Culture
Dee Dee Goldpaugh – Embracing Pleasure
September 16, 2025
Joe Moore interviews Dee Dee Goldpaugh, LCSW about their new book Embrace Pleasure: How Psychedelics Can Heal Our Sexuality. The discussion covers the book’s reception, critiques of over-medicalization, personal healing experiences, definitions of erotic energy and pleasure, historical repression of substances, and contemporary ethical concerns.
Joe Moore interviews Dee Dee Goldpaugh, LCSW about their new book Embrace Pleasure: How Psychedelics Can Heal Our Sexuality. The discussion covers the book’s reception, critiques of over-medicalization, personal healing experiences, definitions of erotic energy and pleasure, historical repression of substances, and contemporary ethical concerns.
Key topics
Conversion therapy: historical use of psychedelics in conversion practices, risks today, and need for professional consensus to ban psychedelic-assisted conversion therapy.
Motivation: reaction to dominance of the clinical/medical model in psychedelics.
Author background: clinical social worker, ketamine-assisted therapy provider, sexual abuse survivor, early psychedelic integration work.
Personal healing: ayahuasca and San Pedro (Wachuma) experiences leading to embodied healing and pleasure.
Concepts defined: erotic energy as life force; distinction between healing pleasure and leisure.
Political framing: pleasure as anti-capitalist resistance; sustaining community and activism.
Links
Dee Dee Goldpaugh, LCSW
Dee Dee Goldpaugh is a psychotherapist, educator, clinical consultant, and leading voice in the development of psychedelic integration psychotherapy, specifically with survivors of sexual trauma. Goldpaugh is a facilitator of ketamine-assisted retreats for both couples and individuals and has taught and published widely on psychedelics and sexuality, trauma, gender, and spirituality. A frequent presenter at international conferences and trainings, Goldpaugh lives in Woodstock, New York.