Wings work by pushing against air. Climb high enough and there is no longer enough air to push against, and the machine that carried you everywhere stops being able to carry you further. Past the Kármán line, you need a different kind of machine entirely.

Amy Schutte, a former newspaper reporter turned brand strategist, founder of Hudson & Co., and TEDx Cambridge University speaker, borrows that boundary to name something most of us misread as personal failure: the moment the strategies that built your career, your business, or your marriage stop working. Her proposal is that nothing is broken. The atmosphere changed.

In this first half of a two-part conversation, Dr. Emma and Amy follow the line from the boardroom into the marriage. They ask why a rebrand changes nothing if the founder does not, why adults hear a stall as a verdict on their character, and why the voice that asks who do you think you are? may be the most reliable altitude reading you own. Emma brings the clinical complication: it is easier to move someone at rock bottom than someone whose strategies have worked for twenty years and who answers every invitation to change with don't you know this is how I got here? They get into the seven-year itch, into proportionate change in couples where one partner is growing faster than the other, and into why a partnership, like a story, needs plot.

The conversation closes on a vow Amy made herself years ago, I will figure this out, and on whether a vow like that is what carries you across the line or what keeps you flying beneath it. Part Two picks up from there.

When the air thins and you hear yourself say I'll figure it out, is that sentence a wing or an engine?

Full show notes

Amy Schutte: amyschutte.com | hudsonandco.co

This episode is supported by Nine to Kind Planners. Code EMMA20 for 20% off at ninetokind.com.

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Couples arrive carrying the portable version of their problem. He is not spontaneous. She cannot decide about children. They have stopped having sex, or they have it on a schedule. A few questions in, the portable version gets heavy, because it was never the whole load.

Dr. Emma Smith and Dr. Alivia Stehlik finally watched Couples Therapy, four years late by Emma's count, and this episode follows what each of them saw: Alivia's verdict, thirty seconds in, that a couples therapist is underpaid; Emma's ball, which a therapist holds just long enough for a couple to readjust their grip; and the way a complaint about spontaneity descends, layer by layer, into aloneness against connection.

Along the way they compare what it costs to carry two people's pain at once, and where a therapist puts it down: in consultation groups, in supervision with someone who started practicing in 1982, and inside an ethics code strict enough that Emma cannot ask a client for a Google review.

From there the conversation moves through why therapy begins in the middle of the fight, why the best therapists keep consulting other therapists, and what a sex therapist adds that the series does not, including one firm clinical line: abuse is an individual problem, and couples therapy is not where it gets treated. It closes on the partner who is waiting. Emma's argument is that when sex is off the table, people narrow what counts as being chosen to a sliver, and the narrowing prolongs the disappointment it is trying to escape.

The question left open: if the one thing you count as proof of being wanted went missing for a year, what would you have to start counting?

Full show notes

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Purity culture promised a body that had been told to stay silent for years that it would speak fluently on the wedding night. Many couples are still waiting.

Dr. Laura Anderson has spent her career at the point where that promise fails. A therapist, trauma recovery coach, and author of When Religion Hurts You, she founded the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, created the Certified Religious Trauma Practitioner program, and works with people on nearly every continent on religious trauma, coercive control, sexualized violence, and the nervous system. Her view, offered plainly in this conversation, is that purity culture is a form of sexual abuse, and that the body holds that whether or not the person still believes it.

That claim organizes the hour. We begin in Nashville, where a stranger's second question is often which church you attend. We move through what purity culture actually contained, which was far more than a pledge card, and why its aftermath can resemble the aftermath of sexualized violence. We ask what the old rules do to desire inside marriage, why a patriarchal arrangement leaves even its men without a victory, and where a wife is supposed to find room to want when her husband asks her to want it. Laura describes her starting point for rebuilding a relationship with a body that was taught to be an enemy, and it involves the restroom. We also talk about deconstruction inside couples therapy, and about midlife, perimenopause, and why old material resurfaces when it does.

If you came out of a high-control environment, or love someone who did, this conversation offers vocabulary and leaves the verdict open. The question it returns: if a body can learn to treat itself as dangerous without anyone laying a hand on it, what exactly are we calling the injury?

Full show notes

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Michelle Dovey spent twenty years as the painter of oak trees. Then, sketching classical statues in Florence, she looked down and found she had drawn an entire male figure except for one region, left blank without meaning to. The next afternoon she drew nothing but the genitals of Michelangelo's David. Within a year she had drawn more than seventy naked men, in a project she designed as an act of permission.

In this episode, the internationally exhibiting artist and author talks with existential sex therapist Dr. Emma Smith about what that year taught her about shame, and about the skill at the center of her work now, the shameless ask: sensing what you want, trusting it, and naming it clearly.

The conversation starts with the blind spot, the thing in plain sight that your conditioning won't let you see. From there it moves to the friends and family who begged her to stop, and to the men who told her it was the first time they had ever felt seen. Its hinge is a question the models kept asking her: how would you like us to pose? Michelle found that asking made her feel fantastic whether or not she got what she asked for, and that not asking left her irritated and tired. Dr. Emma brings it home to long-term couples, for whom asking is harder precisely because their partner knows them, and to the men in her practice who want, more than they can say, to feel desired. They also talk about the female gaze, a tantric gazing practice, and Michelle's retreat in Venice this November.

If the person you love asked you tonight how you would like them to be, would you have an answer, or would you hand the pencil back?

Full show notes

Michelle's Venice retreat, November 4–8: https://venice.michelledovey.com/unedited

More from Michelle: https://invitation.michelledovey.com

Support for the show: Nine to Kind Planners, the planner Dr. Emma actually uses. Code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

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On the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a plaque explains that it was once called the Big Canyon. Somebody upgraded the marketing. Dr. Emma read it at the end of a month spent trying to name the size of two losses that arrived at once.

Her cousin died after major heart surgery. In the same weeks, a business partnership she had believed was also a friendship ended, with the departing partner labeling her, essentially, a liability. She expected grief to sort itself by rank. Instead, the business breakup landed with a sucker-punch quality the death did not, and this solo episode asks why.

Her answer is authorship. Death is universal; it says nothing about you except that you are human and that you loved. A loss with an author arrives with a verdict attached. From there, Dr. Emma moves into territory she works in every day as an existential sex therapist: what happens when you can feel that something is off and keep hearing "it's fine," why insight offers no exemption from pain, why any relationship, romantic or professional, means accepting some liability, and the sentence she wishes she had used: "I hear you saying you're fine, and it doesn't feel fine to me. Are you willing to explore this with me?" If the answer is no, that is important information.

It is also an episode about perspective you prescribe for yourself: hiking just far enough into a canyon to feel caught between above and below, and a new deal landing in the inbox while a draft obituary sits open on the screen. Grief and good news keep arriving in the same week. Nobody gets to choose the order.

Who in your life has told you everything is fine, and what would it cost to say it doesn't feel fine over here?

Full show notes

Support for the show: Nine to Kind Planners, the planner Dr. Emma actually uses. Code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

If this one landed, tell Dr. Emma: http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6

There is a version of you that meets new people first — agreeable, quick, easy to like. Laura Desirée has a name for it: the representative. It shows up so someone can be liked before the actual, more complicated self risks the room.

In part two of her conversation with Dr. Emma, Laura — erotic architect, intimacy professional, and the force behind the immersive erotic salon Eros Unbound — talks about the burnout that finally forced her representative into retirement, and what she learned about honesty during her years as a full-service sex worker, where strangers told her things they couldn't say at home. Why does distance make confession easier than intimacy does? What would it take to make the person who already loves you as safe to tell the truth to as someone you'll never see again? They also get into her mother's last years — a freezer packed with a year of meals, built by hand before the end — and the poem Laura returns to when she needs permission to be exactly who she is.

The question this episode leaves you with: who is the representative standing in for in your life, and what would it cost to send yourself instead?

Full show notes:

This episode is supported by Nine to Kind Planners — code EMMA20 for 20% off at ninetokind.com.

Have a question you've been almost afraid to ask? Submit it here: http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6

Registration for the Reignite Desire Experience masterclass (September 18th) is open now: www.reignitedesire.com/masterclass

Laura Desirée's job is to invent new sex every month, professionally, for a stage. She reports that she runs out of ideas. She also reports that her first session as a professional domme involved blindfolding the client as fast as she could so she could get her written notes out — a step-by-step playbook for conducting an erotically charged power exchange. Every commanding presence you have ever assumed was effortless started somewhere near a laminated agenda.

Laura is an erotic architect: fifteen years across burlesque, adult media, sex work, intimacy coordination, and now creative direction for the members-only erotic theater SNCTM, where what appears on stage is real rather than simulated. She is also the host of Eros Unbound, a monthly erotic literary salon in New York where six to eight writers read confessional work about sex they have actually had — and where, at intermission, two hundred and fifty adults in evening dress are handed notepads and twenty-five anonymous minutes. Laura describes them writing furiously, like an exam they have to pass in order to graduate. The pages get read aloud at the end. Nobody knows whose is whose, and everybody's is in the room.

What she and Dr. Emma trace from there is the seam between talking about desire and having it. Laura reads the present as a social sex revolution — we may be the most articulate generation ever to discuss ourselves as sexual beings, and possibly the most over-analytical. Emma presses on the obvious cost: sex has to be felt, and we may have made it too cerebral. Laura's answer is her own phrase, an intellectual erection — the thinking brain aroused, but only worth something if the arousal routes back through the body.

She declines, throughout, to be an expert. She will relay her findings. She will not tell you what to do with them.

So: if the paper were anonymous and you had twenty-five minutes, what would you write — and what would it cost to say the same sentence out loud, with your name on it, to the person already beside you?

Part One of two.

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Full show notes: [here]

Something this hour unlocked? Tell us → http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6

Reignite Desire masterclass, September 18 — registration open → https://soliloquie.myflodesk.com/mcsept

Support the show: Nine to Kind Planners, code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

By the time someone who runs a company sits down across from me, they have read the book, watched the talk, asked the chatbot, and run the experiment twice with modifications. If the answer had been available anywhere else, they would have found it and implemented it by Tuesday. What they bring instead is a question they find humiliating to say out loud: I have solved harder problems than this.

They have. That is exactly the trouble.

Before Dr. Emma was a sex therapist she was headed for public accounting — a business-club kid who went to nationals in sales and marketing, got handed a slip of paper with a scenario on it and ten minutes to move a couple off the stroller they came in for, and later spent audit season walking through the guts of other people's companies. Which means she learned, early, how a person gets taught to run a business. Clubs, mentors, internships, a first job where somebody senior tells you what you did wrong. Later, masterminds and coaches and advisory boards. Nobody is expected to figure it out alone.

This week she and Alivia go looking for the equivalent on the other side of the ledger, and find a five-pound sack of flour. An egg, then flour, then an animatronic doll with a key strapped to your wrist. A curriculum built end to end to make teenagers afraid of pregnancy, and nothing whatsoever about how two people who have decided to stay build something that survives the staying.

They get into why the resistance these clients bring is not stubbornness but success — the strategy has been reinforced for twenty years and it works everywhere except the one room it was built to protect. They get into what happens when decisiveness reads as dismissal at your own kitchen table, and why that moment tends to arrive feeling existential rather than tactical. And they get into the difference between what a skill set can fix and what actually requires the basement.

You would never have run the company on instinct plus whatever you absorbed watching your parents do it. So what convinced you it would be enough at home?

Full show notes

Reignite Desire masterclass, September 18 → https://soliloquie.myflodesk.com/mcsept

Supported in part by Nine to Kind Planners, code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

Tell us what landed → http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6