This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors or inaccuracies.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: [00:00:00] Okay, great. Yeah,

Joe Moore: we are live. Hi everybody. Welcome back to Psychedelics today. Joe Moore here joined by Didi Gold, pa. How you doing today, Didi?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I’m doing great. I’m so happy to be here. Joe,

Joe Moore: happy to have you. It’s been, um, a long time in the works for us to make this happen, and I wanted to actually show the cover of your recent book.

Joe Moore: Um, I assume this is your first book that you’ve published.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: This is my first book, yeah.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Embrace Pleasure. How Psychedelics Can Heal Our Sexuality. Uh, came out in July. June.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Yeah, it’s been out about two months now and it’s been doing really, really well. I mean, it’s been a really interesting, uh, experience because as I was writing the book.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, colleagues in the field, uh, had sort of given me some level of warning about potential backlash in writing a book about psychedelics and pleasure, and, uh, warned me [00:01:00] about potential negative reaction and that, and I think that was coming from a really sincere and genuine place. And what I’ve learned in the past two months is that people have been dying to talk about this and are much more open to looking at different ways that psychedelics can be beneficial to them outside of the medical model.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, in the past two months since the book has been out, I have received dozens of emails from folks, some people sexual trauma survivors, some people just interested in exploring psychedelics that have found the book really meaningful. And every one of those emails means so much to me. It’s really been amazing.

Joe Moore: I love that. Yeah. I remember us talking about like ex uh, kind of. Predicting the heat that was gonna come your way, and like, I think you hit the right cultural moment because it’s, I don’t know, like things have gotten, become so tough and become also in, in a lot of ways so obvious that like, this is something that we need to dig [00:02:00] into and actually face squarely Absolutely.

Joe Moore: How, absolutely. How, how did that come forward for you?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Yeah. Well, I mean, the ideas for this book really, I mean, there’s a lot of different ways I could talk about how this book came into the world, but it was really, um, an idea that, um, took hold as a response to what I saw as an an, an incredibly over medicalized, um, dominance within the field of psychedelics.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Mm-hmm. I really didn’t think that was gonna serve all people. I, I, as you know, from reading the book, feel like there is a time and place where psychedelic assisted therapy is exactly the right thing. But I mean, we had this sort of, um. Deeply capitalistic championing of the clinical model as the only safe model.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So I really wanted to start building dialogue about other ways people could think about psychedelic healing. Um, because I mean, clinical, the clinical model is just not set up to [00:03:00] actually take us into this additional step of like, well, what happens after we heal acute trauma or we’re not so depressed or anxious anymore.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: There is a whole world waiting for us that has to do with connecting to community earth relatedness, um, our sexuality and spirituality, spiritual life’s flourishing. So it felt really important to sort of build something that was an answer to that. And, and what I can assume is over the past year there’s been some really critical moments that this sort of blockbuster.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Uh, seemingly unstoppable, monolithic, psychedelic assisted therapy movement, all of a sudden got halted by a lot of practical things, the FDA, about stocks crashing. You know, we don’t have to get into all of the, the politics of the situation, but I think all of a sudden people started to think the way that this was, we were told it was all gonna go down.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Maybe isn’t exactly gonna, it’s not gonna work out that way. And what is [00:04:00] left for us. So as it turns out, um, the zeitgeist in this moment, I think of, um, you know, a lot of political uncertainty are more interested than we ever could have known about connecting with their bodies, their communities, about sexual flourishing.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So it’s really just been a, an incredibly exciting moment for me.

Joe Moore: Hmm. So let’s give a little bit of your background before we kind of dig more into, uh, your. Um, your book. So how, how did kind of therapy and kind of psychedelics come forward for you mm-hmm. As a, as a social worker?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Yeah. So I’m a clinical social worker and I’m, I am a therapy, a therapist in private practice in Woodstock, New York.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: My day-to-day life is mostly seeing therapy clients, supervising therapists. I do a lot of consulting work in the field. I do ketamine assisted therapy. Um, and, uh, you know, that has been a [00:05:00] trajectory over 18 years of, of development in a professional career. So, um, I, my personal story is so wrapped up at the heart of this book.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I had multiple different career iterations before I became a psychotherapist. And, uh, like many people, my um, movement towards working in professional mental health was part of my own healing journey. And psychedelics are very much entwined with that healing journey. So I am a sexual abuse survivor. I’m very open about that in my teaching and in the writing in the book.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, and I had. A lot of psychotherapy. I tried a lot of different, uh, modalities for healing. I got deeply involved in meditation. Um, I mean, I, I really kind of tried it all and those things helped me, but they didn’t actually heal me. And at a certain point, I had [00:06:00] had experiences with psychedelics earlier in life in contexts that we might call more recreational.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, but when I came to do work in ceremonial contexts, it all of a sudden opened up this experience for me of healing that I did not even know was possible. And that was the moment that my professional career as a therapist and my psychedelic work really started to merge. So I began, before there were just training programs everywhere to be a psychedelic integration coach or therapist.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, I was in the very, very early stages of developing psychedelic integration techniques, and I was really focusing on. Sexual trauma survivors. Um, my work is more broad than that in terms of my practice. I work with couples, individuals. I do a lot of trauma work, but not exclusively that. And, uh, I really wanted to start developing protocols that were beyond just talk therapy.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Like what, you know, talk therapy hadn’t healed me, [00:07:00] so it, why would I think that that was the only way that other people could heal too? So I was really looking at how to help people in post psychedelic states. And from there, I mean, I think my work has really taken off in the direction of not just how do we effectively integrate a psychedelic experience for an acute level of healing, but how do we take this and really make it medicine in our lives?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: How do we go from, um, I feel better to, I am engaged with the world, right? I am living a wor a life that’s worth living, that is so much at the basis of the work that I’m interested in doing with people.

Joe Moore: Yeah, I think one of the, one of the handful of things that made me kind of get excited about your book is that I’ve been talking about these kind of nons psychotherapeutic modalities for a long time, and that they can be really effective.

Joe Moore: And for instance, my chronic pain went away by, you know, listening to music and live settings. [00:08:00] Uh, and like, I’ll be really honest, overusing psychedelics and MDMA and, but my chronic pain went away. So who’s to say it was really overusing and, um, you know, me really. But I think, um, but it, you know, I’m, you know, um, on a more clean path, I guess.

Joe Moore: But there was a lot of pleasure there and there was a lot of safety and trust and fun. And I think in a lot of ways that those are big themes that you’re touching on in your book is like. It’s okay to have fun. It’s okay to feel good in my body. It’s okay to feel good with other people. And, um, you know, another point, not all pleasure is sexual.

Joe Moore: Right? Like, a lot of people read it and they’re, oh yeah, oh, sexual. Uh, and then they’re like, wait, what about eating, like, doing fun things? You know,

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: you love me. So many little gems there, I think. Okay, let me see if I can, um, piece this apart a little bit. So the first thing is, uh, the, there is sexuality is right in the title of the book, but mm-hmm.[00:09:00]

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Really what I’m interested in is very much about like, how are sexuality is actually a part of our intrinsic life force and mm-hmm. The point that you’re making, like all pleasure, sexual pleasure is a powerful form of pleasure, but so can, um, any kind of erotic experience, meaning an experience that connects us to our life force can be equally powerful and sensual.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Right. So really what I’m interested in is the erotic dancing is a great ex, a great example of that, right? Anything that connects us to our bodies with other people, I think, uh, our creative work, uh, really is pointing to this idea of erotic energy. So, um, you started your comment by talking about this idea of overuse, and obviously that’s very individual.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Like when someone says, I’m overusing something, that’s their own personal judgment as to is it causing harm in their life? There may be a lot of different factors that go into [00:10:00] overuse, but the reason that I circle back to this point is to highlight something for the listeners about my own healing process.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: We have been sold this bill of goods really, and it kind of goes under the magic bullet psychedelic umbrella that you can go and sit in, um, with a psychedelic assisted therapist and do have an experience or two even with really good integration. And that’s gonna do it. And for some people that may really help set them in the right direction.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: But my book and my philosophy is really thinking about psychedelics as a path in our lives. Does it mean you have to do it all the time? No, but it actually might mean that at strategic moments in our life, we return to these medicines as a way of helping us through not only difficult experiences, but rites of passage.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I am very, very interested in how we can look at. Um, the roots of psychedelics and indigenous cultures that are still living traditions today, [00:11:00] and rather than appropriating them or feeling that we have to go into those cultures and possibly cause harm, what can we do with this blueprint to actually create a new psychedelic reality that’s relevant to us in this moment that has to do with music community coming together with an intergenerational systems of support and potentially looking at psychedelics as something that’s integrated into our lives holistically.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, for me, uh, my initial work around my trauma healing was really with ayahuasca and I did a lot of ayahuasca ceremonies before I really felt like I was in a different place. We are not talking about like one or two dosings of MDMA and a very nice therapist holding your hand. I did many ayahuasca ceremonies over many years and, um.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I do talk about this as, um, sort of a key life experience that, uh, gave rise to the [00:12:00] philosophy in the book. But during my last Ayahuasca ceremony, I got a message from the medicine to go and receive healing from Wachuma Medicine, which is San Pedro. And it’s a very different kind of medicine, right? It’s more the chemical cousin of MDMA.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: It’s very heart-centered. Um, and it can also be deeply, deeply mystical as I’m learning. So I go to Peru and I don’t even know at this point what it is that I’m supposed to be healing because all of a sudden I’m not in this traumatized state anymore. I’m not ruled by trauma. I feel quite embodied. I feel like I’m doing well in my life and in my relationships, but I get this really clear message that this is the direction I’m supposed to be going in.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So I’m in Peru. I start working with Chuma Medicine, with the, with a teacher there, and. This really is the story that forms, um, the entire jumping off point for the book because it was the first day of my life that I experienced being [00:13:00] alive and awake and connected to the earth and connected to my body with no thought of trauma at all.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: There was not heavy processing happening. There was just beauty and expansiveness and love. I was being held on the earth in this expansive state of love and ecstasy, and that’s what really turned me onto this idea that this is the piece we are just not telling people about. It isn’t all hard work. Hard work is the thing that gets you to this place that you really get the healing.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: That was the healing. I just didn’t know it at the time. I, I did all of this really heavy trauma processing and thought, well, I’m pretty healed now. And, and to a lot of people I was, but I didn’t actually realize how absent that kind of expansive state of pleasure was in my life until I had these deeper experiences with Wachuma [00:14:00] that turned me on to the fact that like, this kind of love and pleasure is available to us at any moment.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I, um, I want to go back and just try to like define a term because mm-hmm. You know, I think some people won’t. Me too. Like I have a little bit of a hard time like figuring out the, the use case for the term erotic and you used it earlier. Mm. And it was kind of like an interplay between two people maybe, or how do you like to use that or define that?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Yeah. Great. Um, well. I think of the erotic, um, I’m drawing, there’s a really powerful essay written by Audra Lorde that’s called Uses of the Erotic. And I really, um, integrate her definition and it’s the erotic energy is really our life force energy. It is anything that falls into the realm of the expansive, the liminal, the creative.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: [00:15:00] So I think of sexuality as a component of the erotic, but I think of the erotic almost as this raw energy that exists within our bodies. That gets expressed in all different kinds of ways. And it can be expressed in through, as I said, through um, a connection with another person, but it can also just be our own personal creative output.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: We’re whenever we’re in that expansive state of, um, of connecting to the world, um, so we’re really starting to, uh, develop a little bit of a chain here of how different terms connect because. We can start with this idea of the, the erotic as being this energy within us that’s creative and expansive and connects us to the world and other people.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And then I think maybe like the next step on that chain is thinking about when we talk about spirituality and the development of spirituality, which I believe is linked. I think about that from a very pragmatic place. And it’s how connected are we? How connected are we [00:16:00] to the divine within ourselves, to the earth, to other people?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And then I think the next link in that chain that’s worth defining in this conversation is, what do I even mean when I’m talking about pleasure? So, you know, the pleasure is the, um, you know, the, the, the large letter title of the book. But it’s an incredibly misunderstood concept because I am not making any kind of argument that anything we might consider just in our colloquial language as pleasurable, is gonna necessarily be healing.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: In fact, those things can be the very things that hold us back from being as self-actualized as we can possibly be because we might consider it pleasurable to scroll on our phones all day, or any other kind of behavior that can become repetitive. And actually, um, I think in, in a lot of ways we become addicted to those behaviors because we are, um, trying very hard to survive in a very hard world.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So distracting ourselves makes a lot of [00:17:00] sense, and I would put that under the umbrella of leisure pleasure as I’m talking about it as something that heals us and connected to the erotic. Is any moment when we are awake and alive with a quality of mindfulness and savoring the sensual. So it must be something where our attention is there, our body is present, we are open, expansive, and alive.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And I believe those kinds of moments truly do heal us. And so it, it really is important to think about these terms and how they connect and also that pleasure. And what I haven’t found a better word for than leisure are actually two really different things with different outcomes and utility in our life because, um, I’m not anti lesure.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, I think that it’s necessary, but real joy and real pleasure actually has a much bigger resonance that tips into the spiritual and the erotic and also the political. [00:18:00]

Joe Moore: Hmm. Do you wanna jump into the political aspects here? I think that’s a good bridge.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Sure. Absolutely. So I see pleasure as a tool of anti-capitalist political empowerment.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And I think this is a really, really important point because as I was writing this book and I’ve been out speaking at conferences and doing podcasts and talking about the book, every time I come to talk about this book, there’s a little part of me that feels really responsible to share something about why it’s important to talk about pleasure right now.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Because we are in a moment, I think, of tremendous political uncertainty. There is so much fear about the rise of fascism in this country. We are witnessing political violence all around us, and in my experience, people are more scared than I have ever experienced in my lifetime about what kind of [00:19:00] future we’re facing.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So it can be. Edgy to talk about pleasure, be promoting pleasure within this political paradigm. So why is it important? I actually believe that pleasure, as I’m describing it, this meaningful kind of pleasure is what we need to remain politically empowered. Because if we continue to try to create some kind of resistance in the face of violence, we will become depressed and depleted.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And what is the thing that actually helps us to stand together and to have the self self-energy to keep standing up in the face of oppression? And I believe that we have to be nourished by this connection to other people. We need to join together in community and dance and listen to music and make music and tell [00:20:00] stories.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And support each other. Our body has to be nourished in this way, or we just simply will not be able to be effective. The other facet that I would mention of this is we are in this incredibly consumerized capitalist society, that we are in this massive overconsumption of information and overconsumption of stuff.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: But if we really come to realize that so much of what we need to make us feel good resides in our bodies right at this moment, with nothing else required, but creating the space to drop into our human relationships and enjoy our bodies, uh, it really, really disrupts the message that we need to be continually consuming.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And so in that way, I think we can look at the act of pleasure as a, a politically empowered act and, and in fact, uh, an act of resistance and activism. [00:21:00]

Joe Moore: Yeah, I love that. Um, and I think, you know, there’s big historical roots that we chatted about earlier as well, and I think, um, you know, I was, I was trying to go, you know, thousands of years ago, um, but I think like more poignant as kind of the points you were making.

Joe Moore: Could you bring up some examples of like kind of repression from the last, uh, couple hundred years or more recently?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Yeah, so there’s a section in early in the book and, um, I, to my knowledge, I shall say that different authors have written about these, uh, phenomenon independently, but I don’t, I couldn’t find any examples of where anyone had put this together chronologically as it’s laid out in my book.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So one of the arguments I make in the book is that the war on drugs is a war on pleasure. And what do I mean by that? We often think of the drug war as sort of starting with the Controlled Substances Act in Richard Nixon, and that is clearly a [00:22:00] very notable event that has impacted prohibition and the circumstances under which psychedelic work takes place today.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, but actually if we go back in history, the first anti-narcotics ordinances happen in 1875, and they’re targeting opium dens. So it’s not just that that authorities were interested in targeting opium, it was that white women would attend opium dens and there was a, they wanted to create a reason to raid opium dens and prevent.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, intermixing and sexual relationships between Chinese men and white women. So anti or anti-narcotics ordinances, uh, took place. Our next stop in this is, uh, peyote. So peyote is a sacrament in the Native American church and, um, under totally different circumstances, right? Peyote is used for community empowerment, for [00:23:00] spiritual empowerment.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: But when the federal government wanted to, um, try to outlaw or ban practices relating to peyote, one of the chief ways they did that was to just try to disseminate rumors that peyote was going to, was being used for orgies and that young women were being given peyote and would be morally compromised and will be unable to assimilate to whiteness.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: We then have laws against cannabis and the. Propaganda at that time and, and cocaine as well. But cannabis has this really particular history where even the language marijuana, which I don’t know that I mentioned this fact in the book, but the languaging of, of cannabis transitioning to marijuana was to make it sound more associated with the global south.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So you wanna associate this subject, uh, this, this substance rather with black and brown men, and that they would become sex crazed and they would wanna have sex with white [00:24:00] women, and that the white women doing this. Substance, um, could remain morally uncompromised because you could blame the substance and you could blame the man of color, but you could rehabilitate the white woman.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So the next stop that we have in this trajectory really comes in this Nixon era, right? Where you have the controlled substances act as a response to, to LSD and what happens culturally right around the same time that we have, um, the cultural explosion of LSD is the advent of the pill. So all of a sudden you have these two really powerful chemicals that are helping people to connect to pleasure and sexuality, um, and are making women more politically empowered to be able to control their bodies.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Now, just worth note, I don’t mean to, um. Present this entirely rosy picture of the LSD era and the hippie era, that there was no problems there. And it was just a, um, you know, [00:25:00] that it was all wonderful for women because there were a lot of issues that we can point to that happened around that culture as well in terms of um, you know, women’s equality or lack of equality.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: But it’s undeniable that this was a moment of sexual revolution and, and it was exactly that. A revolution of sexuality and a revolution of thought that made it feel so dangerous to the government. And there’s one more example that I give in the book that I think is really interesting ’cause it’s rarely looped in with this kind of bigger trajectory, and that is how MDMA came to be made illegal.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So just in. Very brief, uh, history of MDMA. You know, MDMA as many people know, before it was a scheduled substance, it was used widely in couples therapy. You know, Sheldon Resynthesize, MDMA gives it to Leo zf. All of a sudden, couples therapists are being trained to use this, and it’s effective in treatment.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: [00:26:00] Therapists are seeing great, uh, responses. When, uh, MDMA starts to get heat from the federal government is when it seeps into nightclub culture. When people start to use MDMA for joy for dancing, that’s when it gets on the radar of the federal government, and all of a sudden MDMA is a substance that we need to regulate.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So the brief addendum to that, if, if listeners don’t know, is that when the hearing happened, that did make MDMA illegal. They, the federal government or the DEA court judge, if I’m getting this correct. Um, determined based on testimony that MDMA actually did have medical utility and that decision was basically overridden and MDMA ends up on schedule one, as we know, as it remains today.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: But the reason I go into this whole history is really to try to illuminate that we have a long [00:27:00] history in this culture of propaganda and prohibition that had a lot more to do with restricting people’s access to substances and fun and sex, specifically sex between races, but not exclusively that. And, and this goes all the way back to 1875.

Joe Moore: Wild, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um. I remember like looking up, uh, when we’re the first kind of like traces of like prohibition of substance, like kind of proto drug war things. And it was like kind of around, at least in Europe when tobacco came back and the, the king was like, oh, that’s gross. And it didn’t really go well.

Joe Moore: Um, but yeah, like later it just like evolved to all these other kind of things around kind of like subs, speciation, and, you know, racist, like kind of bloodline [00:28:00] stuff. And, you know, it was really fascinating and kind of ugly to watch it kind of roll out. Yeah, but that’s, you know, kind of a big part of the history of the human race is othering.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: You know, there’s one like little factoid in the book that listeners might find interesting. I was really trying to actually look for any historical evidence of fun, like, of substances being used for fun. And, uh, you know, if we look to, um, the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the repression of psilocybin and, uh, cacti cults, at that time, very rich documentation was destroyed.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So there’s little that we have, but one of the existing documents that we do have talks about the coronation of an Aztec king, where psilocybin was used specifically for merriment and enjoyment and, and, uh, dancing. So yeah, [00:29:00] we, we tend to look at indigenous practice and certainly what our perception is, is of it today, and put that into this bucket of healing.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: But my suspicion is that as long as people have been using these substances, they’ve been in touch with the ecstatic properties and, and we at least have a little bit of scan historical documentation that, um, psychedelic medicines were indeed used for fun.

Joe Moore: It’s important, and I think like I, I was one of my favorite.

Joe Moore: Dinners I’ve ever had was with um, two friends. One was like a classist, so like ancient Greek world, Mediterranean. The other guy was world class scholar on the Mongols. And we kind of just, that’s a dinner. Oh my gosh. We speculated for hours about the, um, possibilities of drug trade and what might’ve been used.

Joe Moore: And it was fascinating and it was like kind of obvious ’cause things were a little boring and we had to, you know, very likely if something was interesting and sellable, people were selling it and trading it. [00:30:00] Um, you know, despite any kind of like sacred elements. Um, ’cause there was, you know, traders just like running, running the Silk Road and whatever other kind of trade routes there were.

Joe Moore: So like, I think there’s a rich tradition of it, but it was often scrubbed from the books. Um. Yeah. Even like the Greek symposiums, like they drink wine, but it was really clear that the wine was with things. It wasn’t just grapes and booze. Yeah.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I mean, there’s a whole very interesting anthropological kind of branch of psychedelic studies that talks about this.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: There’s, there’s a lot of really, really fascinating books that are, um, trying to piece together histories of different ways that psychedelic medicine’s impacted our cultural development, our spiritual development. I mean, that, uh, that, um, inquiry about the psychedelic roots of religion, right? It goes all the way back to was mm-hmm.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Like some of the earliest people were really interested in this. And I mean, it’s [00:31:00] still such an emerging field where the historical evidence is being pieced together.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Absolutely. And a lot of work left to do, everybody. So, you know, if you wanna put on your history pants, go for it. Yeah. Love it.

Joe Moore: So, um. I, I often bring in this kind of idea that the United States was founded by Puritans. I used to, like, I was born in Massachusetts and I used to like bullshit people that everybody born in Massachusetts is issued a Puritan hat when they’re born. And I, half of people believe it, um, which is amazing to me, but it’s, you know, there’s something to it that there was a huge amount of, um, kind of, I guess religious extremists helped found this country and not, you know, they weren’t moderate in their positions.

Joe Moore: Right. So, I don’t know. Do you, do you think that has any kind of influence still?[00:32:00]

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I think it’s a more charged question than it seems like it is on the surface of it. Right? Right. ’cause this country was founded by people too conservative for England. And I don’t think that this, I don’t, I don’t think that we’re out under the thumb of that. I think we’ve got, um, it’s, it’s, it’s very interesting to me because I think we’ve got kind of these two forces that have always been in play in this country and, um, they sort of emerge and get stronger and then they ebb and they flow again, which I is this deeply Christian supremacist movement that seeks traditional, I don’t even know what it is, what tradition it is that they’re referring to, but a traditional view of family and gender roles.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And then we have these periods of cultural backlash to that. I think we now, we’re in a moment where those two opposing forces. Are at a fever [00:33:00] pitch, and it makes a lot of sense to me that this is deeply, deeply in our cultural paradigm from the foundation of this country.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. There, there’s definitely a lot of interesting religious undercurrents, and we don’t have to go too deep in it, but like the Protestant work ethic idea, the idea of like predestination your, your kind of fate to heaven or hell was kinda like preordained before you were born, which is huge in, in certain threads of, um, Protestantism.

Joe Moore: And, and you’re right. Like that idea that this was too conservative for England and like, that’s such an interesting thing to consider, um, and, and really powerful and um, yeah. So I think people should sit with that eventually.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Well, I think I have a, I have a comment that I think could be a, a little bit of a, um, helpful way of pulling some of this together.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I think when we think about this idea of Puritan Puritanism, it’s very much, um, an [00:34:00] anti pleasure. Um, there’s an assumption that somehow pleasure is going to lead to sin. The pleasure is associated with laziness. There’s that Protestant work ethic thing that we’re talking about. And the conversation that I’d like to change around that is I also have a reaction to some of the, um, progressive rhetoric that’s around rest and, um, kind of disengaging with capitalism.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I agree. Like disengage with capitalism as much as. Can, but this is the system that we live under and it is really important to find rest in our bodies. Like working ourselves to death is not a good thing, and sometimes we actually, what our bodies do need is rest. But I think what gets kind of lost in both discussions, on the discussion on both sides, on one side it is saying that [00:35:00] pleasure is evil and leads to sin and will somehow lead to some sort of like moral failing.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And the other says that, uh, actually your life can be, you could just like bypass all of this capitalism stuff. And what you should focus on is just like rest and empowering yourself around rest. And of course, I’m sort of reducing complex ideas, but I’d like to promote something that’s really in the middle ground, which is that, um, it is very important to pursue meaning and pleasure and meaning for me are deeply linked.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So I think in your life you do have to find something that is productive. And it doesn’t necessarily have to mean productive under capitalism, as in it’s associated with a high paying job. But I think you need to find your thing that helps you to actually contribute something to this world. ’cause we have to ask ourselves like, what are we here for?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: We’re here for more than watching Netflix, and we’re here for [00:36:00] more than giving up our entire lives to work for a company in an unfulfilling way. So I think that there’s something that’s deeply pleasurable about connecting to a kind of livelihood, to a kind of community involvement that actually requires that we get off our ass and do something.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I mean, rest when you need to. Work hard when you need to. But a fulfilling life. A pleasurable life is one where. More often than not, we’re doing something that we find emotionally and spiritually meaningful and connected deeply to our ethics and morals that contributes to making this world better in some way for other people.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And I, I think, again, I’ll just connect that to a lot of what we hear in the contemporary rhetoric around trauma healing. Um, you know, healing from trauma can be very exhausting and you might feel like you really need to rest, but in fact, when you’re [00:37:00] spiritually depleted, all the rest and sleep in the world isn’t gonna do it for you because what you actually need is to find the energy to connect to meaning in your life and connect to other people.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And it does require some motivation and energy and hopefully, you know, in a, I think in a, I don’t know that this is entirely utopian, but a utopian idea, but, um. We have other people to stand there with us who love us and, and can help us, help support us as we’re trying to connect to that quality of, of meaning in our lives.

Joe Moore: Hmm. Right. Like there are moments when we really do need to put our energy out there to help other people. And right now it seems pretty clear that that’s the case. And one, one topic that you and I have been chatting about is this kind of, um, consistent encroachment, um, against queer rights and also this one particular topic of conversion therapy, [00:38:00] which is like really clearly shown in the data to be very harmful.

Joe Moore: But yeah. People are probably gonna be bringing it back and people already are bringing it back quietly into clinical frames. Right. So can you, can you give us a little bit of an understanding of this conversation where the important points you might wanna cover?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Yeah, absolutely. So I started this interview by talking about how largely the reception to the book has just been wonderful and people have been super into it.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I’ve been so grateful for that. Um, but there are sections of the book where I talk about this legacy of psychedelic assisted conversion therapy mostly in the fifties and sixties or where the documented cases are. Although, uh, we are learning that this is, um, has continued to happen. Um, more survivors are being identified and underground guides who I’ve interviewed in the course of writing this book, most certainly still get requests for conversion therapy.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So, um, what has seemed to be really difficult to people is [00:39:00] that I do name. Several beloved figures in the history of psychedelic medicine who practiced conversion therapy. And many people have a really hard time with accepting that that figures that contributed a lot and are quite beloved might have also had ideas that were, um, accepted at the time that we now realize are really harmful.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Mm-hmm. So, um. I think it’s really important at this juncture to define what conversion therapy is and is not. Yeah. Because that can really help people to understand some of the pushback around, uh, these discussions of historical figures of what we can do going forward. So there’s a perception that conversion therapy is a coercive treatment inflicted by up upon queer minors or trans minors, um, mostly by religious clergy or other kind of fundamentalist counselors that seeks [00:40:00] to reorient them to cis genderedness or heterosexuality.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: That’s not an accurate definition of conversion therapy. Conversion therapy is any therapy, whether it is voluntary or not, that aims at changing the gender identity or sexuality of the person. Or upholds an idea that heterosexuality is a healthier, more natural or desired outcome. So if we look at a lot of these historical cases, uh, I think we really can see that the figures who engaged in this behavior were doing voluntary treatments with consenting adults who came to treatment for distress related to their sexual identities for depression, for anxiety.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And yet these treatments existed within a cultural moment that I think we still exist in, that suggests that it would be easier [00:41:00] to be, uh, heterosexual or cisgender. And that instead of, um, receiving affirming treatments that can uplift the sexuality of someone, the treatment of the depression. Amounted to conversion therapy to suggesting that, um, treating the distress, in other words, can actually, and has actually caused a lot of harm.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So why is this important now? Right. I think there is this moment of some back and forth within the community naming certain people, and, you know, looking at the historical information is important. So we can look at what was in the historical record and develop a response to it. But why is that especially relevant in this moment?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Mm-hmm. Well, there’s a, a couple of different reasons. So the first, very relevant in 2026, the Supreme Court will decide a case. Called, um, child Versus Salazar. And this is a counselor in the state [00:42:00] of Colorado who is seeking to challenge the ban on conversion therapy to minors by, uh, clergy and counselors and religious counselors.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Now, if this person succeeds in the Supreme Court, this could effectively void bans in 24 states and the District of Columbia paving a way for conversion therapy practices to once again be legal. So we’ve got a, um, attempt that is gonna be heard by the Supreme Court that could once again really create vulnerability for some of our most vulnerable people who are queer and trans youth.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: The way that I see that this is particularly, um. Important to develop consensus within the psychedelic community and guidelines that ban the use of conversion therapy with psychedelics as consensus within our clinical community is a few reasons. One, psychedelics [00:43:00] are no longer something that is just centered in liberal ideologies.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: There is a huge interest in the right wing at, um, supporting psychedelic assisted therapies. And my concern is that one of the reasons that this is, um, looked at as, uh, something that is so, um, interesting to them is not just to support veterans, but because conversion therapy could make a big comeback.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Now we can look at medicines like ketamine that are integrated into clinical private practice right now without a lot of oversight. And for as much critique as I have about psychedelic clinical trials, for a lot of reasons, the one thing that they do have is at least moderate oversight. So we know conversion therapy practices are not happening in clinical trial contexts, but there is nothing to say that as these medicines become more widely available, that they couldn’t be used in private practice settings.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And that feels really important to me. [00:44:00] And the other piece that I wanna mention is just the suggestibility factor of psychedelics. One thing that the clinical, um, clinical literature tells us is that psychedelics make people more suggestible. And when we look at conventional conversion therapy, nons psychedelic conversion therapy, 80% of the people who have received this treatment as a minor experienced lasting harm in the form of depression, anxiety, increased suicidality.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: We know it has no efficacy or medical utility, and we know that it harms people. And my concern is as we integrate psychedelics into that, or if psychedelics were to be integrated into that, uh, the harm will be greatly compounded. So I think we’re in a cultural moment where we really have to, um, acknowledge that past harms occurred, look critically and compassionately at the people who, uh, practiced conversion therapy, hold them as complex [00:45:00] figures in a historical moment.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: But it is so much more important to me that we go beyond this heroes and villains, or I should say more like, um, perpetrators and survivors paradigm. And think about like, why is this so important now that we understand our history? Really, I believe it’s so that we can build consensus and ethical guidelines now so we can look at what happened in the past.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And not to say this person was evil, but to say somebody who, um, is quite beloved and wise could have actually done something harmful with very good intentions. How do we prevent that from happening now? So yeah, it’s a very big issue and, um, I think we, we need to just recognize like we’re in a moment that still so deeply pathologizes queer and trans identities even very well, and tensioned therapists may not realize the harm they’re causing, um, because we still don’t have effective models that are [00:46:00] being widely used for what is really queer affirmative therapy.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, and one really uplifting part that I’d like to mention is there is a consensus statement that’s been signed by many, many different professionals in the field. Um, that’s in the process of being published right now. That does outline, um, a call for the ban of conversion therapy within psychedelic assisted therapy.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Uh, I think that it’ll be published. I think there’s gonna be a very good response. And hopefully what we’ll be doing is really developing some ethical guidelines that are based on, um, what we’ve learned from the past, uh, so that this can’t happen again.

Joe Moore: Yeah, I think we really need to stay on top of this because, you know, I, if I’m reading the political climate, like it seems as though this person, this case will succeed.

Joe Moore: And, um, we really need to like, put up defenses and media and interpersonally to help defend against that because we really don’t want to be harming people. It’s kind of one of the things in the clinical frame [00:47:00] that we don’t wanna be doing is harm. Do you know harm is kind of fundamental, right? So, um, yeah, I guess, um.

Joe Moore: There is this like challenging metaphysics, right? Of like, oh, if they’re gay, then they go to hell. So like, you know, what’s more compassionate? But that’s not really what we should be doing here. Like, that’s not a settled question. The afterlife and ethics morality, that like informed that what’s settled is clinical outcomes and like the science behind that and you know, what is the most compassionate thing to give people really good, healthy, comfortable lives in, in the way that we can, through our current tools.

Joe Moore: Harming is a thing we shouldn’t do. I think, you know, could be wrong, but I, I think we shouldn’t be harming people.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I, I think, uh, it’s foundation, what we need to be doing is helping people to self-actualize and then they can make choices in their life. You can choose how you, on a personal level, wanna reconcile your own religious beliefs with the sexuality that is inherent to [00:48:00] you.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: But I think fundamentally as a profession, we need to be coming from a place that we see all sexualities and gender expressions as valid, healthy, and normal. And that needs to be the cornerstone of how we’re working with all people. Whether they’re, whether they’re voluntarily asking for their sexual orientation to change or whether they, um, you know, whether they’re part of a religious community that believes otherwise.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I think it’s our professional obligation to uphold the dignity and worth of all people and identities.

Joe Moore: Yeah, and I think, um, just to make this more kind of clear and obvious for folks, like if somebody is trying to sweep a huge portion of themselves under the rug, that is only gonna come back worse in the future.

Joe Moore: And facing who you are squarely is. Part of that. And therapy can support that in helpful ways, right? And, um, trying to use therapeutic tools and [00:49:00] psychology to bury it is not gonna have a good result.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: You know, there may be an interesting segue here that I do talk in the book, which is like, how do we actually develop a set of sexual ethics and values that work for us because absolutely.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Mm-hmm. You sweeping your sexuality under the rug isn’t gonna work. But I think this is a good jumping off point where we can take this conversation, uh, and expand it to all people of any sexuality and gender identity. Um, it’s really, really important to talk about the potential harms to queer people, but we are also in a deeply sex negative society, generally speaking.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So I don’t think that there’s anybody walking around that doesn’t have a little bit of sexual trauma. And what I mean by sexual trauma here is maybe not capital T trauma, which we obviously understand is sexual trauma, sexual abuse and assault, but. The product of living in a sex negative society makes it actually really hard to develop a workable set of ethics and [00:50:00] values, um, that are meaningful to you.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of psychedelic sexuality. And what I mean by that is dismantling these inner narratives around our sexuality, um, that reject parts of us, uh, that integrate harmful ideas that come from society that can have to do with what kind of body is the right body to be in, um, what is the right way to experience and express our gender?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: What is it okay to like or not like sexually? And in my view as a psychotherapist, if you are not causing harm and are doing anything coercive, what you like sexually is better embraced. Right. To develop a sane relationship to our sexual desires is a gift. Um, people of course can have out of control sexual behaviors, and there’s lots of clinical support that people can receive around that.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And some interesting psychedelic work about how, um, [00:51:00] psychedelics could benefit people who, who do engage in out of control sexual behaviors. But I’m talking more about the way people who don’t consider themselves sexually traumatized at all, are carrying around deep narratives of shame around their sexuality.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And I think developing, um. A kind of model of psychedelic, clinical flourishing could be looking at the ways that psychedelics can help us to integrate. Well, I mean, look, we can look at what the research actually tells us that these medicines do. And one thing that psychedelics reliably do is make us more open.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And the reason I think openness is such an important character trait when we’re thinking about developing a healthy set of sexual boundaries, ethics, and a healthy erotic self is because it does allow us to be, begin, begin to think creatively about all of the ways, um, that culture has given us deeply misogynistic or homophobic or transphobic or [00:52:00] fat phobic or ableist views that we then apply in the sexual arena and apply to ourselves.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Right? So openness actually allows us to change a lot of the sexual and societal narratives that we have around sex. And the other thing that psychedelic research tells us happens reliably that I think could really benefit fit us in the sexual arena is empathy. Experiencing deep empathy for other people allows us to tolerate sexual difference.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And I think psychedelics are, um, incredibly important at developing more empathy for our partners, more empathy in our human relationships to how we experience the sexuality of other people, and being able to enact our own sexual boundaries. The last piece of this that I’m really, really interested in too is spirituality because, and this links, I think right back to the conversation we were having about queerness.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And earlier than that, the conversation we were having about religious and puritanism, [00:53:00] um, so many people have been sexually harmed by the teachings of organized religions. The gap between sexuality and spirituality can just seem insurmountable for people that I believe, and in my direct experience, psychedelics can connect us to an experience of the divine that is embodied.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: It tells us that our body is actually sacred and more than us knowing that through an intellectual frame, we can feel it by the ecstatic states that psychedelics can offer us in our bodies. And I think that actually this phenomena allows us to connect. Spirituality to our sexuality in ways that so many of us have experienced as damaged by the teachings of organized religion.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So in my incredibly optimistic mind, one outcome I would really love to see is this kind of emerging, um, [00:54:00] spiritual, emerging sense of spiritual practice and how it connects to sexuality. And so to tie this whole thing together, I started by talking about sexual ethics and values. When we experience ourself as divine, when we experience our partners and our partners bodies as divine, as divine, um, treating them with the utmost respect and ethics is natural.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: It’s unthinkable to enact sexual harm on ourself or other people. If we truly have an embodied sense of our sexuality and our bodies as divine vessels. So, I mean, this sounds kind of broad and philosophical, but I think its applications are actually very practical and it can start with how we, how we receive and give pleasure and love in our own relationships right in this moment.

Joe Moore: Mm. That was all quite brilliant, Deedee. Thank [00:55:00] you. I think taking a moment to, to kind of introspect if we’ve had these experiences is a good idea. Like, oh, your body has a sacred thing and other people has a sacred thing. And um, yeah, that intersection also being quite sacred and yeah, how do we want to do these things And yeah, I think there’s a lot people really are gonna take from this recording and your book.

Joe Moore: Um, was there, was there anything in your book that we didn’t really touch yet as like a main category, um, that might kind of hook some people into. Picking up your book, which is what I want people to do.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Mm, thank you. Um, I think the one piece that we didn’t touch on fully, um, I can share in brief. There are kind of two aspects of the book that I think are one that is very interesting to general readers and another that might be interesting to people who have been sort of connected to the psychedelic [00:56:00] community in some way.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: There’s a chapter on sexual trauma, and I began to hint at this, but I take a really expansive lens as to what I mean when I say trauma. So I’m really thinking, um, you know, we can acknowledge traumas as being the big T traumas that we all recognize being sexually assaulted, abused, and I certainly am, don’t treat that lightly.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So, PTSD and how psychedelics can be supportive of healing people with acute trauma. But I’m really looking at, um, the post acute effects of psychedelics and how they can help us to dismantle these. Inner smaller traumas that have to do with absorbing a sex negative culture. So what I lay out in the book is some of these psychedelic phases of trauma healing.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And I won’t get into all the details of that, but I do break down in a way for readers that I think is very practical and something that they can integrate with a therapist, but also can think of a lot about on their own, about, um, these [00:57:00] different components of how we can heal and dismantle, um, traumas within us using psychedelics, whether it’s self-guided or in a clinical setting or in a, in a ceremonial setting.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And I do offer some somatic practices and things that are quite practical for people, um, that I think could be useful to people. Um, because again, I think we’re all a little sexually traumatized. We all have something to heal. Um, I’ll just tell you as a super quick aside, uh, at my book release party in Denver after the Psychedelic Science Conference, um.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: A, a person who was on site who was helping us to sell the books at the party came over and tapped me on the shoulder and said, oh, there’s this guy over there that says he doesn’t have anything to heal in his sexuality. Can you, can you go over and convince him about why he should buy this book? And I was like, I, no, no, I’m not gonna do that.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Because fundamentally, I believe that in this very deep. [00:58:00] Paradox that we all have something to heal in our sexuality. And simultaneously you are not broken. Recognizing your non brokenness is the healing. And because I think most of us carry some idea, some edge, that we are a little broken, that is where the need for healing comes in.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: It’s not actually that we need fixing, it’s that we need to recognize our inherent sacredness and power and dignity and worth in our sexuality. So that is section one. Um, section two that I feel really proud of that I think, um, could be really useful for people who have difficulty like myself reconciling some of the sexual harm that we’ve witnessed in the psychedelic community.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, you know, there is unfortunately this misperception that psychedelics make us more evolved. Wiser, kinder necessarily. For some people, psychedelics seem to make them very much more [00:59:00] narcissistic and can be used as tools of harm. So there’s a whole chapter in the book where I talk about, um, covered memories of sexual abuse in psychedelic states, which is a very, um, difficult topic.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And one of my clinical specializations. And I also to the best of my ability, tried to look at power dynamics and all of the unseen ways in psychedelic relationships, either between guides and clients or in psychedelic communities or in ceremonial contexts. All of these unseen vectors that can influence our safety and, um, unfortunately in some cases lead to the perpetration of sexual harm.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So not only how we can prevent that, but at least my best attempt at thinking how as a community we can answer to that and understand more about people who perpetrate harm. Um. I think that there are some really wonderful people doing work in this arena. Um, and I’ve been painstaking and tried to take a really nuanced approach [01:00:00] to this topic, um, because I think, uh, a lot of what I’ve seen in the psychedelic community unfortunately lacks a little bit of the basis of compassion and nuance.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So I put a lot of effort with really trying to look at these really difficult issues around sexual harm, um, from the perspective of both discernment, but also heart centeredness.

Joe Moore: Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I feel it. And I think like,

Joe Moore: uh, I don’t want to go hard on therapists right now, but often there’s this like, disconnect, right between like, I’m, I’m this professional. And this is what I do, as opposed to like, I’m a feeling human that wants to like be with other people and help other people in this way. And I, I think like even in, I’m sure you’ve seen this, but in some of our trainings we have doctors say, I feel like I’m a human again.

Joe Moore: Like I’m this person kind of positioning myself as clinical expert. [01:01:00] Um, like I actually can’t relate with people in a new way that I haven’t been able to since med school, which is like more trauma, right?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Oh, medical training, um, is partly a masterclass and dissociation. Ooh. It really is. And I mean, to survive as an agent of the healthcare system we have and deliver care under, you know, under these circumstances and sometimes very acute situations with encountering a lot of suffering.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: You have to turn yourself partially off. You know, I, I know that we’re, this is maybe more than we want to fully unpack at this late hour in the, in the podcast, but, you know, I will say, um, people who work to treat trauma, uh, experience a lot of vicarious trauma and a lot of, um, energy in their own bodies that we need support [01:02:00] around medical doctors, uh, are working under circumstances that can be really dehumanizing.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And hence our encounters with the healthcare system can be dehumanizing. But when I think about sort of psychedelics and how harm is perpetrated at its core, um, what’s almost always there is an assumption on the part of the practitioner that they know what is needed to heal you. And that can be a very dangerous belief.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: And, but we go to doctors and shamans and Eros asking exactly for that. You have to give me what I need to heal me. So I really tried to outline how that there are all of these contradictions in our attraction to power and what we want from providers and how this is a, a very slippery area where harm can occur because it might be the very thing that we’re asking for, which is for [01:03:00] someone else to heal us that leads to boundary violations that can lead to things that feel like they were harmful later.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Um, it’s incredibly complex to unpack some of these issues.

Joe Moore: Yeah, and I hope we get to do more like this dei this um, there’s so much more depth to plum here and I think I. Pleasure is as a topic. Being introduced into the psychedelic ecosystem is kind of like a gateway into a lot of other conversations that have been really difficult to have, I think. And I think you’re, are you, are you experiencing something like that?

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Yeah. Yes. I mean, I think even just, um, people turning onto the idea that, um, pleasure extends beyond sexuality, right? Like you think about sensuality, eroticism pleasure as holistic in our lives for a lot of people as a really revolutionary idea.

Joe Moore: [01:04:00] So, all right, well, what, uh, where can people find the book?

Joe Moore: And then I have a few other questions.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Yeah, absolutely. I set up a really lovely website that makes it very easy for people because it’s just embrace pleasure.com. There’s buy links for many different. Sources where you could buy the book depending on how you like to shop. Uh, it also tell you a little bit more about me.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I will be updating it a bit more in terms of, uh, public events and classes that I’m doing. Um, you can also sign my mailing list. I don’t hit you up all the time, but I do occasionally send things out when there’s really notable stuff people might be interested in. Uh, I have a couple of events coming up that folks may be interested in.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I’m teaching a three hour workshop based on the book that will be, um, not just didactic, but also interactive for the Una Institute on, um, October the third and later in October, I’ll be teaching another class for the Open Foundation that will be. Uh, [01:05:00] on the same idea of pleasure and sexual flourishing with psychedelics, but it’ll be a little bit more, um, geared towards clinicians.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: So that will take a little bit more of the clinical frame. And then I’ve got like a vast amount of teaching stuff that’s outside the psychedelic community as well. But those are, um, two, uh, examples of institutions within our psychedelic community that, um, will be offering things based on the book.

Joe Moore: Yeah, brilliant.

Joe Moore: And I’m glad, I’m glad you, uh, mentioned that. ’cause that’s what I was gonna ask about events and in person opportunities. And I, I, I’ve heard you’ve become quite the party thrower with the book launch as well.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: I mentioned this to you already, but I’ll share it. When I was in the throes of writing this book, and it’s a long book, it’s like 350 pages with, um, like many, many citations.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: It’s, it’s a heavily. It’s not an academic book, but I really wanted to make sure I was buttressing my arguments with academic [01:06:00] sources and that I wasn’t just like pulling this out of the air. So it was a lot of work and when I would just be in the thick of things, I would, I would just look up and think, just imagine the book release party.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Imagine your book release party. And then in July I was actually driving to the book release party and I thought like, this is the thing. I did all of this for this moment. I’m getting to go to the book release party. So what a wonderful opportunity to look at pleasure as a motivator to create something of meaning, right?

Joe Moore: Absolutely. Yeah. It can be used skillfully. Absolutely. Um. Yeah, I think, um, there’s a lot of lessons there. Can’t wait to throw my next party. We’ll see. Um, yeah. Cool. Well, Deedee, thank you so much for making it. I really appreciate your time and your commitment to these issues and I really hope we can just continue to amplify the message.

Joe Moore: It’s so important. And thank you so much.

Dee Dee Goldpaugh: Thank you so much, Joe. [01:07:00] This was awesome. I’ll come back anytime.

Joe Moore: Can’t, can’t wait. It’s gonna be fun.