Skin and Soul™: Beyond the Pale with Gwenm A. Carsley

Why do we stay with the person who is destroying us? 


Dr. Stephen Paul Edwards had built the life he taught other people to create: the mansion, the Rolls-Royce, twenty years on stage. Then a woman told him her favourite flower was the Venus Fly Trap. He bought her roses.


His memoir, The Venus Fly Trap: Sex, Lies & Repercussions, is a true story of red flags, obsession, sex, chaos and a relationship he knew was dangerous — and kept returning to anyway.
Gwenm takes him past the woman to the man underneath: the boy from Blackpool, the psychiatric ward at seventeen, his father, the need to rescue, the need to control, and the difference between love, intensity and addiction.
They talk about what a red flag feels like in the body when you’ve already decided to ignore it, whether surrender is really surrender when drugs and alcohol are involved, and who actually holds the power in a relationship built around dominance and submission.

A raw conversation about desire, control, shame, self-deception and toxic love. Skin and Soul™: Beyond the Pale.
Full transcript at gwenmcarsley.com/skin-and-soul-podcast. 


Stephen's free opening chapters for our listeners: bit.ly/4ycwWJ4

Cat Orme and Joshua Rodriguez have spent eight years building the Kink Collective — and a life. For the last three, that life has included Natalie: one home, one bed, three nervous systems, and a truth most people don't expect — nobody here is a filler. "She's not a replacement for anything," Joshua says. "She's an addition to." Because one plus one, it turns out, equals three: add a third mind and everything multiplies. Including the work.
In Skin & Soul's first throuple conversation, they go where the labels can't follow: why Cat — who comes from a long line of men who cheat — swears she was never jealous, and what she actually needed instead. The moment one "Mistress, will you flog me" too many gave birth to People Before Kink. And Gwenm's own first meeting with rope — walking in certain she wanted control, and meeting something else entirely. Kink, they agree, meets you exactly where you are. It just doesn't let you hide.

Love after life? Beth Lynch once read an 87-year-old woman whose five husbands all showed up at once — arranged on a staircase, no jealousy, no jostling to be number one. "I love them all," the woman said, "but the third was closest to my soul." After thirty years of full-time mediumship — five, six days a week, grief work you don't mess around with — Beth has learned that the other side holds love with none of the possessiveness we strangle it with down here. Founder of Inner Light Teaching and author of Life, Death, and In-Between: Perspectives from the Other Side, she channels the way she lives: a small blessing, then the visions — seen, felt, smelled — handed over straight, no archangels, no decoding, no trying to be right.
In this live conversation we go where the spirit world keeps pointing: love and soulmates beyond ownership, what the dead actually want us to know about grief, and why every image they send is an emotion before it's a message. Beth tells the stories that made her — the mother she lost at 32, the loss that cracked her life open and became the work; the parents she helps heal; the messages that arrive as a pair of granny pants or a palomino pony and land like proof. Her one answer to "what's my purpose?" — understand yourself as a spiritual, energetic being as well as a human being, and integrate it. The rest, she says, nobody up there cares about.

Love, dating and relationship expert Violet Lange, the Cosmic Matchmaker, helps smart, succesful, spiritual women reclaim their feminine power, date with confidence and create healthy, lasting love. Her approach combines embodiment, masculine and feminine polarity, spiritual practice and practical dating guidance.
In this episode of Skin & Soul: Beyond the Pale, we explore why successful women can still struggle in love, the connection between pleasure, power and attraction, and what it takes to stop chasing emotionally unavailable partners, trust yourself in dating and build a committed relationship that lasts.

Beauty opens doors. It also demands payment.
Dr. Melanie-Penny Harrison—known professionally as Bella Maori—joins Gwenm Carsley for a raw examination of beauty: not as an innocent ideal or a matter of appearance, but as a machine that rewards, wounds, seduces, excludes, and keeps us hungry for the next hit of approval.
Through her memoir, Ugly: Philosophy, Beauty, Absurdity, and the Black Feminine Paradox, Bella traces the contradictions she has lived as a Black woman, philosopher, filmmaker, actress, model, and adult content creator. They speak about pretty privilege and objectification; the pressure placed on Black women to alter themselves in order to belong; the shame imposed on women who choose to be seen erotically; and the exhaustion of keeping the scholar, artist, and sexual woman in separate rooms.
At the heart of the conversation is a harder question: What happens when achievement, visibility, and desirability still cannot prove that you are enough?
Bella speaks about reclaiming authorship of her own story, the drive born from feeling invisible, and the one place beauty no longer asks her to perform—the music she makes with her guitar.
An unflinching conversation about beauty, race, shame, identity, body autonomy, and the freedom of refusing to hide.

Hakeem Bourne McFarlane on why men fear commitment and abandonment at the same time — and what that does to how they touch people. This conversation goes at the part his other interviews leave out. Before he met the woman he now calls his internal compass, he spent four years with no dating apps, no porn, and nothing sexually explicit on his feed. What does childhood grief have to do with who a man reaches for, and how? What makes a man and a woman devotional?
Hakeem is the founder of the Choose Yourself Movement and the author of Choose Yourself To Be Chosen. He came to Skin and Soul™ because he thinks his work has to survive contact with sex, and it has never been tested there. He says a man penetrates a woman the way he penetrates the world. Let's start there.
Skin and Soul™: Beyond the Pale with Gwenm A. Carsley — the full conversation and the verbatim transcript live at gwenmcarsley.com/skin-and-soul-podcast.

70% of divorces are initiated by women — and most men never see it coming. Not because the signs were loud, but because they were quiet: fewer kisses, colder shoulders, a marriage that runs like a business and sleeps like roommates. Olivier Bessaignet spent twenty-five years and nine deep-diving relationships — including twelve years beside one of France's great Tantra teachers — learning what actually rebuilds desire when talking about it has stopped working.
In this conversation, Gwenm and Olivier go looking for the lost art of respect — the thing almost no modality teaches. He maps his three circles — love at the center, the circle of safety (ownership, boundaries, integrity) that builds respect, and the circle of spark — then opens his own story: the grandmother who crushed his boundaries, twelve years with a French Tantra master, and the breakup that finally taught him containment. Plus the pizza-oven secret of intimacy, the elephant driving your decisions, and a live walkthrough of the AI sparring partner he built to train men before they talk. The full conversation — and the verbatim transcript — live at gwenmcarsley.com/skin-and-soul-podcast. Skin and Soul™ with Gwenm Carsley.

Sacha Hughes knows exactly what it costs to say "I'm fine" when you're anything but. Her twenties in London ran on recruitment, cocaine, pinot, and the kind of grief that doesn't knock — her mother, lost to cancer, and years of partying with the best of them while keeping the flat spotless, because as long as the kitchen sparkled she could tell herself she had it together. Then she picked up a pen. The result is Love, Grief & More Sex Than Pinot — a debut novel featured in Woman's Own, whose heroine, Soho Summers, carries Sacha's own messy past on every page.
In this conversation we go where the book only whispers: the full-moon December night on a beach when she finally handed her grief back to the sky, the chapter her friends insisted she keep — the one about violation, and how many women quietly blame themselves — and the three years she has spent choosing her own company over anyone else's arms. What once broke her is her medicine now. We taste it together — the grief, the pinot, and the coming back to life.

Does desire really fizzle and fade in long-term relationships? 
Gwenm sits down with Caroline Hood, licensed clinical social worker, certified sex therapist, and author of Sex Begets Sex, who has spent more than 25 years challenging the cultural narratives around female desire. Fifteen years into her own marriage and, in her words, having some of the best sex of her life, Caroline unpacks why spontaneous sex was never actually spontaneous, why talking about sex is foreplay rather than a mood killer, and why so many women quietly abandon their sexual selves when they become mothers, wives, or "middle-aged." Together they explore permission as the first step back to agency, the erotic as a way of being alive in and out of the bedroom, and how intimacy can return you to yourself in the moments you feel furthest away. 
Find Caroline at desireinreallife.com and in her newsletter, Desire in Real Life.

What happens when you survive — but you don't come back as the same person?
Retired nurse Jenny White spent decades caring for others before a life-threatening brain tumour forced her to become the patient. When she awoke, everything had changed—not just her body, but her identity, her marriage, and the future she imagined.
Together we explore what it means to become someone new, whether intimacy can survive profound change, why scent can unlock forgotten memories, and what Jenny's remarkable journey reveals about love, resilience, and the hidden realities of modern healthcare. We also discuss how those experiences inspired her medical thriller series, The Triggering Scent.