that. And the reader is heartbroken by it. And the reader keeps turning pages because they need to see these two people figure out that the person in front of them is safe, even though every alarm in their body is saying otherwise. That is what I’m writing. That is what A Soft Place to Land is built on. Not incompatibility. Not miscommunication. The specific, devastating friction of two people whose wounds match so precisely that being honest with each other is the bravest and most terrifying thing either of them has ever done. ROM 101 MOMENT: CRAFT EXERCISE Everything I just broke down? That’s the conversation happening every week at ROM 101, my craft publication for writers who take romance as seriously as it deserves. Prompts, breakdowns, the real work. Completely free on Substack. Come find it. I’ve got two for you this week, one for each half of the episode. First, if you’re building a Dominant character: don’t start with what they do in bed. Start with what they’ve been told is wrong with them. What has every partner complained about? What have they learned to suppress? What quality do they perform the opposite of because the real version made somebody leave? Now ask yourself — what if that quality isn’t a flaw? What if it’s a gift that’s never had the right recipient? What does it look like when the person they love doesn’t flinch? That collision — the moment a Dominant realizes they weren’t broken, they were just offering the right thing to the wrong person — that’s the arc. And if you can make your reader feel it, you don’t need a single piece of kink equipment in the room. The dominance is the man. The kink is who he is. The scene is just the context where he finally gets to stop apologizing for it. Second, if you’re writing a couple whose conflict is internal rather than external — two people who fit but whose wounds make the fitting terrifying — write a scene where both characters are doing the caring version of the wrong thing. He’s softening because he loves her. She’s managing because she loves him. Neither of them is wrong. Neither of them is the villain. Don’t resolve it in the scene. Let it end with both characters feeling like they did the right thing, because from their perspective, they did. The reader should be the only one who sees that the right thing, from inside each person’s wound, is the exact wrong thing for the dynamic. If you can make a reader ache for two people who are both doing their best and both making it worse, you’ve found conflict that doesn’t need a villain, a misunderstanding, or a third-act breakup to sustain a story. That’s Theo, and that’s the paradox he and Jade walk straight into. Theo — not his kink list, his kink architecture. A man who has been dominant his entire adult life and didn’t know it, because every expression of that dominance was met with the same feedback: you’re too much, please be less. And the journey of this story is his slowly discovering, through a woman who has been choosing him for fifteen years, that the intensity everyone else resented is the exact thing she needs to feel safe. That his planning isn’t a production — it’s devotion. That the “too much” he’s been apologizing for is “exactly enough” in a mouth that’s been waiting to say it. The shadow isn’t the dominance. The shadow is the shame around it. And his whole arc is learning to set the shame down and pick up the thing that was always underneath it — which is just a man who loves with his whole body and needs the person he loves to want every ounce of it. And the paradox is the cruel joke on top of all that. Their wounds interlock. His “too much” meets her “not enough structure.” His need to lead meets her need to surrender. They fit. And the fitting is the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to either of them, because now there’s nowhere to hide. The wound can’t blame mismatch. The wound has to face the possibility that they do work — and that working means being fully, honestly, unprotectedly yourself with another person. Which is the thing every wound is designed to prevent. That’s the story I’m telling. Not a story about two people who need to find each other. A story about two people who found each other fifteen years ago and have spent every year since then trying to be brave enough to admit what they found. Next week, we’re talking about Khalil. The man who held the container that got Jade to this threshold. The man who spent seven years being the tuning, not the music. And the craft of writing a character whose purpose is to make himself unnecessary. Find me on Substack. Tell me what you see now about Theo that you didn’t see before, and tell me which pattern you recognized — in your own writing, in your own reading, in your own life. I have a feeling pattern two is going to hit some of you personally, and I want to hear about it. See you next week. xo, Tasha Thanks for reading Filthy Fiction with Feelings! This post is public, so feel free to share it! 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15. What Makes a Submissive Character Feel Real? Inside Jade Thompson's Kink Profile

The submission isn't the starting point. The wound is. This week on Filthy Fiction With Feelings, we're running the wound-to-kink pipeline through a specific character — Jade Thompson, the submissive at the heart of A Soft Place to Land. Last week we talked theory. This week we show you what the theory produces. This is a character study, not a scene breakdown. No spoilers. We're going deep on who Jade is as a submissive, why her psychology is wired this way, and how every preference on her kink profile traces back to the woman she was before she ever walked into a scene. If you're a writer, this is a blueprint for building a submissive character whose kink is layer three all the way down. If you're a reader, this is the architecture underneath every scene you've read — and every scene that's coming. In this episode The woman before the submissive — Jade's ADHD, her chronic somatic pain, the cost of being the one who manages every room she walks into, and why her body learned to convert emotion into physical symptoms The distinction between obedience and surrender, and why Jade's submission style is earnest rather than bratty The five core preferences walked through at layer three: command and obedience, orgasm control, impact play, praise (and why "good girl" is the complicated one), bondage, being the center of orchestrated pleasure, and aftercare The "good girl" problem — why those two specific words are not a simple pleasure point for Jade and what reclamation looks like on the page Why aftercare is non-negotiable, and the one thing that will end a dynamic faster than a hard-limit violation The hard limits as character architecture — what every "no" on Jade's list is actually telling you about the experience that carved it The difference between twenty-four-seven total power exchange and the integration Jade is actually seeking — and why getting that distinction wrong is how Dom-side abusers operate A craft exercise for writers: how to build a submissive character from the woman backward, not from the kink list forward The craft point When a character says "I won't do that," the reader should be able to feel the weight of what happened the last time somebody didn't listen. The list is the surface. The reasons are the character. Next week Theo. His kink profile, his wound, and why every quality his exes punished him for is exactly what makes his dominance devastating when it finally lands on the right person. If this week was about the courage of surrender, next week is about the courage of admitting what you actually are. Where to find more ROM 101 — the craft publication for writers who take romance as seriously as it deserves. Prompts, breakdowns, the real work. Free on Substack. A Soft Place to Land — Jade and Theo's story, releasing weekly on Substack. Find me on Substack and tell me which of Jade's preferences hit you hardest, and why. I have a guess. I want to hear yours. Get full access to Filthy Fiction with Feelings at filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe [https://filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

14. WHERE KINK MEETS CHARACTER: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER EXCHANGE AS SHADOW WORK

So last time we were here, I was talking about the difference between a kinky story and a story with kink in it throw pillows versus load-bearing walls. And one of the things I kept coming back to in that episode was the idea that in a kinky story, the kink isn’t just what the characters do in bed. It’s how they see themselves. It’s how they see each other. It’s the lens through which the whole relationship becomes legible. And after that episode dropped, I got a bunch of messages that were basically some version of: okay, I hear you, the kink has to be structural. But how do I figure out what kink my character actually needs? How do I connect the sex to the psychology? How do I make sure the power exchange isn’t just hot but actually means something? And I realized I never actually explained the connection I’ve been making between kink and shadow work. Which is wild, because I am always writing from Jade and Theo’s shadow. Every craft choice I make in A Soft Place to Land starts from the wound and works outward. But I never sat down and walked y’all through that process. So that’s what we’re doing today. This is a craft episode. We’re going deep on character psychology, and we’re going to be in here for a minute. If you’re writing kink and you’ve ever struggled with why your sex scenes feel disconnected from your character arcs, this one is for you. If you’re reading kink and you’ve ever noticed that one book’s bondage scene hits you in the chest while another one just hits you in the mechanics, this is the conversation that explains the difference. I’m going to give you the framework I use to build kinky characters from the inside out. The wound-to-kink pipeline, as I’ve been calling it. And I’m going to show you how it works in practice with Jade and Theo. Okay. Let me start with what I think most romance writers get wrong about kink, and I say this with love, because I used to get it wrong too. A lot of writers think kink is about what characters do in the bedroom. The accessories. The handcuffs. The blindfolds. Someone in charge, someone on their knees. The choreography of dominance and submission. The mechanics of who does what to whom and in what order. And sure, that is part of it. But if that’s all you’re writing, you are missing the entire point. Because kink real, psychologically authentic power exchange isn’t about what characters do. It’s about who they are. It’s about the wounds they carry, the needs they can’t articulate anywhere else, the parts of themselves they’ve been taught to hide or suppress or apologize for. Kink is shadow work with a safeword. And when I write it that way when I use power exchange as a lens for character psychology and wound exploration and emotional archaeology I’m not just writing hot sex scenes. I’m writing transformation. I’m writing the moments when characters finally tell the truth about who they are and what they need. That’s the difference between decorative kink handcuffs because they look hot and architectural kink handcuffs because this character needs to stop being in control for five minutes and doesn’t know how to ask for that anywhere else. One is set dressing. The other is load-bearing structure. And if you listened to the last episode, you already know which one I’m interested in building. So let me define what I actually mean when I say shadow work, because I throw that term around a lot and I want to make sure we’re all starting from the same place. In Jungian psychology, the shadow is the part of yourself you’ve disowned. The traits, the desires, the needs and impulses you’ve been taught are unacceptable, so you shove them down into the basement of your psyche and pretend they don’t exist. The shadow is everything you don’t want to be but secretly are. Everything you don’t want to want but secretly do. Shadow work is the process of going down into that basement, turning on the lights, and actually looking at what you’ve been hiding. Not to judge it or fix it or make it go away. But to integrate it. To bring it into consciousness. To stop letting it run your life from the dark. And here’s the thing about D/s dynamics that I think a lot of writers miss. D/s dynamics create incredibly controlled environments for exactly that kind of shadow exposure. Think about it. In a negotiated power exchange, you are explicitly naming desires you might be ashamed of. You’re saying out loud, “I want you to hurt me,” or “I want to make you beg,” or “I need you to tell me I’m good when I do what you say.” You are taking the thing you’ve been hiding and making it the point. That’s shadow work. That is integration happening inside a scene. But this is where most kink writing goes wrong. It stops at the surface. And I want to talk about what I mean by the surface, because I think there are actually three layers to kink writing, and most writers only ever get to the first one. Layer one is what I call surface kink. That’s the choreography. The mechanics. The physical acts. “He tied her up.” “She knelt for him.” “They used a flogger.” And that’s fine. That’s necessary. You have to write the thing that’s actually happening. But if that’s all you’re doing, you’re writing a report, not a revelation. Layer two is psychological kink. This is where you ask why. “He tied her up because she spends every day holding everyone else’s life together and she needs to stop being in control.” “She knelt for him because surrender is the only time she can stop performing.” Now you’re connecting the act to the need. Now the scene means something beyond the mechanics. This is where good kink writing lives, and honestly, if you can get here consistently, you’re already ahead of most of what’s on the shelf. But there’s a third layer. And this is where I want to live. Layer three is shadow-work kink. This is the thing beneath the thing. The wound they’re trying to heal or hide. The identity they’re trying to reclaim or escape. The truth they haven’t let themselves admit yet. So “he tied her up” becomes “she needs to stop being in control” becomes “she is terrified that if she lets go, she’ll disappear. That the only reason people need her is because she’s useful. And if she stops being useful, she’s nothing.” That’s the shadow truth. That’s the wound. And that’s what the scene is actually about. Not the rope. Not even the surrender. But the fear that surrender means annihilation and the desperate hope that maybe, with this person, in this moment, surrender might mean something different. Might mean rest instead of erasure. And let me make this really specific, because I think this is the sentence that unlocks the whole framework for Theo. Theo’s shadow isn’t his dominance. His shadow is the shame around it. I need you to hear the distinction, because it changes everything about how I write him. Theo has been dominant his entire adult life. That’s not the thing he’s hiding. He’s been making decisions, creating structure, orchestrating other people’s experiences since he was a teenager. That’s just who he is. What he’s hiding what he has shoved so far into the basement of his psyche that he doesn’t even know it’s down there yet is that he wants it. That he likes it. That the “too much” every woman in his life complained about wasn’t a character flaw he needed to manage, but instead a desire he needed to own. The shadow work for Theo isn’t becoming a Dom. It’s admitting he already is one. And has been for decades. And that the wanting doesn’t make him dangerous it makes him honest. When I write kink at layer three, I’m not writing sex scenes. I’m writing the moments when characters confront the truths they’ve been running from their entire lives. Okay, so let me get practical, because I know some of you are sitting there going, that sounds beautiful, Tasha, but how do I actually do it? How do I get from “my character is kinky” to “my character’s kink is doing psychological work on the page”? I have a process for this. I’ve been calling it the wound-to-kink pipeline, and it’s how I build every kinky character I write. There are four steps. (Like to hear ‘em? Here they go!) Step one: identify the character’s core wound. I start by asking, what is the thing this character believes about themselves that shapes everything else? Not their backstory. Not what happened to them. What they believe about themselves because of what happened to them. For Theo, the core wound is: I’m too much, and that makes me unlovable. Sarah reinforced that wound for years. Every time he was decisive, she called him rigid. Every time he created structure, she called him controlling. Every time he approached something analytically, she told him he couldn’t just feel anything. She made him believe his natural instincts were the problem. For Jade, the core wound is: if I submit to someone, I’ll disappear. She’s been burned by men who confused submission in the bedroom with submission in life. Men who wanted her small and compliant everywhere. So she learned to keep kink and romance carefully separated. She’d submit to partners she didn’t love because emotional distance felt safe. But combining submission with real emotional connection? That felt like a recipe for erasure. Step two: determine how the wound shapes sexual psychology. Once I know the wound, I ask, how does this wound show up in their sexuality? In what they’re drawn to? In what they avoid? For Theo, his wound makes him suppress his natural dominance. Sarah trained him to second-guess every instinct to take charge. So at the start of the story, he’s not confidently dominant. He’s someone who wants to lead but has been taught that wanting to lead is a character flaw. His journey is about discovering that with the right person, his intensity isn’t destructive. That his desire to lead isn’t controlling. That he can be exactly who he is and have that be exactly what someone needs. For Jade, her wound if I surrender, I disappear makes her keep sexual submission and emotional connection in separate rooms. She’s practiced at kink. She knows what she likes. She can submit beautifully to play partners because there’s no real risk. Those men don’t matter enough to erase her. But Theo? Theo is her best friend. The most important person in her life. So the idea of submitting to him is terrifying, because the stakes are so much higher. Her journey is about discovering that maybe surrendering to someone who already sees her, who already respects her autonomy everywhere else, won’t make her disappear. Maybe it’ll actually let her rest. Step three: create a dynamic that confronts the wound. And this is the crucial part. I don’t write kink that heals the wound immediately. That’s unrealistic and frankly boring. I write kink that creates space for the character to face the wound. To negotiate with it. To slowly, painfully transform their relationship to it. The dynamic isn’t the cure. It’s the crucible. For Theo, it’s not about Jade asking him to dominate her and suddenly he’s confident. It’s about him slowly, gradually discovering through their everyday interactions that his natural instincts to take charge, to create structure, to be decisive don’t make her flinch. They make her relax. When he decides what they’re having for dinner, she seems relieved. When he creates structure for how they navigate living together, she leans into it. And every time that happens, he has to confront the possibility that maybe Sarah was wrong. That’s not instant healing. That’s transformation through repeated confrontation with evidence that contradicts the wound. For Jade, it’s not about Theo demanding her submission. It’s about her noticing slowly, terrifyingly that when he takes charge, she doesn’t feel diminished. She feels relief. And every time she notices that, she has to confront her fear that wanting this means she’s weak. That she’s becoming the thing she swore she’d never be. The work is in facing that fear over and over and discovering that it’s not coming true. Step four: show how the dynamic triggers the wound. Because here’s the thing about confronting your shadow. It is not comfortable. The thing you crave is also the thing that scares you. The kink that should feel good also pokes directly at your deepest fear. For Theo, every time Jade responds positively to his decisiveness, part of him is terrified he’s going to become what Sarah said he was. Too controlling. Too rigid. Too much. His ex-wife’s voice echoes in his head. His instinct is to pull back, to second-guess, to ask if he’s doing too much. For Jade, every time she wants Theo to take charge, part of her panics that she’s giving up too much. That she’s becoming small. That she’s being erased. Her past echoes in her head. I write those moments. The panic. The resistance. The body saying yes while the mind says but what if this is a mistake. Because that’s the reality of shadow work. You don’t just face your wound once and move on. You face it over and over, in different contexts, with different intensities, learning each time that maybe the thing you’re afraid of isn’t as absolute as you thought. So let me talk about what this actually looks like in practice, because theory is great but you need to see it in the prose. When I show a character confronting their wound on the page, I don’t write “she felt vulnerable” or “he felt scared.” I write the body. Because your body knows before your mind admits. Trembling. Heat flooding your face. Throat going tight. Tears that come from nowhere. Freezing, like a deer in headlights. The feeling of suddenly being very far away from yourself. When Jade notices herself relaxing into Theo’s dominance, her first instinct is relief and her second instinct is panic. And I write the panic in her body before I let her mind catch up. Her throat goes tight. Her pulse kicks. Heat crawls up her neck. Her body registers danger before her brain can articulate why. And then the defense mechanisms kick in. She makes a joke. She deflects. She tells herself it’s just friendship. She minimizes what she’s feeling by calling it something else. And then I write the choice point. Does she lean into what she’s actually feeling, or does she retreat into the safety of pretending? For Theo, when Jade responds to his intensity without flinching, his first instinct is to pull back. To check. To ask if he’s doing too much. Because Sarah trained him to believe his decisiveness is a flaw. And I write that in his body too. The heat at the back of his neck. The tightness in his chest. The moment where he has to actively stop himself from apologizing for taking charge. And then his choice point. Does he trust that Jade’s response is genuine? Does he believe that maybe he’s not too much? Or does he retreat into performing uncertainty to prove he’s safe? And afterward, I show that they’re not healed. But they’re different. Jade still fears being erased. But now she has evidence that letting Theo lead in small ways doesn’t make her disappear. Theo still fears being too much. But now he has evidence that with the right person, his intensity is welcome. The fear is still there. But it’s not absolute anymore. That’s transformation. Not perfection. Not wound completely healed. Just a shift. Just growth. Just a new relationship to the thing that used to control them. And here’s the thing I want to sit in, because I think this is the part that distinguishes what I’m doing from what I see in a lot of kink romance. I don’t write the wound confrontation only inside explicit sex scenes. I write it in the kitchen. In the car. At the dinner table with her parents. In a coffee shop where he’s studying torts and she’s finishing a color palette. If you listened to the last episode, you already heard me walk through those scenes in “Cartography” and “Clean Slate.” Every one of those domestic moments the Bellamy palette, the Kroger, the body doubling at Java Vino is shadow work happening in real time. Jade is confronting her fear of surrender without a single piece of kink equipment in sight. Theo is confronting his fear of being too much without ever saying the word dominant. The shadow work is happening in the relationship itself, not just in the scenes. Because in a kinky story, the D/s isn’t something you do. It’s something you are with each other. And the wounds don’t clock in and out with the sex scenes. They’re ambient. They’re always operating. And I want to get really specific about how the wound shapes the kink, because there’s something I’ve been building in the project files for A Soft Place to Land that I think illustrates layer three better than anything else I can point to. It’s about impact play. Spanking, specifically. And what I want you to see is that the same physical act a hand on Jade’s ass means three completely different things depending on whose hand it is and what wound it’s touching. Devon used impact carelessly. Sometimes cruelly. He didn’t warm up. He didn’t read her body. He didn’t check in. He treated spanking like entitlement something he did to her rather than something they built together. Impact from Devon felt like punishment because it was punishment. For having boundaries. For being “too sensitive.” For using a safeword that he ignored. His hand on her body taught her nervous system that impact meant danger. That the position of submission bent over, exposed, ass presented was a prelude to violation, not worship. Devon didn’t destroy Jade’s desire for impact. The desire survived wired deep enough that abuse couldn’t reach it. What Devon destroyed was the container. The trust that made impact safe. And the cruelest part was that he conflated his abuse with her desires, so she spent years believing her submission itself was the problem. That wanting structure and command and impact made her complicit in her own destruction. Now, Khalil? Khalil rebuilt the container Devon shattered. He did it through ritual, through precision, through boundaries so absolute they became the architecture of her safety. Impact with Khalil was a slow progression. His hands first, because Jade craved the personal connection of palm on skin. Building gradually. Each escalation negotiated through her body’s responses. And the crying Khalil understood, maybe before Jade did, that her tears during impact weren’t about pain. They were about the emotional release the pain allowed. Her body, which had spent years converting emotions into somatic symptoms because direct expression wasn’t safe, finally had permission to feel. The sting broke something open. The endorphins created a neurochemical environment where the usual defenses went offline. And what poured out wasn’t just the response to impact it was everything she’d been holding. But here’s the thing about early Khalil, and this is the part I really want you to sit with. Before Jade was fully rewired, before the container was solid, she showed up to scenes and performed. She submitted flawlessly. Silent. Obedient. Beautiful. And if you were watching from the outside, it looked perfect. It looked like a woman in deep surrender. But she wasn’t surrendering. She was gone. Her body stayed in the room while the rest of her left, because dissociation was the only way her nervous system knew how to handle being in that position after what Devon did to it. She performed a perfect submission because performing was safer than being present. And Khalil, because Khalil is who he is, caught it. He clocked the difference between a woman who was dropping and one who had left the room, her body staying behind. And he stopped the scene. Not because she used a safeword. She didn’t. She was too deep in the performance to signal. He stopped it because her submission was too good. Because too-good submission, from a woman with Jade’s history, wasn’t submission at all. It was the wound-wearing submission’s clothes. And that moment, the moment he stopped and said, “ This isn’t you, come back is the moment the rewiring actually began. Not the first scene. The first scene, he caught her performing and refused to let her hide inside compliance. That is shadow work on the page. Not because someone got spanked. Not because the scene was hot. Because a man who understood the difference between surrender and dissociation refused to let a woman’s wound pass itself off as her desire. That is layer three. And then Theo. Everything changes when the hand belongs to someone she loves. Theo’s impact is instinctive, not trained. He gripped her hips hard enough to bruise the first time they had sex. He bit her shoulder until the mark lasted days. His roughness wasn’t performance it was the first time in his adult life he stopped editing himself. And Jade’s body recognized the honesty of it before her brain caught up. But impact with Theo introduces variables Khalil’s contained dynamic never had to navigate. The hand that strikes is the same hand that held hers through the worst night of her life. The same hand that makes omelets the morning after. When Theo’s palm connects, the sting arrives loaded with fifteen years of accumulated meaning. And there’s a microsecond a fraction of a heartbeat where her nervous system has to decide what this is. With Khalil, the ritual answered that question before it was asked. With Theo, the answer has to come from somewhere more fundamental. From the quality of his attention. From the sound he makes when his palm connects more worshipful than punishing. Her body has to feel the difference between Devon’s hand and Theo’s hand and learn, in the marrow, that this man’s impact is care wearing a different outfit. Same act. Four different psychological architectures. Devon, early-Khalil, established-Khalil, Theo. The kink isn’t the spanking. The kink is who the character is while it’s happening. And if you can track a single physical act through four stages of a wound’s healing, you are writing at layer three. You are writing kink as shadow work. And there’s one more thing I want to name about that Khalil moment, because I think it’s the sneakiest version of what wounds do inside a D/s dynamic. And it’s not a collision. It’s the opposite. It’s a wound cooperation. When Jade showed up to those early scenes and performed perfect submission silent, obedient, beautiful she wasn’t the only one whose defenses were operating. Khalil could have accepted that performance. Could have read her compliance as consent and her silence as surrender and moved through the scene without ever noticing that the woman on his bench had left the building. A less experienced Dom might have. A Dom whose own wound needed to believe he was doing it right might have taken her perfect obedience as proof of his skill and never looked deeper. That’s what wound cooperation looks like. Both people’s defenses align so perfectly that they create the illusion of intimacy without any actual risk. She performs perfect submission. He performs perfect dominance. Everything looks right from the outside. Nobody gets hurt because nobody is actually present. And that is harder to write and harder for the characters to catch than a direct conflict, because nothing looks wrong. The wound isn’t making noise. It’s making silence. And the silence feels like success until somebody is paying close enough attention to hear what’s missing. Khalil was paying attention. That’s what made him the right person to rebuild the container. Not his technique. His refusal to let the wound pass itself off as the woman. THE ETHICS WHAT I OWE THE WORK I want to talk about responsibility for a second, because when I write kink as shadow work, I’m writing about trauma, wounds, psychological need. And that comes with obligations I take seriously. I don’t use trauma as titillation. The wound exists to deepen character, not to make the sex hotter. If I’m writing trauma just so the kink hits harder, I’m exploiting my own characters, and my reader is going to feel that. I don’t conflate abuse with D/s. Negotiated power exchange requires consent and the ability to stop. Abuse doesn’t. I am careful never to suggest that abusive dynamics are “just intense BDSM.” I don’t suggest kink magically heals wounds. Kink can create space for healing. It can reveal wounds. It can provide new frameworks for relating. But it doesn’t fix trauma by itself. My characters still have to do the work. Jade still needs to confront her fear of erasure outside the bedroom. Theo still needs to unlearn Sarah’s voice. And I also want to show that wanting power exchange doesn’t mean you’re broken. Some of my characters have trauma that shapes their kink. But kink is not always a trauma response. Sometimes it’s just how someone is wired. I want to represent both, because if every kinky character in your book arrived at kink through damage, you’re telling your reader that kink is pathology. And we talked about why that’s a problem in the last episode. THE ROM 101 CRAFT EXERCISE Alright. If you’re writing kink and you want to try this, here’s what I want you to do this week. Pick one of your kinky characters. Just one. And write down three things. First, their core wound. Not what happened to them. What they believe about themselves because of what happened to them. “I’m too much.” “I’ll disappear if I let go.” “Nobody will stay.” One sentence. Second, how that wound shows up in their sexuality. What do they crave because of the wound? What do they avoid because of the wound? How does the wound shape what they want in bed and what they’re afraid to ask for? Third and this is the hard one what is the shadow truth? The thing beneath the thing. Not “she wants to be tied up.” Not even “she wants to stop being in control.” But the fear underneath it. “She’s terrified that if she’s not useful, she’s nothing. And letting go means finding out.” If you can get to that third layer for your character, you have the engine for every kink scene you’ll ever write for them. Because now the scene isn’t about the rope or the command or the kneel. It’s about whether this character can survive looking at the truth about themselves. And whether the person holding the other end of the rope can be trusted to hold that truth, too. Okay, let’s wrap this up because I know it was a lot we went deep today, and I appreciate you staying with me through all of it. Here’s what I want to leave you with. Most writers think kink is about what characters do. But when you write kink as shadow work, you’re not writing about what they do. You’re writing about who they are. The parts of themselves they’ve been taught to hide. The needs they’re ashamed of. The wounds that shape how they love and fuck and trust. And when you build from the wound outward, when the kink is the lens through which your characters finally see the truth about themselves, you stop writing sex scenes and start writing transformation. You start writing the moments when characters bring what’s been hidden into the light and become more fully themselves. That’s the work I want to do as a writer. That’s the story I want to tell. And if it’s the story you want to tell, too, then stop writing kink as decoration. Start writing it as a revelation. Write kink as shadow work. And watch what happens when your characters finally tell the truth. Come find me on Substack. Leave a comment. Tell me what your character’s shadow truth is, layer three. I want to hear it. See you next week! xo, Tasha Get full access to Filthy Fiction with Feelings at filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe [https://filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]