The Newest Version of You Is the Most Authentic One

Dawn and I recorded this week's episode outside, sitting in folding lawn chairs at the edge of a lake in northern Wisconsin. Birds, bugs, a breeze, and a spider that made it into my nose partway through. Almost three years of doing this podcast and we had never once recorded outdoors. It turned into the slowest, easiest conversation we've had on here in a long time.

Listen to episode 145 here, or on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube if you want to see the lake.

What follows is the full exploration of what we talked about, for those of you who would rather read.

Where we've been

We left the Phoenix area at the beginning of April and have been moving almost every week since. Four days at the Grand Canyon. Two weeks in Page, Arizona. Kanab and St. George. Monument Valley, Mexican Hat, Goosenecks State Park where we boondocked on the edge of a cliff with the river a couple thousand feet below and had fires right out over the edge. Moab for Arches and Canyonlands and Dead Horse Point. Eight days in the mountains above Salt Lake City, where it snowed on us the day we arrived after we'd been in the 90s. A week in Idaho, where we got to meet a couple who follow us on Instagram, including a guy in the Becoming a Dominant Man course. A week in West Yellowstone. A cut across Montana. Spearfish, Custer, and Wall in South Dakota. Then Minnesota to see family, and now here.

Two things I want to say about that.

The first is that you cannot live at that pace indefinitely. It was burning me out. Every move means prep the day before, then packing up, then hitching a forty foot fifth wheel weighing seventeen thousand pounds to the truck and driving it somewhere. A two hour drive with that thing can leave me shot for the rest of the day. In eastern Wyoming we took a fifty or sixty mile per hour gust in the side and I genuinely thought the whole thing was going to tip. That's still the most terrifying moment I've had behind the wheel of it. So we're parked here for five weeks, on hundreds of private acres, and it is exactly what we needed.

The second is that the good stuff came from slowing down. Antelope Canyon in Page, on Native land, where a guide takes you down into something wind and sand carved that looks like nowhere else on earth. Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone, where I stood at the overlook and told Dawn that when I die, this is where she want my ashes, that I want to rest there and look at that forever. She teared up talking about it again on the podcast. Yellowstone is enormous, and we've now been twice and still haven't made it to Lamar Valley. If you go, don't try to do it in a day.

There's an obvious lesson sitting in there about the pace I'm always telling clients to slow down to, and Dawn pointed it out to me on the recordingh.

Turning away from what we built everything on

I've been in the middle of a pivot for a few months now, moving what we talk about away from a focus on the dominant and submissive dynamic. That felt like a big deal. Nearly all of our new clients still find us through the D/s content, and I welcome that. I still love that work.

But it has always been about more than that.

Dawn framed it in a way I keep coming back to. The D/s language is a niche, and it's how people found us, but the things underneath are instrumental to all of life anyway. So what looks like a departure is a perspective shift about how we get to share.

Dominant and submissive are labels. They're words that reach for an experience happening inside you. Masculine and feminine energy are more words doing the same thing, and Dawn and I didn't have that language at all until we were already inside our dynamic and things started feeling different and we went looking for someone who could explain what the hell was happening. The experience those words point to is available to anyone, whether or not they use the words, whether or not they ever hear the terms masculine and feminine energy in their life.

That's why nothing we teach actually changes here. The container is widening around the same work.

Trashy, not classy

A comment came in a while back on Dawn's Instagram. Someone said she was sorry, but she used to like us. That the content has become very trashy, not classy anymore. That the way my wife behaves and acts feeds into the misunderstandings and misconceptions about this lifestyle.

She's entitled to that opinion. I mean it. When you live in public view, you give up the right to manage how you land in other people's minds. People will see what they see, and some of them will grieve the version of you they preferred.

Dawn's response on the podcast, for the record: don't say mean things to the girl with the degradation kink, because it's going to have a counter effect.

But the comment stayed with me, because it points at something real. Something did change. And what changed is almost exactly the opposite of what it looks like from the outside.

What people were calling class

For years, the woman people admired online was composed. Measured. She wrote beautifully about surrender. She held herself carefully in every photo. She looked like depth. She looked like class.

Some of that was depth. Real, hard won, and still here. But a large portion of what people were responding to was something else wearing depth's clothing. Perfectionism. Performance. The lifelong vigilance of a woman who learned early that she would be loved for her polish and quietly punished for her wildness. Ego with excellent posture.

Perfectionism photographs well. Restraint reads as wisdom. A woman holding herself in reads as a woman holding herself together, and the world hands out approval for it. She collected that approval for decades. Most women do. They learn which parts of themselves earn admiration and which parts earn raised eyebrows, and they build a self out of the admissible parts. Then they spend years being told how classy they are, which is another way of being told the cage looks good on them.

So when someone says they miss the classy version of her, I understand what they miss. They miss the performance. They fell in love with her composure and mistook it for her character.

What actually came to life

The silly, playful, loud, sexual woman showing up on that account now was not invented last year. She is the oldest thing about my wife. She existed in full before the conditioning arrived, before the lessons about what good girls do, before perfectionism moved in and started managing the household.

Those parts of her were buried alive. That phrase is precise. Buried things that are dead stay quiet. Buried things that are alive keep knocking, for decades if they have to, showing up as restlessness, as numbness, as the strange grief of a woman who has everything she was told to want and still feels like she's watching her own life through glass.

What's happening now is an exhumation. The woman in the bikini with a collar around her neck, laughing, being ridiculous, being openly and unapologetically sexual, is a woman finally getting to love and live and experience parts of herself that were locked away before she was old enough to consent to the locking.

I have watched this from closer than anyone on earth. I watched the composure form and I have watched it dissolve. I can tell you the woman underneath is more honest, more present, more devoted, and more free than the polished version ever was. She is also, by any measure that matters to me, more classy. Because class was never about how much skin you show. Class is congruence. It's a person whose outside matches their inside. And for the first time in her life, hers does.

About those misconceptions

The comment said her behavior feeds misconceptions about this lifestyle. Here is the misconception I actually see doing damage: the idea that power exchange is supposed to look somber. Dark aesthetics, hushed tones, everything heavy with significance. That a submissive woman is a subdued woman.

A real dynamic produces the opposite. Submission, held by a man who has earned it, creates the safest container a woman will ever stand in. And what does a nervous system do when it finally feels safe? It plays. It laughs. It gets loud. Hers got slutty and joyful, and sometimes it wants the whole world to see how alive it is. My role in her life is to make room for every part of her, and I am proudest of making room for the parts the world spent forty years teaching her to hide.

If watching a collared woman be silly and sexual in the sunshine confuses people about this lifestyle, good. Let it confuse them. Their picture needed breaking.

A different version of you lives in everyone else's mind

A different version of you exists in the mind of every person who knows you. Not because they're cruel or lazy, but because that's how minds work. You meet somebody and you immediately start taking in information and making meaning about who this person is. Then you carry that construction around and treat it as the person.

Her example was fitness. She was the personal trainer, the CrossFit girl, the woman lifting heavy enough at Lifetime that men would stop to watch. That was true. It was also just the set of things she happened to be doing and the way she was presenting herself, so what else could anyone see? People built her out of what they had access to.

We did the same thing to ourselves in how we started. Early on with Infinite Devotion we were deliberate about not talking about the sexual side of our relationship. There were reasons for it at the time. So people came to know us as the couple who talked about dominance and submission without making it about kinky sex. That's a hundred and forty some episodes of one particular slice of us.

Us not talking about something never meant we weren't sexual, or kinky, or whatever else. It meant we were sharing what felt real and important to share at the time.

So when the adult content started a year ago last July, for some people it landed out of left field. How could you??? That reaction makes sense once you see that they weren't reacting to us. They were reacting to the gap between us and the version of us they'd built.

The newest thing is the truest thing

Here's the teaching underneath all of it, and it's the reason this episode has the title it does.

Everything I've ever brought to this audience starts in the same place. Turn around, look inside yourself, and go deeper. Shed the layers of conditioning and programming. Go further into what's actually under there.

You cannot do that without your outward life changing. You're different, so you relate to the world differently. Different things start pulling at you, other things fall away, and the shape of your life reorganizes around who you're becoming.

Which means that if you're living in the direction of authenticity, the newest thing to show up in your life is the most authentic thing about you. It arrived on the heels of you letting go of whatever was in its way.

Run that backward and you get something uncomfortable. The first thing you ever saw of us on Instagram, the oldest podcast episode you've ever heard, was the least authentic version of us you will ever encounter. We're not here to perform or to be a product. We're here to reflect what it looks like when two people live authentic lives side by side. So the newest face is always going to be the truer one.

Someone on YouTube commented on an old episode recently that this is just a couple of influencers cashing in to make money. Dawn's answer was so what if making money is her kink. Mine is that every new edge, every new venture, every new turn on, every change in this business is a more honest expression than the one before it.

What to do with "how dare they"

If you look at someone else's life and feel a hard judgment rise up, some version of how could they or how dare they, Dawn's instruction is to bring curiosity to it.

Not curiosity about them. Curiosity about the experience happening inside you that feels like it's about them.

What is this? What is this for me? If you ask honestly, life will show you what you're suppressing, resisting, avoiding, or stuffing down. That's the whole method. It's how we found who we are underneath who we thought we were.

And to be clear, this is not a callout from people who have transcended the reaction. Dawn said it plainly on the recording: she has empathy for anyone triggered by this because she's been there, she's had her own big triggers, and she's not a finished product. Neither am I. There is no finished product. There's just the next layer.

What your partner hands you

The authenticity principle gets more delicate when there are two people involved.

You're both going deeper. New parts of each of you keep opening up. Deeper turn ons. Things you were afraid to reveal. Desires for your life you'd never admitted out loud, sometimes never admitted to yourself.

When your partner brings you one of those, understand what's in their hands. The scary thing they're revealing is the most vulnerable, most authentic, most real thing they currently have access to. The things we bury deepest are the ones we buried longest ago, and they're the ones we've been protecting hardest. What they're holding out is tender.

Treat it gently. That's a gift of their authenticity showing itself to you.

You get to be a place where your partner is welcome to be themselves, or a place where they learn they have to hide. Those small moments of vulnerability are exactly where that gets decided. Not in the big conversations. In the little ones.

Extend that gentleness to yourself first, and also understand that it's a joint effort. Her inner little girl, the one who did the suppressing, has looked to me for permission. She can work at giving it to herself, and it lands differently when she also receives it from me.

Neither of us has been perfect at this. I have not been perfect at giving it to her and she has not been perfect at giving it to me. What has carried us is being honest inside the imperfection. Saying the thing that's hard to say out loud even when you've known it for years and you know your partner knows it too. That's intimacy.

Permission is not a crowbar

Here's a mistake I made for a long time, and I'll own it.

I thought permission was a way to get something out of her. I'd say bring all of it, I'm here for it, you're free to be you, I want all of you. And then I'd wonder why nothing moved.

Permission from a partner does one thing. It means the other person doesn't have to hide it from you. That is real and it matters. What it does not do is change their internal experience of accepting something about themselves. Those are completely different operations.

The reason something isn't coming out isn't that permission was missing. It's that they're terrified.

So permission is a genuine gift when you're offering it as an open door. It becomes a tool of pressure the second you're using it to extract. Acceptance is the better word for what actually works. Being in full acceptance of her however she's showing up, and her in full acceptance of me however I'm showing up. That's the condition where a body starts to feel safe enough to open.

And Dawn wanted this said clearly: it's a felt experience, not a verbal one. There were times I said all the right words and her body knew something wasn't right. She'd tell me so, and I'd insist I was serious, and I'd double down on my permission, which of course did nothing. Then just the other day, on a picnic table twenty feet from where we recorded, we had essentially the same conversation, and this time her whole experience of my tone and my energy was different. Her words were "oh, I needed this. This is what I needed."

The words weren't new. Probably the same ones I'd said a dozen times. What changed was me, over months, learning that I'd been using permission as a tool. The body reads the difference. The body holds a wisdom the mind can't always get to.

Intimacy is bigger than sex

Intimacy and sex should not be used to mean the same thing.

Sex is an intimate act. Intimacy is the closeness, the ability to be open and vulnerable and be yourself with your partner, and for your partner to be themselves with you.

It shows up in sex. It also shows up in the conversation on the picnic table, in the thing you finally say out loud after a year of not saying it, in how someone receives the tender thing you handed them. The whole relationship gets to be intimate. Dawn's experience of that has been meeting parts of herself she didn't know were there.

One year of adult content

Dawn's kink that got big is exhibitionism, and following it has taught her more about herself than almost anything else. She'll tell you she's finding her stride now, a year in, and what's behind that is owning the excitement of her own kinks, letting them be real and lived, and continuing to face whatever fear shows up next.

Something she said that I want people to actually hear: she cannot perform. She won't do things because someone tells her to. That's a specific reason she isn't doing professional porn. She does this because she loves it, because it's her turn on, because she gets to share herself this way and engage with real people. She said she wondered at the start whether anyone would even want to see her porn, and that she didn't feel fully comfortable in her body then, and she did it anyway because she knew there was something in it for her.

There was a comment on the church girl, porn star episode a couple months back calling it a classic example of how to manipulate a woman. I laughed out loud. You think this was my idea? This was hers. It has been hers from the beginning.

My year has looked different. Some of it hits my kinks, in a smaller way than it hits hers. Some of it is my business brain enjoying the puzzle of building the thing and figuring out the marketing. Officially I'm the cameraman, the lighting guy, the ideas guy, the marketing department, the IT department, the video editor, and occasionally the co star. What I'm still working out is where my own lane is in it, beyond all those jobs. That's an open question I'm sitting in, and I'm enjoying myself while I sit in it. The best part by a long way has been watching her come alive.

The biggest surprise for both of us is the people. The subscribers and customers have been genuinely, gushingly kind. Good human beings, in the messages and the chats, generous with her and with us. None of the disrespectful ones are the paying customers. The disrespect comes exclusively from people watching from outside.

There's a couple, Sonny and Skye, who came at this from the opposite direction. They started in adult content and then began talking about their relationship. I saw a clip of her responding to men who say they want a woman like her, so sexual and open and free, and her answer was that she didn't fall out of the sky this way. She's like this because of the relationship they have, the trust in it, and the fact that she can bring new things to him and still be herself.

That's the same claim we've been making from the other side of the same room, in a different vocabulary.

Life gives you what you need

Dawn reads a lot of romance novels, and I pick them out for her. It started because the analysis paralysis of choosing would have meant she never read anything, and it turned into a thing I enjoy. She finishes one and the next is already on her Kindle.

For years she's noticed that the books keep arriving at exactly the right time, which is funny, because I mostly haven't read them. I skim the blurb and a few reviews and think she'd like this one.

The one she started this week is Priest by Sierra Simone. The main character is a woman who believes she's supposed to feel shame about her sexual side and doesn't, and concludes something must be wrong with her because of it. Which is precisely the terrain Dawn has been walking for years.

Dawn's take on this: life is your playground. A book can reveal you to yourself. So can your relationship. She said the same about the Bible, which she now reads as a place to go deeper into yourself if you actually understand what Jesus was saying, a very different relationship to it than the one she was raised with. It's all the same mechanism. If you're open and paying attention, life hands you the next thing you need.

Underneath all of it is what she called chop wood, carry water. You do the work, you reach whatever you want to call enlightenment, and then you chop wood and carry water. Life looks the same from the outside. Your experience inside yourself is unrecognizable. You get to live this life for you, and what you share with the world is exactly that.

The question underneath

If any of this stirs something in you, I'd point you past the comment section and toward yourself.

What are people praising you for that is actually your cage? What composure are you maintaining, and whose approval is it buying? What got buried alive in you, and what would it cost to let it knock loud enough to hear?

Those questions are the actual work. Everything we teach lives downstream of them.

The woman some people miss was beautiful. The woman standing here now is true. I know which one I'd rather be devoted to.

Listen to the full episode here, or on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube, where you can see the lake.

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We'll probably do more of these by the water.