Sergio Rebelo: Dr. Douglas Thomas, it's so fantastic to have you on the show. Thank you for being here.

Douglas Thomas: Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.

Sergio Rebelo: Great. And also just before recording everyone, Douglas told me that it's the season of peacocks. Is that right? Where you're at?

Douglas Thomas: That's correct. For anybody that knows the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles, peacocks have become this ⁓ addition to the landscape over the last couple hundred years and they're doing quite well in this environment and it's springtime, so we're probably going to hear them doing their thing outside.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, it's our third guest. They're part of the conversation. They're going to check in with us. So that's absolutely fine. So I emailed you, think, in December because I was incredibly excited about your book, The Deep Psychology of B.D. Simon Kink. It's a fantastic contribution to the scene and to BDSM in general. I came across that book about two years ago. It came out in 2024, I think. It popped up on my screen and I thought, where did this come from? And it instantly spoke to me. I thought this is very important, this book. And the reason I think it spoke to me was because any time that I participate in BDSM, something important is happening. And I never understood what was going on. In my own reflectivity and speculation, I thought archetypes were at play. There was an archetypal energy which brought myself into the scene and the other person. But that's as far as I could go. I could just be taking on an archetype. And then your book came out and I opened it up. I started to read it and I thought, ⁓ no, I need to put this down because this guy really takes this seriously and I need to take this seriously as well. So I'm going to find the right time, the right place and engage with it in that way. And so I read through it very slowly, chunk by chunk. just to kind of really grasp on what it offers us, this sort of new layer, a new perspective in what could be happening alongside other things in the act of BDSM. So again, I just wanna say thank you for that contribution, because it finally put language to an experience I was having and I didn't know what was going on. So thank you.

Douglas Thomas: I'm delighted that it spoke to you on that level. So yeah, that's very gratifying.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. So I just think maybe for listeners, it may be helpful for you to just give a brief description of ⁓ you are and how this book came into being.

Douglas Thomas: Right, ⁓ well I got my ⁓ master's in social work back in the 90s and worked in community mental health for probably the first decade of my career. Felt like there was something seriously missing that was not ⁓ speaking to me on a kind of deeper level of passion or excitement ⁓ working as a psychotherapist. ⁓ And I discovered Jungian psychology and depth psychology ⁓ through Pacifica Graduate Institute. And I went there ⁓ and attended, got my PhD. And one of the things that ⁓ very important to the tradition of depth psychology, know, beginning with Freud, depth psychology is that psychology that's looking at the unconscious as the primary factor for determining what is guiding. our thoughts, our feelings, our wishes, our desires. And one of the things about Freud and Jung following him was that they were pioneers of an incredibly subversive tradition to have ⁓ women with these, I suppose we would say today, neurotic disorders coming in and lying down on the couch and free associating and speaking about their sexuality and their sexual fantasies was something extremely taboo for the time. ⁓ One of my, ⁓ I would call him a mentor and great, ⁓ one of the great thinkers who influenced my own work, James Hillman, would remind us periodically that we come from a subversive profession and we really should never forget that. That psychology should be provocative. It should be looking at aspects of the culture that had been unexamined. unexplored, neglected, marginalized, pushed to the side, the periphery, because that's where the unconscious is. And not only is it the unconscious, but they also call it the soul, the psyche and the soul. If you look in the German, in the collected works of Jung and Freud, they will use the word seele, which means soul, as often as they use the word psyche. ⁓ So. It's a soul psychology and the place where the soul resides is in these pockets, these marginalized spaces. I am an openly gay man ⁓ ⁓ part of my ⁓ experience ⁓ familiarity. would not say, ⁓ would I say? I would not say that it was intense, but I would say it was close familiarity with the BDSM and Leather community as part of the gay community. And I recognized that this was a highly marginalized group that was misunderstood by people outside that group and that something extremely powerful and profound and meaningful was happening for people through their sexual encounters. That was, it was about something that was much more than having sex. So it struck me this is a topic that psychology has been neglecting. ⁓ you know, partly I think out of some ⁓ modesty and there's something very important happening here so that was my motivation to write the book.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, was it quite a long process to get this book in shape because you do go into a lot of depth. This is one thing which particularly struck me about this.

Douglas Thomas: It took about five years to write the book. I'm just thinking back now about that process. There was something about it from the beginning that ⁓ crystallized, where I could really see the whole book from the beginning, and I could see what I wanted to say. But then fleshing it out, and as it went along, of course, I think like with any work of that, of that size, there's a risk of topics sort of creeping, you know, and becoming bigger and bigger and broadening out. And at some point you have to decide how are you going to rein this in and create something coherent out of it. I was really concerned about creating something that would be to understand for lay readers and at the same time something that was going to be ⁓ challenging and enriching. for ⁓ clinicians because one of the things about the BDSM community that we've seen consistently in research, and there's not a lot of research, but there's been some and quite a bit more recently, is that have negative experiences in psychotherapy. ⁓ come in to ⁓ with a psychotherapist because they're having some issue with anxiety or depression. ⁓ pretty soon the therapist finds out about their sexuality and says, well, your sadomasochism is obviously the thing that we have to address in therapy. And they have no need to address their sadomasochism. That's not the issue that's bringing them in. So they feel like the work that they wanted to do has been hijacked by the therapist who, you know, was foregrounding that because the therapist is uncomfortable with it. So I really felt it was important to try and make a contribution to my field to give clinicians another point of view where they could look at this kind of transgressive sexuality or radical alternative sexuality we sometimes call it, a positive point of view that there's something valuable that's happening for people here. There's nothing that needs to be fixed about it.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yeah. I get this often in my practice because I focus on kink and BDSM. That's my kind of niche. So I get clients who come in and say they've been with a therapist and it's been great, but they've never disclosed the fantasy or their sexual interests. That's always remained a part that they've withheld for whatever reason. And they will tell me that the first session or one of the first two sessions. And I think, wow, you've been with the therapist for a number of years and obviously there's been benefit there, but you've withheld this and there's a reason for that. So I really connect with what you're saying there in terms of a culture which hasn't caught up yet with the King Corbidius-Sem truth that many people live. Absolutely. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. So let's, I want to get into your book. And I thought about how we can do this. And I want to take it step by step. So I think a good way of approaching it is if we first go through the historical context of BDSM. So understanding how history sees it. And then we move into how we see it now as therapists who are well versed have experience. So how does the world see it now? And then after that. we can go into the deeper layer, which is what your book is talking about. So that kind of systematic way. That's how I work. So that's good. And just to help this process, I want to offer a small BDSM scene that I wrote up, very small, as a sort of anchor point, which we may come to. Just because sometimes these conversations can be very heady, can be very conceptual. And I just want to return to a point of like, well,

Douglas Thomas: Sounds good.

Sergio Rebelo: what would history see this scene like and what would we see it now? And so maybe we'll come back to this ⁓ and then we'll just move through those layers. So are you ready for the scene? Okay. One partner is tying up the other. The master is in a uniform, perhaps leather or military. And the sub slash slave is naked or in a gimp suit and they're bound up by rope.

Douglas Thomas: I'm ready.

Sergio Rebelo: And there's dark lighting and maybe some candles around. Very simple. well, I was going to say level one, but this could be an extreme thing or like, you know, but very, ⁓ what you would expect, what you'd expect master a slave. There's a bit of uniform and costume. And then there's a bit of like a theater around them, which is candles and lighting. So that's the kind of scene. So maybe if we can start with, ⁓ how history.

Douglas Thomas: Okay.

Sergio Rebelo: would have seen this. If they were to look through a window and see people participating in that, how would they feel towards that and why?

Douglas Thomas: Okay, well, it depends how far back you wanna go in our time machine, right? Because we do know if you're going back to ancient Rome.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. ⁓ wow. Okay. We'll do a pit stop here. But I was thinking a hundred years. Let's, let's do it. Let's go to Rome.

Douglas Thomas: I'm just gonna pick something, okay? Maybe I overshot. Maybe you're hoping for like 1850.

Sergio Rebelo: It may actually, if you could, because I wasn't expecting that, but that'd be so, so great to hear. Yeah. Let's go.

Douglas Thomas: Let's try Ancient Rome, right? I mean, I don't know. I'm only going to... This is all for imagination's sake, right? You know, and for the sake of our conversation. But in Pompeii, when they excavated Pompeii, there is a villa that's known as the Villa of Mysteries.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, yeah.

Douglas Thomas: and there are these beautifully preserved frescoes inside that include images of what they believe is an initiation ceremony. ⁓ And it has a naked initiate, female, on her knees, ⁓ and she's being scorched by a long staff with ⁓ a kind of, I think, pine cone on the end, is interpreted as the staff of Dionysus. Right. So we do know that, you know, flogging restraints, scourging, ⁓ what we might call ordeal ⁓ initiations, know, initiations of ordeal and intensity are something that are cross-cultural. ⁓ They occurred in the ancient world. They've incurred occurred in indigenous cultures like the Lakota Sioux Sundance ceremonies. is a fairly famous one, the Hindu Kavandi ceremony is one. So we've got these points of reference where I think people from other times and other cultures might look at the scene of a dominant master in a uniform tying up ⁓ a naked slave or a slave in a gimp suit. They might be puzzled by a gimp suit, but they might recognize what they would say is, with the candles, this is some kind of an initiation. I think that that's how they would look at it. and they would see that there was something unusual and important that's being enacted here that's now part of daily life. So that's how I would imagine it. Yeah. Right.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. With something valuable. Something valuable. So that far back they would see that there's value in this and we may not know why or what, ⁓

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, I don't think they would come home to their families and say, you would not believe what people in 2026 are doing.

Sergio Rebelo: Exactly. ⁓ Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: If they go out on the street, probably they would. But in the ceremony, I think they'd have a point of reference. Now, if you go to the 1880s, ⁓ in brothels, ⁓ whipping, flogging became a kind of popular activity. The original Hellfire Club, ⁓ I understand it, I mean, there may be some listeners who know this history better than I do, but...

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, that's right. Mm.

Douglas Thomas: I believe the original Hellfire Club was in London and it was considered like part of a brothel and the people there specialized, the sex workers are specialized in flogging and whipping. ⁓ So again, there's that sense of pairing now with something erotic and arousing with something that is difficult and potentially painful, but It's experimenting with pain that's also blending pleasure so that it kind of becomes confusing for the psyche. Is this something that feels good or something that feels bad? I'm not entirely sure, but it's turning me on. ⁓ kind of ⁓ ⁓ space for the person who's experiencing it. And so I think that we start to see more ⁓ enactments, more of a kind of a theatrical aspect being brought in to these activities in the late 1800s. We also see an increased interest in the psychotherapeutic community to start to look at sexuality and to determine if sexuality is being performed in a way that professionals consider to be healthy versus unhealthy. And ⁓ had not been the case before. was largely the work of the church to determine what was considered appropriate or inappropriate, right? Pure or sinful. But ⁓ in the late 1800s, you've got this shift. So I think that they would start to recognize something about the scene that they say, this is a kind of transgressive, sadomasochistic ⁓ enactment that's happening here. Now, if you jump ahead ⁓ another point in time, ⁓ We know that there were gay men ⁓ our major metropolitan centers, I think in the ⁓ for sure, who were meeting and having interest in exploring sadomasochism ⁓ as of their sexuality. ⁓ And so they would be even more, they would recognize it even more, particularly if we're imagining a same sex couple. I don't think you ⁓ identified is the gender of the two people. ⁓ After World War II, things really take off. And there are different opinions about that historically. ⁓ There truth to one ⁓ line ⁓ thinking this, that you had gay men who ⁓ had from rural parts of the USA, they'd served in the military, they had intense experiences in combat with other men, they met other gay men in the military. And they formed these close relationships. And when they came back to the States, they did not want to go back to their small towns and rural farms to, ⁓ you resume the life that they had left behind. They stayed in the urban centers and some of them ⁓ enjoyed in these motorcycle clubs. ⁓ Now, were some members of the motorcycle clubs who were not military. So ⁓ we pretend that the whole thing happened because of World War II and returning vets. But I think that that was an element that brought in this interest in the uniform. And then military tradition and discipline. You get this idea from the military, there's a very strict hierarchy. There's code, there's code of conduct. ⁓ know, all of these things you see in BDSM after World War II. And so don't think that's accidental. Let's see, what was the other part of this? So the motorcycle clubs would... go on these rides ⁓ out into ⁓ rural areas. very often sex was a part, like rough sex or extreme sex was part of what they would do. And so they would definitely be tying people up or tying them to a tree. Group sex was something that you would see was not unusual. And ⁓ the had to wear leather because that was ⁓ what wear on a motorcycle to protect yourself from the wind and the weather and from the heat of the bike. And then you had the biker bars, the leather bars that started up serving a gay clientele. And so you have a whole culture that develops around leather and bikes. So I think in the 1950s, people would look at that scene and say, oh yeah, I mean, I don't quite understand why they have candles, but the rest of it looks perfectly familiar to me.

Sergio Rebelo: Mm. Yeah. But yeah, so there's this culture that builds with these rituals and attire and this is all building underground because there's a shift that seems to happen from the 1850s where the act feels much more pathologized. It's wrong. And this is an expression of something serious. I think the word that caught my attention in the book was that people would literalize this scene. They wouldn't see the poetics of it. They wouldn't see the metaphor, the symbology, even though people are doing it. they've lit, would, therapists back then would literalize and then pathologize. Is that, that's also happening as well. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: Yes. Absolutely, it's very much this notion in the late 1800s and particularly with Richard von Krafft-Ebbing and his Psychopathia Sexualis, which is this, it is a groundbreaking publication. It's amazing what he did. It's this encyclopedia of what he would consider to be deviant sexuality. And that was a point of interest. primarily for the courts and for the legal profession because there were these cases that would come forward that involved some kind of strange sexual behavior and then the courts had to determine well is this Perversion is it legally illegal? There's somebody been harmed And so they would bring in the mental health experts and that's so the whole orientation towards sexuality was is it healthy or unhealthy is it? abiding by some kind of moral standards of society or is it transgressing those standards? Right? So you got it exactly right.

Sergio Rebelo: And I think that carries on even in today's world. Even the example we're talking about in the start of the show, which is when clients come in and they present something like, I'm interested in this, and they think it needs to be fixed, or it means I am wrong. And I think even then they carry this echo of literalizing what they fantasize about. And that's the aftermath of such an entrenched attitude towards these practices. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: So well described by you. And here's the linchpin that I think is so important and to me so fascinating, which is what Freud pioneered. Freud gets a bad rap in so many circles, culturally and in the psychological, theraputic community today. was brilliant. What Freud brought in is a direct response and a word of reassurance to the client who comes in today and says, what the heck is wrong with me? You'll never guess what I got into there where I was degraded and I was treated like an object and I loved it. Like what the hell is wrong with me that I liked it so much? And Freud would say, you like it so much because it's normal. It's not pathological. It's not some subgroup of the population who's deviant and perverted. We're all deviant and perverted. We all carry within us what he called polymorphous perversion. It sounds horrible. It's a very unfortunate term, right? It sounds like, that's gotta be bad. I don't know what it means, but it doesn't sound good.

Sergio Rebelo: Wow. It's like a poem at the same time. Yeah, but you could have a poem, you know. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: But what he's saying is that we all enjoy these experiences of sexual fantasy and sexual imagining, sexual energy. Let's put it that way. We all enjoy these experiences of sexual energy moving through us that have as its purpose something other than procreation. Because in the 1800s, that was sort of the gold standard. It's like... Well, is this sexuality that's resulting in procreation? Because if it's not, it's wrong. And, you know, for ⁓ well over a century, that has not been the way I think most of the culture is thinking about sexuality these days. Clearly not. But, you know, the idea of perversion and the idea of, there's something wrong with me if I enjoy things that are kind of beyond...

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. ⁓ Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: beyond the fringe of what we think, you know, quote unquote normal, quote unquote decent people would be doing. But Freud's point is that none of us are normal, none of us are decent. I mean, it was groundbreaking for him to say this is not a subgroup of the population that's deviant. We all carry these impulses and fantasies within us and the work of becoming healthy is to recognize it and to start to adjust to the fact that this is who we really are.

Sergio Rebelo: and Would that be the id? Like the superego ego id. So this is the id trying to push its way through something like this. that? Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, right, right. All of these different desires of releasing or ⁓ expressing, ⁓ discharging, I think was the translation, the discharging, you sexual and aggressive impulses. That's all ⁓ the work of the id.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yeah. So there's this tension. have different ⁓ individuals, different people, different groups pulling into different directions. Men who are going to more and more ⁓ blacker communities. have the psychotherapy community as well coming in. But then there's this law layer as well, where there's a very famous case in England where a group of men were participating in BDSM. I think it was in the eighties. And then they were taken to prison because it was It was wrong. How could you do this to people? You're hurting them. And so that scene that we described, these individuals could be put into prison at a specific point in time. Yeah. It's this tension. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, very, very important point that, you know, it continues to be criminalized. ⁓ I mean, you can have examples today of custody battles where a couple, perhaps one of them has been into BDSM and the other has said, that is definitely not something that I'm into. No judgment. If you need to do that, go somewhere else and find, find other partners. and they open up the relationship and they do that and then the marriage falls apart and you go to court over who's going to have custody of the children and suddenly this is brought in as evidence. You know, is this somebody who's going to be a fit parent? Look at the kind of disgusting activities that they're involved in, you know. So again, it's not on the face of things. It's not illegal. right? But it is being treated as a defect in character that should determine, you know, a verdict or an outcome in a legal case.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. So some of the parts in the world haven't caught up to where other parts in the world are at now. And this is where I kind of want to move towards, which is this sort of person-centered approach we have now with people who understand what's going on. So it's not about some deep ⁓ aggression of genuinely wanting to hurt people. It's not about taking pain and, I don't know, it's not being literalized. Now we can understand that it's being deliteralized. So if we look at that scene, we can understand, well, there may be an attachment pattern going on from younger years. There may be something about their childhood. their personalities are complementing each other or not. And that's the lovely tension point. They may be replaying something or trying to repair. So we have this kind of, it's the people and their particularity that is connecting. And that's what we see it now, not as a deviant act. That's right.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, yeah, you got that. And thank you. You brought up a point that I really emphasize in the book, and I haven't quite responded to your questions as directly as I mean to. This issue around literalization is quite important to understand, ⁓ you know, that we live within a culture that really has a fondness for literalizing because it makes things clear. It makes the edges of right and wrong quite sharp, know, something is or it isn't. And, you know, we even see the use of the word literally as an intensifier, right? You know, I was literally on the edge of my seat. Well, I don't know if they really were on the edge of their seat, but they use it. They say that they were, you know, as a way to intensify the excitement that they felt about whatever the thing was. But Jung really, I think that Jung This is arguable, but let's say Jung and Freud, I think both really appreciated the importance of what we would call a metaphorical basis, a metaphorical frame of mind. That's a term that James Hillman coined, a metaphorical frame of mind, a deliteralized frame of mind, which is to say, we're not going to say anymore that is literally being enacted by one person upon another. know, torture is something horrific that has been done throughout history, that continues to be done today, ⁓ you know, often during times of warfare. And, ⁓ you know, it's serving a specific purpose that is about harm. ⁓ I mean, it's essentially a harm to extract either for the pleasure of the person who's harming, but it's non-consensual. When you get into BDSM and kink, it's very important that there be this element of negotiation and consent. It is one of the main factors that separates BDSM and kink from these other activities where people that don't understand it look at it and say, well, that's abuse.

Sergio Rebelo: Yes Yeah

Douglas Thomas: There was a you know, the lesbian sex wars were occurring in the 1970s between some feminist thinkers like Eve Sedgwick and Susan Sontag Adrian rich ⁓ and I'm said you're come I got that wrong. Sorry ⁓ And then a group of leather ⁓ leather dykes basically ⁓ were writing their journal saying look, this is voluntary consensual we ⁓ We have the right, it's a source of empowerment, that we have the right to name our pleasure and to name what we desire and to pursue that without anybody telling us that it is wrong or misogynistic or that we're acting out some kind of a patriarchal narrative on each other as women. So they're really working to deliterate, as a historic example, they were working to deliteralize BDSM and King.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: from other activities that we would consider as misogynistic and abusive. So that's where I think you've got a good example to make that distinction.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's such an important distinction to make. It's this shift from literalizing to deliteralizing. And that's the kind of beginning ground of where we come into the soul-centered approach, but we have to adopt a deliteral point of view, which means that we have to exercise the capacity to understand metaphor.

Douglas Thomas: There it is.

Sergio Rebelo: and symbol and poetry. That's the shift from pathology to abundance and celebration and connection or a deeper form of connection. So that's one of the ingredients there. I think

Douglas Thomas: Yeah. And let's say, let's say transformation too in that list.

Sergio Rebelo: Yes, yeah, yeah. And even so, even now with this sort of person-centered, because we're still in that realm, we understand that these two people are attaching in certain ways. It's about them, particularity. They can have this poetic sort of mind going on. But there's also another layer, which is if a ⁓ neurologist looked at this and then they would understand. also know that these scenes create flow states and what these people are actually experiencing when this person is being tied up. They're experiencing it and being bound and pressure and this creates a response in the brain and this is what it's about as well. So we really get to understand what's going on on the inside more and more in this person-centered world. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, we have to do a shout out to my colleague and friend, Brad Sagran, for the excellent research that he's done ⁓ actually in at BDSM play parties, taking swabs and doing testing of like what is actually happening in terms of the composition, the chemical composition ⁓ of the saliva for the person, right? It's a really, really smart, really, really solid, very tight research, you know, looking at the neurochemistry and finding that, you know, what we refer to as sub headspace, subspace. You know, it's when people in the submissive position get kind of spacey, they're a little bit trance, you know, kind of in a trance state, they're, they're slow to come out of it. you can tell like, Hmm, I don't want you driving a car for a little while. Like, let's just sit you down and make sure that you can really transition out of the scene. You just did, you know, ⁓ for the person in the dominant position, he found that it's a flow state. ⁓

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: ⁓ similar to, we always mangle the name, it's a Csikmihalyi, I think, ⁓ who wrote the book about flow, and that ⁓ it's a flow state for the dominant, because you've got to be very closely, empathically attuned to what is happening for the submissive in order for the scene to really work, because part of the fascination, part of the interest is how much can you take? And

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: You know, the submissive very often in the negotiation saying, I want you to take me to the edge of what I can stand, maybe even take me a little bit past that, right, into a state that my other dear colleague Avgi Sokotopoulou writes about as overwhelm. You know, that we want to experience overwhelm as part of the payoff or the real point of arrival, right, for the scene.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yeah. I think we forget that we are a species that loves to surf sensations. Like we get sensations and we like to just be in them. Like why would someone want to do bungee jumping? You know, it's this sensation that we do seek. It's part of our animal that we are, the animal that we are. And I think people forget that in BDSM as well. We just love sensations. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, well, and then we get a high, you know, that releases, you know, endorphins, they're in natural opiates that are released, you know, when you're under kind of extreme pressure or pain. So, I mean, you're really working with the internal pharmaceutical company of the body itself there, right, and experiencing a maximal amount of pleasure through it.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yeah. And I love how we're at a stage now where people can just not think about it too much and just do it because it's fun. Like that's a lovely place to be where you can just practice these things in the many places in the world and not be criminalized or, it just be a common thing on apps and just like, you want to be, I'm a dominant looking for a sub. And it's just, we don't have to think about it too much either. There'll always be people like me and you who are thinking about it.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sergio Rebelo: And there'll be people who are like, let's just do it. Like, why are you thinking about it? So I love that we're also at this place in history.

Douglas Thomas: I'm really glad you're including this because it is something that ⁓ needs to be ⁓ said, you know, in a very explicit way. There are a very large number of people that enjoy BDSM without reflecting too deeply on it or saying, you know, what does this say about me that I like to do this? You know, they just sort of shrug and say, I just like it. You know, I'm a gear head. I just love the gear. I love to dress up in that stuff. And that is fine. Like go, go be your best self and have a great time.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So that's a lovely start here. where we can see history would see this scene ⁓ and pathologize and literalize. ⁓ we see it as interplay of personalities and attachment and also a surfing of sensations and it's the person centered world. And then we have this other offering you have in the book, which is a soul perspective. And that's where we really get into the depths of your work. So you kind of answered at the start, and I think this is a word that's going to hit people, which is soul. And what do we mean by soul before we get into what it actually is?

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, well, if we, for the purposes of this conversation, let us imagine anyway, that soul is a word that is almost synonymous with psyche and with imagination, right? So that these three words are almost interchangeable. And let's bring in unconscious as a fourth one, right? That that is the zone that we are trying to create for the conversation. James Hillman, probably more than any other thinker in the bridge between Jung and the 21st century, really promoted the word soul. His concern was that with the biologizing of the psyche through all of the neuroscientific research, and I'm not discounting any of that, it is very important research and very valuable. But it does lead to a biologizing which creates a you know, it's risking an essentialist perspective that we are nothing more than the chemicals moving around in our brain and the neurotransmitters and the neural pathways that are laid down through experience, right? Then there's also the medicalization of the psychotherapeutic profession, you know that we have to have parity between medical services and mental health services just so that psychotherapists can get paid a living wage. And the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is really presented ⁓ as a kind of medical model for how to diagnose and treat different mental disorders. And so the whole culture is oriented towards the psyche as medicalized, right? Soul moves us in the opposite direction, you know? Soul moves us back to the way that the Greeks used to think about imagination and the mind and the relationship between the mind and the body. And I think where we're also headed very soon here is, you know, what is larger than the individual? What is the thing that endures beyond the life of the individual? I mean, this is historically what we've referred to as the soul. This is why the church was so interested in it. James Hillman came up with, I think, seven characteristics of soul. I'd like to share those with you because I think it's It's a bit of a clarifying list. I feel like I have to apologize to James. He's been gone for a number of years, but I think he would be very upset that I'm providing a list because he would always say, don't do that. It's a deliberately ambiguous term that is deliberately ambiguous. Do not try and make it specific, but...

Sergio Rebelo: Yes. Yeah. You have it here. The quote is, the soul, this is in your book, Hillman endorsed this imprecision when he wrote, the soul is a deliberately ambiguous concept resisting all definition in the same manner as do all ultimate symbols which provide the root metaphors for the systems of human thought. I love that he wanted to stay with the ambiguity and the uncertainty. That's a I think that's an honorary position to take, but there's a list.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, yeah, but for the listeners who are hearing this for the first time and are saying like, I'm out, this is like, don't understand what you guys are talking about. He would say, soul is the thing that makes meaning possible. It involves a deepening of experience. It is conveyed in love. ⁓ It ⁓ often has a religious expression. It has a special relationship with death and it favors symbolic and metaphorical modes of thought. So that gives you a little bit more to work with or chew on in terms of what we're talking about with soul. It's not a theological statement or getting into anything religious, except he would say that religion has drawn upon the idea, but the idea is bigger than any use within religion.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: It involves all of the Greek philosophers and the humanities. he would say, I Hillman would say, please stop reading these textbooks about psychotherapy that, you know, use all of this jargon and all of these big technical words where we don't have any idea anymore what it is we're talking about. He would bring it down to like, have you ever met an ego? You know? Yeah, yeah, well.

Sergio Rebelo: Many.

Douglas Thomas: That proves his point is like well we can turn it into an adjective and say we know people are egotistical Right, but the ego itself like what do we get? So anyway? ⁓ He he would say, you know There are authors and poets who have done a much better job of describing the soul than psychotherapists have done

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, Yeah, yeah. ⁓ So, So just to kind of go step by step here, we have in this scene or in the room, two people and then Hillman or what this book is arguing is that the soul is also present. And there's a way that it's present, but the soul and those characteristics you described are present as well. And that's something that we may be participating in.

Douglas Thomas: Yes.

Sergio Rebelo: but we don't know it or if you do develop a lens or a way to access it and understand it, then we can also bring or make contact with the soul and that can enrich our experience. Is that what we're saying with the soul-centered way or approach?

Douglas Thomas: Yes, yeah, yeah, very much. It is something that is present, ⁓ which is both within and between, betwixt and between. That's giving credit to another one of my great teachers, Marvin Spiegelman. I have to do a shout out to him. ⁓ But the idea that, yes, there is something emerging from inside you that maybe you didn't know was there. Or maybe it's something that you don't regularly access. You know it's a part of you, but in order to get through your day-to-day routine, you can't let it out or you can't show it. But then you find a setting, you find a container, you find a space where it's safe. And the other person says, I not only want you to let that out, I need you to let And so it's giving expression to something hidden or ⁓ unknown or partial only partially known. Right. This is really the realm of depth psychology. So it's coming very much from that place that we're thinking of as soul, not a literal place, but a metaphorical, a metaphorical place. Right. And there's soul in the room in between it's in between the two people. Some, because something is being Co-created and I think that's what you were getting at at the beginning of our episode that you're participating in something that is bigger than you are and you can't fully understand it and sometimes you do go into a trance state or a dream and you come back out of it and You know this involves some people who are they're not even I shouldn't say even but they're not necessarily participating in BDSM sexuality but you're just having a really intense experience of having sex with somebody else. And you go into a space that's almost like a trance and you come out of it and it's like, what the heck happened there? That was amazing. Like, I think people are chasing that. Like when you were saying we're sensation hungry and we're adrenaline junkies or we want those endorphins, you know, that's part of what I think we're chasing after with the pleasure of sex and arousal, right? But it's something, it's, It's that experience of merger with another person where it's like, I, particularly in BDSM, can see the ways in which what we call the authority exchange or the authority and power imbalance between the two people creates the opportunity for this sense of merger. It's like, I'm not entirely sure where I end and where my partner begins. It's like we, we are in some kind of a zone and in between space. That's soul space.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, yeah. And it is difficult to define and grasp and concretize. No, make concrete. It's difficult to... It's actually, the soul doesn't want that.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

Sergio Rebelo: I think it's better to say it like that. The soul does not want to be literalized or pinned down. It can't be. ⁓ And so when we try to explain it, it slips away and we just can't give words to it. And this points to ⁓ an image because that's spoken about as well being image focused. The soul comes in images, not in words. Is that? Is this something?

Douglas Thomas: Mm-hmm. That's it. Very much, you got it. So it's something that we might consider pre-verbal. And this is why poetry becomes so helpful because, you know, poetry is by its nature, deliteral or non-literal, guess is the right expression. It's by its nature, metaphorical and non-literal. And very often poetry is breaking down language. You know, we have these conventions in poetry. where it's poetry because it's not the way we normally speak. And think it was Octavio Paz who ⁓ something along the lines of, know, the ⁓ does violence upon language to purify the, ⁓ think it's doing violence upon words, the poet purifies the language of the tribe. Right? ⁓ ⁓ but the,

Sergio Rebelo: Wow, that's lovely. That's really good. Can you say that again? Just...

Douglas Thomas: By doing violence upon words, the poet purifies the language of the tribe. Right? So, yeah, right. Because I think very often, and actually, ⁓ you know, the French post-Freudians like Lacan, mean, the Lacanians know all about this. They'd be like, yes, I absolutely want you to get to the point where you have no idea what you're saying. Because...

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, ⁓ it brings them back to a bigger truth. Something, yeah. Yeah, I ⁓

Douglas Thomas: Because that's when the unconscious then is really present and revealing itself. That there's something that's deeper and truer than the conscious personality. And to fall back on another image, since you're bringing up the importance of image and poetry is related to image, but here's the image that Jung provided about the unconscious. He said, that you're standing in a dark field and you've got a flashlight.

Sergio Rebelo: Mm. Yep. Yep.

Douglas Thomas: Wherever you shine the flashlight, that's consciousness.

Sergio Rebelo: Mmm. ⁓

Douglas Thomas: And everything that's in darkness is the unconscious. So the part of psychological experience or the human psyche of which we are aware and conscious is just a sliver. It's just a tiny beam of light in this vast darkness. so the unconscious, becoming curious about it, wanting to explore it, wanting to become more familiar with it, is the journey of a lifetime. And for those of us that are devoting our careers, our vocation to the study of the psyche, the study of the soul, it is the most important thing that we can do. I should add in here, maybe I'm going to make a grandiose statement, so just indulge me for a minute if you don't mind. One of Jung's great preoccupations at the end of his life, he died in 1961, was the detonation of the two atomic bombs in Japan. And he said that, you know, we have the potential to destroy the world and we know next to nothing about the human psyche, about the unconscious. He said the world hangs on by a thread and that thread is the human psyche. Right. He was very concerned about that. And we are no better off in 2026 than we were in 1961 in terms of You know, the direction of the psychotherapeutic community and the direction of our global politics and the threats that are posed by people ⁓ projecting, I'm going to use Jungian terms here, but projecting shadow on each other, you know, actively destroying and degrading and abusing and inflicting harm and torture and cruelty on each other. You know, What BDSM is doing curiously, is trying to create a space in which it's safe to explore those aspects of the human soul and to say, I want to get to know this better. I want to know this part of myself and I want to know this part of you. And I need to, right? And there's something quite extraordinary about that that I think is one of the more constructive, fascinating

Sergio Rebelo: I think part of the resistance people have with letting out these shadow parts or these

Douglas Thomas: responses to the way these impulses are at work in all of us. And when we don't create the spaces to metabolize it and to get to know these impulses, they play themselves out in these radically horrific, destructive ways.

Sergio Rebelo: horrible parts, if we can literalize it, is that they only accept one truth about themselves. How can I be a doctor and also enjoy inflicting pain? I can't, and that's very hard. And one of the key aspects of the soul-centered lens or approach is that many truths can exist, or this may be the fabric of the soul, that many truths can exist. And I think a way that you talk about this in the book is through play as an example. the importance of play, because we can pretend to be a doctor and a nurse when we're young, and that reality exists. But we're also young. And even in theater, when we play in theater now, I take on a role, but I am also not that person. So that's, I think, a way people can access, ⁓ my gosh, there's two truths that can exist. Yeah. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, beautifully put, beautifully put. And I think so many of us can relate to that. And that takes me back to the little tableau that you presented, right? That donning the uniform, you know, is a kind of costume. It is identifying, you know, I'm stepping into a role. It's a role that I love. It's a role that I identify very deeply with, right? But ⁓ is not everything that I am. And similarly, and we, I don't know if we'll have time to get into this or not, but the whole business of stripping and nakedness, the French philosopher Georges Bataille, he spoke about this so brilliantly about the connection between nudity and stripping and death. Right? And, and so it brings in the Marquis de Sade's insights about the connections between the erotic and the morbid and our nudity itself, you know, to have one person clothed. This is like a fetish for a lot of people. One person is clothed, the other is naked. And it's very arousing because of, I mean, it's this overt expression of this imbalance of power between the two people. Now I'm finding myself getting a little bit sidetracked. So I'm trying to think back to what you said that got me on this. Maybe you can remind me.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Well, even Even in that, I think what I'm understanding is if we try and take this lens of the soul is enacting something or the soul wants something, the nakedness, the soul wants nakedness in a sense. Part of it is like I want to be stripped from these costumes or this persona or whatever it is and it demands it in some way. And the more you resist, then the more fragmented we are in our life. But if we give it a space and a container,

Douglas Thomas: Bye.

Sergio Rebelo: then it's an integrative process. So when I feel the urge to strip and become naked, it's part of my psyche, yes, but it's also the soul saying, I need to release this. Is that? Yeah. Yeah, Great.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, it's because you had spoken about play, you know, and play brings us back into the realm of deliteralizing, right? So, but it's, you know, so it's a symbolic stripping, right? Yes, I'm taking all my clothes off. Yes, I'm standing here without anything left for you to take away. You know, I'm offering my body, my body to you, right? And, ⁓

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: That brings us around to mythology and to art as well because mythology is something that develops over a long, long period of history by telling certain stories over and over again that have some kind of sticking power to them that it fascinates people and it becomes this very powerful explanation for deeper truths about the cosmos, about the world, about ourselves, about our relationships with other people. And ⁓ just look at the ways in which nudity figures into mythology. And one of the ones that I'm thinking about just from the example you gave of stripping is the myth of Inanna, which comes from Sumeria. Very, very, very ancient old myth, but she is trying to rescue her beloved from the underworld. He's died, he's gone down there. She descends down to the underworld to face her sister Ereshkigal. And she has to go through these doorways, these portals in the underworld in order to approach her sister. And with each portal, she has to remove an article of clothing until she's completely naked in the underworld, the land of the dead, to confront her sister and to ask for her beloved to be returned to her, right? You see that ritual aspect of it and you also see the same insight that I was just mentioning through Jung and Georges Bataille and these modern thinkers where there's some kind of a connection here between our nakedness and death, but it's not a literal death. You know, this is what we really have to emphasize here. I mean, we're not saying that people that are into kink and BDSM want to kill each other or they want to die, but it's a symbolic, it's a place within the psyche.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. ⁓ yeah. ⁓ Yeah. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: It's a place within the psyche that knows someday I am going to be stripped of everything that I am, of everything that I possess. It's all going to be taken away from me. And can I just have a little bit of a rehearsal for that?

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Myth is so interesting because you speak about it in the book quite a lot. And it's sort of like a pattern And this is an archetype as well, you can say. But a pattern that repeats itself throughout history. And it does it for whatever reason. for whatever reason, we're drawn to it. ⁓ time and time again, it wants to ⁓ it or wants to express itself. And this is the BDSM space where maybe what we're seeing is the soul or the pattern or the archetype wanting to express itself again. So we take on the soul when we think we pretend to be it. Like it actually takes on us. We're doing what it wants. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: Yes. Thank you. You got it. So important. Yeah. mean, so many, so, so many interviews I've had people will ask like, so how do we work with these archetypes? And I just have to say, I mean, I can't even answer that question. We don't use archetypes. Archetypes use us.

Sergio Rebelo: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's I think it's such an important point because this is the shift that people to gain the benefit of your book or what you're trying to say. This is the really important shift is that when we enter that space, we think we're putting on a costume. So we're in control. We think we're putting a costume in some ways we still are. We can we can hear the consent words. can can stop if we need to. But when we embody the archetypes like the bully, the king, the mistress,

Douglas Thomas: That's you nailed it just now.

Sergio Rebelo: the Queen, that's a particular energy or, even I'm losing words, but this is the whole point. It's a particular expression of the deepest parts of our psyche, which is there for a reason, which is mysterious. And it's coming up and it demands expression. And so you start to act how a king would act. This is what a king would do. But then often people can find themselves doing more than they expected. And that we can think of That's the soul has found a safe way to come out and it needs safety. The human needs safety and the soul, I'm trying to get very particularly here, the soul coins on that it's now safe enough and then the spring comes out and then the soul becomes us or the soul enters us. That's it. The archetype enters us.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, or we enter soul, right? I mean, ⁓ the Sufi mystics in ecstatic Islam, you know, speak about this place, Nakosha Abad, pardon my mutilating the language, but the place of non-where, which is the place, there's no topography, it's the topography of the imagination, it's this place. that we, it's a landscape that we are inside of. And you see this in imagination, right? Where you can start to have, I don't know why I say it, I if you've ever had this experience, I'm sure you've had this experience, but you start to engage in a daydream, you know, where you're either imagining the TV show that you saw last night or something that you read about or some piece of publicity or who knows what, right? Or something that happened to you a few years ago that you feel really, really great about or really awful about. And you know, wherever you're standing in that moment, you are not there. You know, somebody will come up to you and go like, where are you? Because you're clearly not here. You are in the setting of some other experience that you're fully immersed in. Right. And we say, ⁓ well I was lost in thought. Right. That's exactly right. Lost, not inside myself. I was lost in the landscape of thought, right? And so that's the landscape of the soul that we're talking about. The way that I would slightly modify what you just said is that when we feel safe, we can lower our defenses. And when our defenses are lowered because we're relaxed and we feel safe, then the soul can emerge. and we will find ourselves not only. with and sold as a person but we are in a field or in a realm a landscape of soul.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And what's interesting is it's only a very particular expression of the soul, because I think what Jung and Hillman arguing is that the soul is indefinable, it's expansive, ⁓ it's too big. And the soul is using the apparatus it has. It's using, if we're a car or a vehicle, it only can use what it has. And we see its particular expression as ⁓ an archetype. But That's just the tip of a very big fabric or iceberg. So that's really, yeah.

Douglas Thomas: Yes, beautifully, beautifully put. Exactly. It's one iteration. It's one moment. It's one shimmering, you know.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, Yeah. And it's so interesting because I find, so after reading your book and when I really got into it, I was like, this is, this is beautiful. And when I'm, I'm, I'm searching through pornography and I see BDSM and kink, I always thought of us, this is really horny, this is great. But when I adopted and managed to access your perspective or your lens, I'm seeing the expression of the soul in so many beautiful ways. And it was very connecting. I just thought, Oh my God, this is the soul in all of us expressing itself in all these ways. And they weren't people anymore. It was just the, the, the, the, the structure or the form that the soul takes on. And I just, that was such a beautiful re-orientation of everything. I was like, Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. I'm wondering here because the, takes on a very particular, one, one thing that seems

Douglas Thomas: It's an You really got it. You really got it.

Sergio Rebelo: seems common is that it takes on a very particular expression and we see that as suffering and transgressive and demonstrative. Why do we see it? Why does it express itself in those ways?

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, this is one of Hillman's favorite concepts. I don't know if it's his favorite. Well, let me own it. It's one of my favorite concepts from James Hillman. He writes about it quite a lot, though. He calls it pathologizing. And that's not to say that we create pathology. Right. But he's saying that the soul, one of the favorite ways that the soul finds its way into the world. One of the favorite modes of expression for the soul is through breakdown, through crisis, through decay, through decomposition, through a falling apart, through things that are destroyed or destruction. And I give the example in the book, if you go to an art museum, Just notice how many of the paintings, particularly from the 17, 1800s, have as its subject matter some form of human suffering. Where somebody's being tortured, somebody's being stabbed, it's a battle, somebody's being slaughtered, or whole groups of people are being slaughtered, or Salome's carrying the head of John the Baptist, or Judith is cutting off the head of Holofernes. mean, some of these really horrific images. ⁓ They're on the walls of our art galleries and we don't think anything of it. Why do we think anything of it? Well, it's a way that the soul comes into the world. And you know, the mythic stories, the stories that the Greeks and the Romans created about the afterlife and the underworld and the places within the underworld. I they got co-opted into Christianity years later with the idea of hell, right? The worst kind of suffering. occurs in the underworld or for the Greeks, know, it's an eternal, it's an eternal suffering that that never ends. Right. And so again, we've got this connection when Hillman says the soul has a special relation with death. This is what he's getting at. Right. ⁓ So it's this idea of pathologizing then spring forward. I'm going to jump in the time machine and ask you to join me again. You know, let's go from ancient Greece back to Vienna in 1895. And you know, people are coming to Freud's office because they're having a nervous breakdown. You know, my life is no longer working. I'm having these strange symptoms. I can't talk or I have some kind of paralysis or I have these, these nervous spells and heart palpitations and I can't breathe. Right? He, Hellman is saying it's cause this is how the soul was finding a way to break through all of the constraints and rigid rules of Victorian society. The problem was not in these women. The problem was in a society that no longer had any room for the soul. The soul finds its way into the world through breakdown and destruction and collapse and crisis. And so that is also what we're playing with in BDSM and Kink. It's that place, like how much can you take? How close? It's what we call edge play. What do we think the edge means? Well, the edge... Is that place where we lose control or it's too much? Right? It's more than I can stand. ⁓ And you see that with kids, don't you? You know, where you're like, I'm the tickle monster. I'm going to get you. And they're like, no, no, no. But then immediately they're like, do it again, do it again. Right? Yeah. But they come chasing after the tickle monster to get it again. It's like, how much can I take or take me beyond the place I can't stand? Right?

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, yeah. You're the best. Yeah. ⁓

Douglas Thomas: That's what Sakutopulo means by overwhelm. So it's a place where the soul comes forward because we're beyond the place of the ego defenses.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yeah. And this is even deeper here, if you can imagine, but even deeper is the dehumanization because is it argued that even being a human and what it means to be human is, ⁓ well, it's not soul. So dehumanization, which is a big part of King Play, is deconstruction, not of the societal norms and customs, but a deconstruction of human and what it means to be human. It asks of that. Is that the same? Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, it's such a, it is a really complex concept and a lot of people stay away from it and I lean right into it because I think it is so important and ⁓ there is what he calls it, this seems like we're getting quite kind of granular in the technical business, but he calls it dehumanizing because he wants to make a distinction between what he's talking about and what we call dehumanization.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yes.

Douglas Thomas: that you can look out, you can just read the headlines any day, ⁓ look on your newsfeed and you'll see dehumanization happening. There's multiple headlines every day about this, right? Of treating people as less than human or taking away their humanity, treating them as property or objects or as chattel. We think that slavery is over, slavery is not over, slavery...

Sergio Rebelo: you

Douglas Thomas: there's still a slave trade in the world today. And without calling it slavery, we still treat people as objects. When you just look at the way the immigration deportations are happening in the United States. I don't think I'm making a political statement here. think I'm just making a statement of fact. ⁓ So dehumanization is happening all the time. Now he would say, Hillman would say that, you know, the thing we're talking about is dehumanizing.

Sergio Rebelo: ⁓ description. Yeah. ⁓

Douglas Thomas: which is to say, psychologically, to really understand the soul. And this is where you're absolutely correct, Sergio. The soul is not the same thing as the human. The soul is something that is bigger and vaster and more mysterious and ⁓ it's autonomous. It has its own agenda that it is working through, you know, through the human population. But it is not the same thing as humans. And Hillman says, Many of the problems that we've gotten ourselves into with the way that we think in the 19th, 20th, and now 21st century has to do with the amount of value and emphasis that we place on humans. And some of this is very important and necessary. I'm not entirely agreeing with Hillman in this, but I think his concept is very important to consider. What have we lost? by placing the human and the dignity of the human as the greater, the greatest good, right? And for the sake of the soul, there are times when we need to have our heart broken. There are times when we need to be taken down a notch. There are times when we need to experience humiliation. You know, not only because it makes it, frankly, it does make us a better person sometimes, you know? ⁓ teaches us humility. Humiliation and humility are two words that are closely connected, right? And we need that for the society to be healthy and to function and to have empathy for other people in their suffering, right? And so there is a necessary positive aspect to it where we can say like, oh, you violated my rights or you, yeah, I was degraded, right? You know, mean, in BDSM degradation is something that people actively seek out and they want to have that experience. you know, in public life, we have a lot of serious concerns about it. But I hope I'm not going too far afield from your question, that these are examples of where it is in the dehumanizing. It's in the place where, I'll give you another specific example of a play partner who said to me, I was so touched by this. I don't know I've ever said this in a podcast before, but. I'm getting older, so I'm a little bit more reckless. Playpartner said to me, nobody else knows that I'm not a real person. said, ⁓ pretend to be one ⁓ in the world, and that's what everybody thinks I am. Right? ⁓ was in a zone ⁓ his identity where he understood himself as being more than ⁓ the address where I live or the name on my bank account or the photographs of my driver's license or the name that I use to file my income tax every year or how people talk to me at work or all of the different roles that I play. I he was so clear. I play all these different roles in life, but they're just roles, right? It's like, pretend to be a real person. I mean, there's something that for him was so liberating.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: I mean, he did not say this with sadness. He did not say this with any distress or alarm. It was just a sense of like, finally I can actually tell somebody how I really experience myself in the world. And he was somebody who's very successful professionally. mean, he's a great, just lovely person, right? There's nothing disordered or pathological about him, but it was just this incredible

Sergio Rebelo: Mmm. Hmm.

Douglas Thomas: incredibly enlightening moment to encounter somebody who was so clear about, this is all pretend. I mean, you think that we're playing pretend when we go in the dungeon to do our scene. No, the whole thing is pretend.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, that's right. Yeah, it's an inversion. There's a huge freedom, I think he's expressing because from what I'm, when I hear you in life, we build up a personality, we build up a character and that's great. It's, it's, we're functional. If you don't do that, society goes to, to all sorts. So we need a character and a personality to step into and we construct that it's a cast. Uh, yet the, the expense of that is that we then become fragmented because we put away these different parts in us. And then the BDSM space offers a chance for these parts to come back in and break the cast down, break the personality that you have invested your life in. And there's a freedom in that. But also I think what's happening is that We then understand ourselves as larger than the character we thought we were. And that's the transformation that can happen. We transform into something bigger because we've always put those things away and now we have a chance to meet them in a safe contained space. And then we can understand ourselves in many truths. I am a CEO banker. I am a person who be degraded as well and I'm nothing.

Douglas Thomas: Bingo.

Sergio Rebelo: know, many truths exist. So it's this. Yeah, this is what's happening.

Douglas Thomas: Yes. ⁓ yeah, I couldn't say it better. You got it.

Sergio Rebelo: And then in that scene I described, the gimp suit is the most, I think in your book, the most reduced form of the shadow or of the soul. It expresses itself in that way. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, it's such an extraordinary image. And I've talked to so many people who look at GIMP suits, you know, from outside the community and say, I find that so disturbing. They just find it really troubling. And I think that that is like, becomes a kind of trope or a meme, you know, as the kind of shorthand for kink and BDSM equals disturbing, right? ⁓ Because it is, you know, in a way the, the the purest expression of what we're referring to as dehumanizing, right? All of the characteristics that make up, you know, identifiable traits, you know, where I recognize your face, I'll recognize your hair color, I'll recognize any number of things about you are erased. You're just a silhouette. You're just the silhouette of a human form, faceless. And ⁓ whoever Whoever you think you are, whoever I thought you were has been reduced, you know, to this essential form that's like barely there except as the outline. And I had one friend, I think that's, I quoted her directly in the book, so I'll credit her, Caroline Shabazz, who just said the most wonderful thing about how she said, know, what we put our, What we put ourselves through as human beings on a daily basis having to equivocate and make all of these decisions. you know, there's something that's happened with late, late stage capitalism and marketing and choices that we want to give you more choices. And do you want the, you know, do you want it with cheese or without cheese? Do you want it supersized? Do you want the salad or do you want the fries? Or do you want the, you know, somebody once said, what kind of Levi's do I want? I come on the kind of Levi's that I used to be able to buy when there was only Levi's. It's like, I don't want so many choices. She says it's exhausting. And to be able to completely surrender all decision-making over to another person for a few hours or for a day or for the rest of your life is incredibly liberating. It is such a relief. And all that I have to do is follow and be led, you know.

Sergio Rebelo: That's it. Yeah.

Douglas Thomas: ⁓ So yeah, it is this other aspect that is extremely pleasurable.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, absolutely. So this sounds like, you know, quite heavy, intense stuff. ⁓ And it's so great that we get so much satisfaction and joy and playfulness and connection out of it. That's also very important. It's for these reasons that we connect more deeply. It's not something otherwise. And this requires a container. And that's what the BDSM space is for this to exist. And it's in a safe container because I always want to push safety around these things. Yeah. So maybe just to consolidate before we go to the final part of this, which is if we were looking at that scene, history would say, literalize it and say that it's inappropriate and it's criminal. ⁓ Well, modern recent history. And then right now we would say it's an interplay of people. That's what we'll be looking at, interplay of people and their attachment styles and everything and their history. And then the sole scented lens is looking at it and saying this is the soul taking shape within our eyes, taking form in our eyes. This is the soul expressing itself.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, finding a place to come into the world.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, that's it. Yeah. You end your book with a final chapter called, The Final Word is Love. Can you say a bit more about that?

Douglas Thomas: ⁓ yeah, we need a whole nother episode. ⁓ let, let, let me try and be brief. Let me try and be brief about this. I think for a lot of people outside the community, it's hard to understand how any of these activities can have anything to do with love. and yet you were just bringing in the idea of connection, which is so much a part of what people are seeking. And,

Sergio Rebelo: Okay.

Douglas Thomas: There is also in that connection, often a sense of dissolution, which is, what we were getting at a few minutes ago with the idea of pathologizing that it's as we dissolve what we call our ego defenses and we feel safe enough to surrender and release. And, know, I should pause here and just reference the, position of the dominant or the master here, because very often we think, well, this is the person who doesn't get to surrender or doesn't release he's or she, sorry, or they are all about control. It does require a surrender of those ego defenses which say, have to be socially appropriate. I can't let my violent impulses out. can't. What will it be another example? You know, I can't impose I can't impose myself on on this person and hurt them Right. It's wrong to hurt people there has to be a surrender around all of those prohibitions in order for the dominant to do what the submissive wants them to do Right. The submissive is saying I am waiting to find a partner who is unafraid to show me their violence That's a huge statement, right? So there's a surrender on both sides of this relationship, right? And so for the submissive, they might say at the end, thank you for trusting me enough to really show me just how brutal and how merciless you can be. It's such an experience of overwhelm and great pleasure and a privilege. to experience that from you. And for the dominant, there might be a sense of gratitude, right? Thank you for offering yourself to me so profoundly, so deeply, so thoroughly that I could exercise this level of control and this kind of extreme ordeal that I put you through, you know, and bring you as close as I can to the edge without putting you over the edge. Thank you for trusting me. that. What an honor, right? So you see the beginning of something that feels like love, right? Because I love that you trusted me enough. I love that you did that for me. I love that you offered yourself, right? And to see somebody, I mean, I think that's such an important part of what we're talking about with love is to say, I see you. I really, see you and I see you in a way that other people don't see you and maybe you feel like you can't show it to other people and you have to hide it but you don't have to hide it from me. That is a very loving statement right?

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. The dominant learns my anger is not welcome. It's going to threaten connection. My vulnerability will threaten connection. ⁓ Me wanting to be control. Me wanting to inflict a bit of pain because I get angry. that will threaten the bond. So I'm gonna hide that my whole life. And then there's this opportunity. And this is part of our species that we have these impulses. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a part of us. And then BDSM offers this opportunity where the submissive says, you know what? I am going to give you the space to bring all parts of you out. And this is Jungian, all parts. To come to the surface. And I'm gonna hold that for you. And I will endure that in a loving way because I see you as more than what you present yourself. And this is the space I'll give to you. And so the dominant surrenders to that. Yes, I am a person who has anger in their life or in their experience. I am a person who likes to be worshipped from time to time. And this is a real, as you say, it's a real, I think it's an honor or a gift of love and real connection. Cause we're not just connecting on the surface layer. We're connecting on every part that we have. It's beautiful. It's great.

Douglas Thomas: Yeah, thank you. You know, so ⁓ thank you for seeing me. It's really, really lovely.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's been wonderful. Is there anything that you may have missed or wanted to say or rectify or anything like that before we end?

Douglas Thomas: I know that we've talked about a lot of things that can be hard to hear. ⁓ Sometimes I worry, like, ⁓ this may sound so hyper-intellectual or hyper-abstract. And I just hope that what we're trying to get at is something that is really primal. And I don't mean primal simply in the sense of like animal and savage or something. But I mean primary, like prime, primal in the sense of primary, that we're trying to get at something that is just part of being human, you know, and finding a way to really love ourselves and love other people for being fully human.

Sergio Rebelo: Yeah, yeah, great. Yeah, yeah, great. Douglas, I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you again for writing the book and it allows us to have these conversations so we can access it more and more and think about it more and more. So again, just thank you. Thank you so much.

Douglas Thomas: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. It's been a pleasure.