In this episode of Psyche Podcast, I’m joined by theologian David Congdon for a deep, wide-ranging conversation about desire, love, polyamory, and the future of Christianity.

For centuries, Christian theology has treated eros, sexuality, and pleasure as something dangerous — something to be controlled, disciplined, or confined to narrow moral boundaries. David’s new book challenges that entire framework. Drawing on theology, philosophy, and queer theory, he asks what it would mean to imagine a Christianity where God, desire, and human love are not in competition with one another.

We talk about why Christianity has been so suspicious of pleasure, how monogamy became a moral norm, and what a non-competitive vision of love might look like. Along the way, we explore Donna Haraway’s concept of natureculture, Carrie Jenkins’ philosophy of love, jealousy and compersion, and why a resurrection-centered faith opens the door to a more abundant, joyful, and inclusive understanding of intimacy.

We also dive into the cult film Shortbus as a surprising parable of the church — a community built around permeability, forgiveness, and the courage to let in the new.

This episode isn’t about tearing faith down. It’s about asking what kind of love, spirituality, and community might become possible if we stopped confusing scarcity with holiness.

Listen in for a conversation about eros, grace, and a church that could be otherwise.

In this episode, I draw the second film from my New York Times Jenga movie deck—Anchorman—and end up somewhere I didn’t expect: a surprisingly intimate reflection on masculinity, emotional development, and the quiet fragility beneath alpha performance.

Using both the film and stories from my clinical work with men and couples, I explore how so many of us were taught to perform masculinity without ever being taught how to feel, relate, or truly know ourselves. What Anchorman turns into comedy, I often see in the therapy room: men who look confident on the outside but feel disconnected, angry, or numb on the inside.

I also bring in Jorge Ferrer’s idea of the “omega male”—a relational, emotionally grounded alternative to dominance-based masculinity—to imagine what might emerge when the alpha role finally collapses.

This isn’t a movie review.

It’s a reflection on how masculinity breaks—and what might grow in its place.

What if intimacy was never meant to come with guarantees?

In this solo episode, I explore how psychotherapy often inherits a quiet promise—that if we choose the right relationship structure, heal enough, or communicate well enough, intimacy will eventually become safe and predictable. Drawing on my clinical work, reflections on anti-mononormativity, and insights inspired by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, I suggest a different way of holding love and relationship.

Rather than treating intimacy as something that should protect us from change, I explore the idea that intimacy is inherently risky—not in a harmful way, but in a deeply human one. To love is to be affected, transformed, and sometimes undone by another person. No relationship structure—monogamous or otherwise—eliminates that risk; it only organizes it differently.

This episode is not an argument for or against monogamy or polyamory. It’s a reflection on moving away from relational essentialism and toward a view of relationships grounded in perspective, relatedness, and transformation. Along the way, I draw on real clinical moments, explore jealousy as information rather than pathology, and reflect on therapy’s deeper task—not guaranteeing safety, but building capacity to stay present while we’re being changed.

If you’ve ever wondered why love still feels hard even when you’re “doing everything right,” this episode is an invitation to think about intimacy in a more honest, compassionate, and spacious way.

In this episode, I sit with a question that’s been quietly shaping a lot of my clinical work and personal reflection: What kind of masculinity are we actually bringing into our relationships?

Inspired by a provocative appendix from Jorge Ferrer’s Love and Freedom, I explore his contrast between the “Alpha Male” and the “Omega Man”—not as fixed identities or ideals, but as relational patterns that shape how men experience confidence, desire, power, and intimacy.

Rather than critiquing Ferrer, I use his framework as a doorway into something more personal and clinical: how masculinity often becomes organized around performance, hierarchy, and validation—and what begins to shift when it moves toward presence, self-trust, and relational safety.

Along the way, I reflect on:

• Why gender language always risks essentialism—and how to hold it lightly

• How these dynamics show up quietly in the therapy room

• Why gentleness, empathy, aesthetics, and emotional attunement are still coded as “unmanly”

• How sexuality changes when it’s no longer treated as a referendum on worth

• And why masculinity doesn’t need to be defended through hardness in order to remain potent

This isn’t an episode about becoming a “better man,” or replacing one masculine ideal with another. It’s an invitation to get curious about what allows relationships—and desire—to breathe.

If you’ve ever felt alienated by hyper-masculine bravado or flattened versions of “healthy masculinity,” this conversation is for you.

Jealousy is one of the most misunderstood human emotions. It’s often either justified as proof of love or dismissed as something we should simply get over. In this episode, I take a different approach—exploring jealousy as a complex emotional signal that can sometimes serve us, while also examining the ways it becomes shaped and intensified by cultural scripts like patriarchy, scarcity, and comparison.

Drawing on insights from Jorge Ferrer—especially his reflections in Love and Freedom on sympathetic joy (mudita)—I explore how jealousy can be transformed rather than suppressed. Sympathetic joy is not about denying jealousy, but about developing the capacity to genuinely celebrate the happiness and success of others without experiencing it as a threat.

I also reflect on ideas from my book Green Flags: How to Be the Kind of Person You Need in Your Life, particularly the challenge many of us face in celebrating the “wins” of others. Often, our difficulty rejoicing in someone else’s joy has less to do with them—and more to do with our own insecurities and fear of scarcity.

Throughout the episode, I explore how jealousy is shaped by evolutionary factors, attachment history, and sociocultural conditioning, and how psychotherapy can help us discern when jealousy is pointing to a real relational issue—and when it has become a barrier to freedom, intimacy, and joy.

This is a conversation about moving beyond possession and comparison toward discernment, emotional maturity, and the possibility of shared joy—without moralizing, bypassing, or pretending jealousy doesn’t exist.

In this episode, I explore the idea of mononormativity—the assumption that there is one correct structure for love, desire, maturity, and even healing—and how deeply it shapes religion, psychology, and spirituality.

Drawing on the work of David Congdon, Angela Willey, and Jorge Ferrer, I examine how appeals to “nature,” normality, and spiritual maturity often function less as descriptions of reality and more as tools of moral control. Across these traditions, plurality tends to be tolerated—but rarely trusted.

A key thread in this episode comes from philosopher Carrie Jenkins, who offers a powerful alternative metaphor: relationships—and life itself—as a choose-your-own-adventure. Rather than assuming a single correct path, this framework invites us to think in terms of responsible navigation, open futures, and ethical discernment without guarantees.

This is a conversation about desire as information rather than threat, plurality as a condition of growth rather than a failure of integration, and what becomes possible when we stop confusing uniformity with wisdom. It’s an invitation to rethink love, healing, and spirituality beyond rigid scripts—and to imagine forms of maturity that can hold complexity without panic.

In this episode of Psyche Podcast, I’m joined by psychoanalyst, writer, and host of Rendering Unconscious, Vanessa Sinclair, for a wide-ranging and deeply human conversation at the intersection of psychology, film, culture, enchantment, and resistance.

We begin by tracing Vanessa’s journey from Miami to New York to Sweden, her early adoption of telehealth long before it became the norm, and the origins of her podcast as a way of sustaining intellectual and creative community across borders. From there, we dive into a rich clinical and philosophical discussion of Melancholia (2011), which Vanessa describes as her favorite film of all time.

Using Melancholia as a lens, we explore depression and anxiety not simply as pathologies to be cured, but as meaningful responses to a profoundly disordered world. We contrast Kirsten Dunst’s melancholic attunement with Charlotte Gainsbourg’s anxious drive for control, examine how certainty, rationalism, and “trusting the experts” can collapse under existential pressure, and reflect on how denial, productivity, and optimism can become fragile defenses in the face of catastrophe.

From there, the conversation opens outward into questions of intuition, magical thinking, colonialism, patriarchy, monotheism, pluralism, and the loss of an enchanted worldview. Vanessa offers a powerful critique of how modern culture trains us to distrust our inner compass—pathologizing intuition, ritual, synchronicity, and imagination—while outsourcing meaning to algorithms, experts, and online consensus. We talk about art, astrology, animism, psychoanalysis, and why having your own experience of something matters more than reading reviews or interpretations first.

Clinically, we reflect on the dangers of romanticizing depression while still honoring its depth, especially in the context of systemic injustice, poverty, medical trauma, and institutional failure. Vanessa shares moving reflections from her work in hospital settings and HIV clinics, underscoring the limits of therapy when material conditions are fundamentally inhumane—and why self-care, community, and moments of joy are not luxuries but necessities.

We close by returning to the film’s final images of relational connection in the face of annihilation, and what they suggest about how meaning, care, and presence might still be possible—even when the world feels like it’s ending.

This is a conversation about depression, anxiety, art, magic, justice, and what it means to remain human in a disenchanted age—and why reclaiming depth, intuition, and connection may be one of the most radical acts available to us.

In this episode of Psyche Podcast, I’m joined by my friend Phuc Luu for a wide-ranging and deeply personal conversation about Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka.

Kafka’s letter is often described as one of the most raw and devastating documents in modern literature—and for good reason. Written as an attempt to explain his lifelong fear of his father, the letter becomes an unflinching examination of authority, power, guilt, shame, and the psychological formation of the self. Together, Phuc and I explore why this text is emotionally difficult yet strikingly clear, and how Kafka’s relationship with his father shaped not only his inner life but also his creativity, relationships, and sense of agency in the world.

Our conversation moves through themes of fatherhood as an archetype, the role of authority as influence rather than domination, and how early relational wounds can become internalized as an inner critic or superego. We reflect on Kafka’s struggle with trust—both in others and in himself—his awareness of hypocrisy and projection, and the tragic weight of guilt that followed him throughout his life without any real sense of acquittal or redemption.

At the same time, we resist reducing Kafka’s father to a caricature. Like Kafka himself, we hold space for nuance—acknowledging both the harm and the humanity present in parental relationships. From there, we connect the letter to contemporary questions: How do we relate to our parents as adults? When does cutting off family become protective, and when does it prevent growth? How do we move from victimhood toward agency without denying real harm?

We close by reflecting on what Kafka’s letter teaches us about fatherhood—not just as a biological role, but as an archetypal function. What does it mean to be a father figure who creates space for experimentation, difference, and becoming? And how can therapists, mentors, and teachers embody authority that empowers rather than constrains?

This episode is a meditation on woundedness and creativity, guilt and grace, and the difficult but necessary work of making meaning out of our earliest relationships. 

In this episode, I spend time with Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father—one of the most intimate and unsettling texts he ever wrote.

Kafka famously tells his father, “My writing was all about you.”

And it’s hard to deny the profound psychic impact fathers can have on their sons: the shaping of authority, judgment, fear, and the inner critic.

But this episode doesn’t stop there.

Drawing on postmodern sociology, attachment-adjacent insights, and reflections on power and masculinity, I explore a more difficult question:

What if the father is sometimes less the sole cause and more the carrier of something larger—culture, authority, masculinity, and expectation?

We look closely at Kafka’s memories of watching his father speak to employees in the family shop, his identification with the humiliated rather than the powerful, and how authority becomes internalized as inhibition rather than confidence.

This is an episode about fathers—but also about power, shame, internalized judgment, and how entire worlds get inside us long before we know how to name them.

If you’ve ever struggled with authority, self-doubt, or the voice inside that tells you you’re already in the wrong, this episode is for you.

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Before I ever watched Stranger Things, I read J.F. Martel’s philosophical essays on it. That reversal mattered.

In this solo episode, I offer a close, reflective reading of J.F. Martel’s Reality Is Analog essays, using Stranger Things as a lens for thinking about the Real—that dimension of reality that resists explanation, control, and reduction.

This is not a plot analysis and contains no spoilers. Instead, I explore why the series resonates so deeply at a psychological level: its refusal to domesticate mystery, its resistance to a fully digitized view of reality, and its quiet insistence that imagination is not an escape from the world but a way of staying in contact with it.

At the center of the episode is one of the show’s most radical claims: that ordinary children—through curiosity, play, courage, and care—are capable of extraordinary things. Not because they dominate the strange, but because they remain open to it.

As the series comes to an end, this episode reflects on what Stranger Things leaves us with: a posture toward reality that values attentiveness over mastery, relationship over control, and wonder over explanation. Reality, after all, is still strange.And that may be its greatest gift.