Sex and the Psyche

This episode features Deb Rubin on creating a sex-positive home, the three things that make kids stop talking to you, and why there is no "talk", just a thousand small moments.

Deb Rubin is a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and therapeutic parent coach based in Boulder, Colorado, with over twenty years of experience helping parents navigate the transition from childhood to adolescence. She's also Jenni's longtime ...

No guest this week. Just Jenni and Daniel, two married co-hosts, two therapists, and two people who are very comfortable talking about things most people avoid entirely.

The episode starts where it always does for this podcast: with honesty. A scheduling miscommunication left them without a guest, and instead of papering over it, they open with a real conversation about what rejection actually does to a person. The small sting of a...

Brooke Bralove has been doing talk therapy for over twenty years. She's good at it. And she will tell you, clearly and without hesitation, that there are things talk therapy simply cannot do.

That's where Accelerated Resolution Therapy comes in.

ART is a brief, neuroscience-based treatment modality that uses rapid eye movement, similar to what happens during REM sleep combined with a technique called voluntary image replacement, to...

When Claire Rumore was lifted into a hospital gurney to undergo her first biopsy, she stepped aside to use the restroom first. And while she was there, she heard a quiet internal voice ask her a question: Do you want to go back to the life you had before? Is that what you want?

Without hesitation, her answer was no.

What followed was one of the most unusual cancer journeys in modern medicine. Claire was 43 years old. She had stage ...

Jeff Abraham didn't set out to build a sexual wellness company. He was a semiconductor engineer from a coal mining town in Pennsylvania who sold his business, retired, and got a call from his neighbor, Dr. Ronald Gilbert, the urologist who invented Promescent's delay spray. One conversation, one product sample, and one phone call later, Jeff was all in.

What followed was fifteen years of building one of the most respected sexual we...

Dr. Jenni Skyler and Daniel Lebowitz sit down with Zach and Sally Maxwell, relationship thought leaders, executive coaches, and co-founders of The Art of Conscious Love, for a conversation that will change how you think about romance. Together since they were 18, the Maxwells have built a modern relationship framework around a radical premise: love is not something you fall into. It's something you practice. They walk through their...

If Part 1 was about the field of sexual medicine, Part 2 is about the marriage at the center of it. Dr. Jenni Skyler and Daniel Lebowitz return to their conversation with Dr. Irwin and Sue Goldstein, and this time, the questions get more personal. How do you stay married for fifty years? What does great sex actually look like across the decades? And what happens when a woman who has spent her career in sexual medicine starts experi...

Dr. Irwin Goldstein didn't set out to become a pioneer of sexual medicine. He was a biomedical engineer turned urology resident who, as he tells it, asked one stupid question during a 1976 surgery: "Could you explain the physiology of erection to me?" The surgeon shrugged. Irwin spent the next decade figuring it out. Along the way, he co-discovered that nitric oxide, the elephant of our air, is what makes erections possible. He pub...

When Susan Bratton talks about intimacy, she doesn't speak in theory. She speaks from 34 years of marriage. From decades of teaching couples how to stay erotically connected through every life stage. From writing 44 books and programs on passionate lovemaking and from her own personal journey. Eleven years into her marriage, she had never had an orgasm from intercourse and was avoiding sex with her husband entirely. Then she learne...

In this episode, Dr. Jenni and Daniel sit down with Michele Weiner-Davis — internationally renowned marriage therapist, bestselling author, and creator of the Divorce Busting method — for a conversation about what most therapists won't tell you: that many marriages assumed to be over are actually salvageable, and that infidelity, while devastating, is rarely the real ending.

Michele shares the personal story behi...

 In this episode, Jenni and Daniel talk with infidelity expert Michelle Weiner-Davisabout how couples can rebuild sex, safety, and emotional connection after an affair. They normalize everything from “hot and heavy” post-discovery sex to long dry spells, and offer practical tools for easing back into touch, managing triggers, and shifting from obligation to genuine desire. Michelle also explains why she believes ch...

In this never released short Bonus Episode from The Modern Pleasure Podcast with Dr. Jenni Skyler and Kim Kaplan, Paul Joannides discusses cultural issues surrounding women's sexuality, including the restriction of abortion and birth control, and emphasizes the importance of sex education. Paul shares a story from a college newspaper about young women's negative views on masturbation. Dr.  Skyler adds that these attitudes ofte...

Paul Joannides is an author and sex therapist who discusses the impact of his book on reducing anxiety and shame around sex. In this never before published episode from the Modern Pleasure Podcast which Kim Kaplan and Dr. Jenni Skyler co-hosted together, they discuss the challenges parents face in educating their children about sex and the importance of starting these conversations early. They also explore the role of religion and ...

In this bonus episode, Kim Kaplan, Dr. Jenni Skyler, and Natalie discuss the therapeutic use of psychedelics, particularly MDMA, for healing sexual trauma. They emphasize that different psychedelics are suited to different traumas and that set and setting are crucial. Natalie highlights the importance of a knowledgeable guide and the process of preparation, including obtaining informed consent. They role-play a preparation session,...

In this lost episode from "The Modern Pleasure Podcast" Kim and Jenni talk to Natalie Cooney who runs the Compass Healing Project about healing trauma with both somatic experiencing and psychedelics. Natalie is an expert on somatic experiencing and how sexual trauma can exist in our body and how to heal that. We dive into sexual disassociation, the power of psychedelics and how to be present with that trauma and deeply heal. 

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Listen to this past episode from the Modern Pleasure Podcast where Kim talks to Dr. Jenni and her husband, Daniel Lebowitz on the subject of ED.  Daniel explains how ED plagues both the partnership and the man, but how important it is for the penis to be the signal, acting like a lightning rod for your needs, wants, fears and boundaries. Daniel also covers important facts around prostate surgery. 

See omnystudio.com/listen...

This "Listen Again" episode was one of our favorites, and it deserves a re-visit! Dr. Jenni and Kim talk to Dr. Craig Heacock, an adolescent and adult psychiatrist and addiction specialist in Colorado who hosts the psychiatric storytelling podcast “Back from the Abyss.” He is a co-therapist in the Phase 3 trial of MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD and has particular interest in the use of psychedelics to treat severe...