Filthy Fiction with Feelings Podcast

Tasha L. Harrison
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Filthy Fiction with Feelings is the craft-and-commentary podcast of author and editor Tasha L. Harrison where she breaks down her own romance writing process in real time. filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com

  1. Jul 1

    The Soul Has Teeth — What Jungian Kink Theory Gets Right, and the One Room It Never Walks Into

    Last week we talked about Khalil Sinclair. The man who rebuilt Jade’s container after Devon shattered it, the third character in this whole thing, the one whose entire job in the story is to make himself unnecessary and make you love him for it. And I told you that the stillness Khalil walks into a room with isn’t decorative, it’s the container itself. That his dominance is a craft, a discipline he studied and refined over decades, something that belongs to him whether or not there’s a partner on the receiving end. The tuning, not the music. I want to pick that exact thread back up today, because here’s the question Khalil left sitting on the table. That craft he spent decades refining, the vocabulary he handed Jade for what was happening to her body on those early Tuesdays — where does that language actually come from? Who wrote it down? And who got left out of the writing? That’s where today’s piece lives. Today we’re getting into the depth psychology of kink, the Jungian frame for what’s actually happening when two people walk into a scene, and the one enormous thing the newest, most ambitious book on the subject walks right up to and refuses to enter. This connects to everything I’ve been building with Jade and Theo, so if you’re new, welcome. You can start right here. ARTICLE CONTEXT So I want to try something I’ve never done on this podcast, which is talk you through a book. Not as a review, I’m not out here rating things, but as a window into the reading I’ve been doing on my own to write this serial honestly. There’s a stack on my desk that made Jade and Theo possible, and today’s the first time I’m cracking it open in front of you. We’re starting with the one that sent me looking for the rest of it. Douglas Thomas, The Deep Psychology of BDSM and Kink: Jungian and Archetypal Perspectives on the Soul’s Transgressive Necessities. Routledge put it out in 2023. The subtitle alone tells you the man came to play. Transgressive necessities. The soul’s, no less. I picked it up while I was elbow-deep in writing this thing, because I wanted to know what the current thinking was on why kink does what it does to people. Thomas is a Jungian analyst out of Pasadena, teaches at Pacifica, and the book reads like a clinician who has spent years sitting across from kinky clients and decided he was done pathologizing them. His whole move is to take Jung — the framework his own followers have been clutching like heirloom pearls for a hundred years — and walk it straight into the dungeon. And I want to tell you what it gets exactly right before I tell you about the room. THE CONVERSATION Here’s the argument, in my words. Kink isn’t pathology. It isn’t deviance. It isn’t a chapter waiting to happen in somebody’s DSM. It’s individuation. Soul work. The thing Jung spent his entire life mapping and never quite had the nerve to follow down into the actual underworld of the body. Thomas pulls from The Red Book, leans hard on James Hillman’s archetypal psychology, and reads a Master/slave dynamic not as trauma to be untangled in therapy until the client finally gives it up, but as an encounter with archetypal material. Persephone and Hades. Dionysus tearing through the Apollonian container. The descent, the ordeal, the dismemberment that comes before coherence. Subspace isn’t dissociation. Ordeal isn’t self-harm. The dungeon sits closer to a temple than a clinic. And he does the one thing almost no Jungian has had the spine to do, which is free Jung from his own — and I’m quoting one of the book’s blurbers here, Russell Lockhart — his “compulsory heterosexist mode of individuation.” Jung built a system that ran on the anima-animus straight-marriage coupling as the engine of wholeness, which meant queer folks, kinky folks, anybody whose erotic life refused the marriage plot got filed under arrested development. Thomas names that and steps over it. He uses Jung against Jung. He uses Hillman, who was always more porous, more polytheistic, more willing to let the soul be many things at once, to crack the door open. For a kinky romance writer? That’s a real gift, and it helps to say what kind. He gives you language for intensity. Numinous. Imaginal. Soul-making. He lets you write subspace as something other than a girl checking out. He lets you write a Dominant as something other than a man with control issues and good forearms. That vocabulary is worth having, and I keep it. But notice what it’s a vocabulary for — it’s for the dark, the descent, the ordeal. It names the going-down beautifully. It has almost nothing to say about the coming-up. Hold that, because it’s the whole argument I’m going to make later. Here’s the room. Thomas knows there’s a problem. The book gestures at it more than once. He understands the master/slave dynamic in American kink can’t be unhitched from American chattel slavery. He’s got a Black submissive in one of his case studies — he calls him “Black boi Kaseem” in the Master Jess relationship — so he knows Black bodies are in the spaces he’s describing. He nods at the fraught terrain. He even tells us, his own words, that BDSM “considers the collective archetypal sources of historical trauma.” That’s the gesture. And that’s where the gesture stops cold. What Thomas never does — what the book in its current form can’t do — is sit inside the contradiction the way a Black practitioner sits inside it every single time she walks into a play space. Stay with me on the Jungian logic, because this is the part that matters. The shadow, in Jung, is the part of the psyche the conscious self has exiled. But the shadow assumes a universal subject, somebody with the luxury of choosing what he represses. White American culture’s shadow includes the violence of slavery. The plantation lives in the white psyche whether the white psyche claims it or not. So when a white Master collars a white slave in 2026, that scene is also, whether the participants want it to be or not, an encounter with a collective shadow carrying four hundred years of actual, documented, chain-of-custody ownership of actual Black people. Thomas’s framework can hold that. His framework should hold that. The book, in practice, doesn’t. And the wild part is the people who could’ve held it for him were right there, already on the shelf. There’s no real engagement with Amber Musser’s Sensational Flesh, which makes sensation itself an analytic for understanding what it means to be embedded in structures of domination. Nothing sustained on Ariane Cruz’s The Color of Kink, the first monograph on race play, which won an MLA prize and argues that BDSM is, for Black women, a productive place to think through Black sexual practice and a way of accessing and contesting power. Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection, with its theory of counterintuitive power found at the very point of violation — that’s archetypal-meets-historical thinking, that’s exactly the conversation Thomas’s book should be in, and it isn’t there. Mollena Williams-Haas isn’t there, and Mollena is to American discourse on race and kink what Audre Lorde is to Black feminist poetics. Her central insight is that as a Black woman she does race play by default, because her Blackness gets read into any scene whether she intends it or not. That’s the exact thing his archetypal frame needed to wrestle, and it never lays a hand on it. And there’s no Jennifer Nash, whose The Black Body in Ecstasy makes the argument the whole field needed somebody to make out loud — that Black women’s pleasure can be read as pleasure. An archive of ecstasy and not only a ledger of injury. Nash is the one who keeps you honest after the history sinks in, and I’ll come back to her, because she saved me from my own worst instinct while I was writing. So why does a missing footnote in an academic book matter to us, the people actually writing these scenes? Because the omission doesn’t stay on the page. It walks into the room. A Black submissive walks into a dungeon. The room reads white. The implements are old. The iconography of leather culture is rooted in post-World War Two gay white veteran subculture, and the language she’s handed for what she’s about to feel is Master, slave, property, ownership, collar. Those words don’t mean for her what they mean for the white practitioner kneeling next to her. He gets to descend into archetypal territory, play with Hades, do his soul work, and Thomas’s framework honors all of it. She’s doing soul work too. She’s also doing a second thing he never names, moving through a vocabulary whose literal historical referent is her own ancestors. The collar has a literal cousin in the iron collar. “My property” has a paper trail in this country. Kneeling in front of a man summons an entire collective archive whether she summoned it or not. When a foundational text leaves all of that unspoken, the silence teaches everybody who reads it — white practitioners included — that her position doesn’t need marking. That she’s a variation on the universal subject rather than a person standing in a different relationship to every word in the room. The book becomes one more piece of architecture built to receive the white body without modification, and it trains a whole community to mistake that architecture for neutral. And that silence, for us, hardens into two failure modes every Black and brown kinkster already knows by heart. The first is the cold room. Nobody hangs a sign. Nobody has to. When the literature everybody points to, and the workshops built on it, and the language everybody defaults to all assume a white subject, she reads the absence instantly, the way you read a room that goes quiet when you walk in. The play party where she’s the only one. The munch where the organizer’s eyes do that little recalib

    The Soul Has Teeth — What Jungian Kink Theory Gets Right, and the One Room It Never Walks Into

  2. Jun 17

    18. THE KHALIL CHARACTER STUDY: THE TUNING, NOT THE MUSIC

    The Khalil Character Study: “The Tuning, Not the Music” Over the last two weeks, I walked you through Jade’s kink profile and Theo’s kink profile — who they are as a submissive and a Dominant, why every preference on their lists is wired to a wound, and how those wounds built the specific architecture of what they each want. And if you sat through both of those, you noticed there was a third person standing in the doorway of every conversation. The one who rebuilt Jade’s container after Devon took a wrecking ball to it. The one Theo drove out to Little Five Points to learn from. The one who spent seven years holding something that was never his and never once lied to himself about whose it was. This week we’re talking about Khalil Sinclair. Not as a supporting character. As a man. Because “The Audition” is live, y’all have finally met him, and I have got some things to say about what you just read. [SIGNPOSTING] Same format as Jade’s and Theo’s studies, but this one’s going to sit different, because the man at the center of it isn’t one half of the central romance. He’s the third architecture. The one who built the bridge the other two are walking across. And the craft question I want to live inside today is the hard one — how do you write a character whose entire purpose in the story is to make himself unnecessary, and somehow get the reader to fall in love with him on the way out the door? I also want to finally get into the thing I’ve been circling since the Shadow Work episode, which is what happens when two people’s wounds don’t crash into each other but cooperate. When two sets of defenses line up so clean that together they build something that looks like healing and has a ceiling poured right into the foundation. He and Jade are the case study, and I think it’s one of the least-written dynamics in all of kink romance. [THE MAN: WHO HE IS BEFORE THE ROLE HE PLAYS] So let’s talk about Khalil Sinclair the man, before we get anywhere near the Dom, because by the time I’m done you’re going to understand they were never two separate things to begin with. Here’s the why of him, and everything else in this episode hangs off it. This is a man whose calm is not a temperament. It’s a discipline he had to build, because the alternative was a body that never quite came down on its own. There’s a watchfulness that lives close under the surface in him, the kind that doesn’t switch off when the day ends, and what he figured out somewhere along the way is that control is the thing that quiets it. Structure settles him. Ritual walks him back into his own skin. So when you watch him move slow and deliberate through a room with not one wasted gesture, you are not watching a man performing serenity for your benefit, you’re watching a man doing the exact thing that holds him together, out loud, in front of you, and being generous enough to let you borrow the steadiness while he’s at it. That’s what Theo actually walks into in “The Audition.” Not a host expecting a guest, but a man already deep inside his own process who happened to leave the side door unlocked. And the first thing that registers, before Theo can even put words to what he’s looking at, is that the room is already holding a temperature, and he can either come down and meet it or stand there feeling loud until he does. Catch that, because it isn’t hospitality and it isn’t a power move. It’s just what this man’s presence does to a space whether there’s anybody in it or not. The steadiness was there before Jade ever wandered in off that sidewalk, and it’ll still be there long after she’s gone, because it was never built for her. It was built to keep him standing. She just got to live inside it for a while. And then there’s the house set back behind the shop, and I’ll be straight with you, the house is where he stops being a type and turns into a person. Because the same control that makes him unshakable in a scene is the exact thing that’s kept him alone, and the house is where both of those truths are sitting in the same room. This is a man who grows orchids the way other people pray. Who reads poetry in the quiet and comes apart at a Coltrane record and would sooner walk into traffic than let you witness either one in a scene. The house is the part of him the rope work doesn’t get to touch, the self underneath the role, and when Theo stands in the middle of it and pictures Jade there across all those Tuesday nights, what actually lands isn’t jealousy. It’s evidence. Proof that another man already held what Theo himself was too slow to reach for, and held it well, and held it lonely. [THE WHY UNDERNEATH THE WHY] Now I want to go one layer deeper than I did in the kink profiles, because a man like this doesn’t get built by accident, and I want you to understand what’s actually generating the calm and the distance and the beautiful boundaried thing he made with Jade. I’m not going to walk you through his whole history. The how and the when live in my notes, not in this episode. What I want is the why, because the why is what you can actually write from. Start here. Somewhere in him is a child who learned, early and for keeps, that his feelings were a burden somebody else couldn’t afford to carry. So he compressed them. He got easy. He got useful. He became the one who never added to the load, and he decided his own storms were things he’d weather alone and present to the world only after they’d passed. That’s not a quirk. That is the foundation the entire adult is standing on. The man who can hold anyone else’s overwhelm for hours and cannot, will not, say “I’m overwhelmed” out loud to save his life — that man started as a kid doing the math on whether his sadness was going to cost more than the household had. Second thing, and this one runs even deeper. He came into the world already braced for someone to leave, because the first person who could have stayed didn’t, and he never got a reason. So he made himself a private rule that has governed every connection since. Don’t get caught off guard. If the leaving is coming anyway, be the one who built the exit, name the ending before it can name itself, make the goodbye your decision as much as theirs. That’s the engine under everything that looks like wisdom in him. The clean boundaries, the temporary-by-design dynamics, the gift he has for letting people go gracefully — none of it is enlightenment. It’s a man who decided a long time ago that he would rather pre-grieve every loss than ever be surprised by one again. And the third thing ties the first two into a knot. He learned that he was worth keeping only as long as he was useful. Worth lived in function. So he became extraordinary at being needed and never once let himself examine whether being needed was the same thing as being wanted. He serves. Constantly, beautifully, expertly. And he will not let you serve him back, because some part of him is certain that the second he stops providing, the reason anyone stays disappears with it. Hold those three things together — the child who hid his needs, the boy braced for abandonment, the man who only feels safe when he’s useful — and you have the complete blueprint for how he loved Jade. Which is where this gets devastating. [THE DOM: HIS SPECIFIC ORIENTATION] Here’s the distinction every writer working with more than one Dominant needs to sit with, because it’s the whole reason these two men aren’t interchangeable even though they both lead from care. Theo’s dominance rises up out of attachment. It’s a way of loving one specific person, which means it needs that person to exist at all, and if you pulled Jade out of his life it would go looking for somewhere new to land, because it was never separable from how he bonds in the first place. His dominance is a function of his heart reaching for somebody. The man across the room from him runs on something else entirely. His dominance is a discipline he built on purpose, the way you’d build a practice or a faith, and it does not need a particular person to be real. He’d be exactly who he is alone in an empty house. And here’s the part the surface read of him always misses — he didn’t come to this looking for someone to dominate. He came to it looking for a way to survive his own nervous system, found his way to the truth that power held in service could regulate the thing inside him that wouldn’t rest, and then went and got himself a whole scholarly frame so he could understand why the thing that saved him actually worked. The practice came first. The partner was always the one who got to receive it, never the reason it existed. Which is precisely how he could hold Jade for seven years and stay standing. The same containment that made him safe for her is the containment he keeps wrapped around his own wanting. He could love her the entire time, never let it bleed into the work, and never let the work fall apart, because holding the unbearable thing steady and refusing to act on it is not some side effect of his dominance. It is the dominance. It’s the whole skill. He brings the identical stillness to his own grief that he brings to a body suspended in rope, and he carries it the way he carries everything, which is silently, completely, and without ever once making it your problem to hold. That’s how the two feelings get to live in him at the same time without canceling out. He is genuinely, fully glad she found the integration he was never going to be able to give her. And he is privately gutted that the one thing she needed was the one thing his own wounds had locked away years ago. Those don’t resolve into a single clean emotion. They just coexist, and that refusal to collapse into one feeling is the entire difference between a man and a plot device. There’s a line from Hafiz he hands Theo in the episode

    18. THE KHALIL CHARACTER STUDY: THE TUNING, NOT THE MUSIC

  3. Jun 10

    16. THE ARCHITECTURE OF THEO'S DOMINANCE & THE INTIMACY PARADOX

    AD SPOT: MIDNIGHT IN AUSTIN Hey, subbies… If you read Little Boxes, you already know all about Jade and Theo and their NYE ritual. One trip a year. Four days that belong to nobody but them. Four days where she doesn’t have to manage her face. This year he brings his wife. Midnight in Austin is the second book in my Before We Fell series, and it’s the slowest burn I’ve got. No cheating, no easy way out. Just a woman who learned that being small is how you keep people, and the one place she never had to do it, with a witness in the room. Read Little Boxes first. Austin is where the bill comes due. Coming June 21st 2026. Stop by tashalharrisonbooks.com for the deets! Last week we walked through Jade’s kink profile. Who she is as a submissive, why every preference on her list is wired to her wound, and why the bravery of her submission is in choosing to stay present inside her own surrender instead of hiding behind compliance. If you haven’t listened to that one yet, go back. Today builds on it, and then it builds past it. Because today is a double feature. First we’re doing Theo — who he is as a Dominant, why he’s wired this way, and how his wound shaped everything about how he holds power. And then, once you’ve got both profiles in your head — hers from last week, his from today — we’re going to do the thing everybody actually wants to talk about, which is what happens when these two finally meet. Because here’s the spoiler that isn’t a spoiler: they fit. The harder question, the one that runs the whole story, is why fitting that well is the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to either of them. If Jade’s episode was about the courage of surrender, Theo’s half of today is about the courage of admitting what you actually are. Which, for a man who has spent his entire adult life being told that what he actually is constitutes a character flaw, turns out to be the hardest thing he’s ever done. And he’s a civil rights attorney, so the bar for hard things is not low. Same rules as always. This is a character study and a craft conversation, not a scene recap. Spoiler-free. First half is Theo’s kink architecture — who he is as a Dominant and why. Second half is the intimacy paradox — what happens when two people whose wounds match perfectly still manage to hurt each other, not because they’re mismatched, but because proximity to the thing you actually need is more terrifying than distance from it. If you’re a writer, the first half is a blueprint for building a Dominant whose kink isn’t a costume he puts on for sex scenes, and the second half is a blueprint for writing romantic conflict that doesn’t need a villain or a misunderstanding to sustain it. If you’re a reader, this is the psychology underneath the command voice and the rolled-up sleeves and the way he angles her coffee mug just so. THE MAN BEFORE THE DOMINANT Just like last week, I’m not starting with the kink. I’m starting with the man. Because Theo’s dominance doesn’t make sense until you understand what happened to it before it ever got to be expressed. Theodore Matthews is forty-five years old. Civil rights attorney. Northwestern undergrad. University of Chicago Law. He left a partnership at a corporate firm in Seattle to take a pay cut and do the work he went to law school for in the first place. He is precise. He is structured. He is the man who alphabetizes spice cabinets and reorganizes the grocery cart by category and irons his jeans on a Tuesday morning because that’s just how he’s built. He researches everything. He has a rough outline for exploring the BeltLine on his phone. He remembers your three o’clock deadline from a phone call you had with someone else last Wednesday. And here’s the thing about Theo that you have to understand before we talk about kink. Every single quality I just described — the precision, the structure, the intensity, the focus, the need to plan, the inability to just let things be casual — every single one of those qualities has been identified, by the women who loved him, as a problem. Cameron told him he was too intense. Too controlling. That sex with him was exhausting. That he needed to relax, be spontaneous, stop trying to orchestrate everything. Sarah told him sex with him felt like a production. That he couldn’t just be in the moment. That his elaborate planning was about his need for control, not about her pleasure. That his focus was suffocating. That she needed equality, not whatever this was. Two relationships. Two women. The same complaint in different words. You’re too much. What you are is a burden. The way you love is work for the person receiving it. Please be less of yourself so I can be comfortable. And Theo, because he is a good man who loves the women in his life and wants them to be happy, took that feedback and internalized it as truth. Not as mismatch — as truth. He didn’t think “maybe I was with the wrong person.” He thought “maybe I am the wrong person.” He spent years learning to suppress the intensity. To soften the commands into requests. To apologize for taking charge. To perform a version of spontaneity that felt like wearing someone else’s skin. To edit himself into a shape that wouldn’t make the people around him uncomfortable. That’s the man who shows up in Atlanta. A man who has been dominant his entire adult life and has no idea, because every expression of that dominance has been pathologized by the people closest to him. He doesn’t know he’s a Dom. He just knows he’s too much. And those feel like the same thing to him, because nobody has ever told him they’re different. HIS PRIMARY KINK: CREATING THE CONTAINER Theo’s deepest kink is not a specific act. It’s not commands or bondage or orgasm control, although he gravitates toward all of those. His deepest kink is creating the structure that allows someone to surrender completely — not because they’re overpowered, but because they trust the container he built enough to let go. I want to sit in that for a second because it’s the thing that makes Theo different from most Dominant characters I’ve read. He is not interested in taking power. He is interested in building the architecture that makes someone want to give it. His dominance is about the container, not the command. The command is just what the container sounds like when it speaks. This is care-based dominance. Service dominance, if you want the formal language. And the psychological profile of a service dominant is almost a perfect overlay of who Theo already is: high conscientiousness, perfectionism, strong executive function, a need for his competence to be recognized as devotion rather than control. He plans because planning is care. He structures because structure is safety. He orchestrates because the person he loves matters enough to warrant the same sustained attention he’d bring to his highest-stakes professional work. When this orientation is directed at a partner who wants spontaneity and finds structure suffocating, it reads as controlling, excessive, exhausting. That’s what Cameron experienced. That’s what Sarah experienced. They were right about what they were feeling — being with Theo was overwhelming for them. They were wrong about the diagnosis. The problem wasn’t that Theo was too much. The problem was that Theo was offering dominance to women who weren’t wired to receive it. The same behaviors that ended his marriage are exactly what the right person has been starving for. The planning that felt like a production to Sarah feels like worship to a woman who craves being the center of devoted attention. The intensity that exhausted Cameron is the same intensity that makes Jade’s nervous system settle for the first time in years. The command voice they both told him to soften is the same voice that makes something low in Jade’s belly tighten when he says “Use your words, bestie.” The behaviors didn’t change. The receiver changed. And that recognition — “I wasn’t too much, I was Dominant with non-submissive partners” — is the central insight that heals Theo’s entire wound. But he doesn’t have it yet at the start of the story. He’s still carrying their voices. Still apologizing for taking charge. Still performing a softer version of himself because he’s been taught that the real version is dangerous. THE SPECIFIC PREFERENCES AND WHAT THEY MEAN AT LAYER THREE Let me walk through what Theo is drawn to and what each preference is doing psychologically. Because just like Jade, every kink on this list is an answer to a question his wound is asking. Orchestrated pleasure and scene planning. This is his signature. This is the thing that makes Theo, Theo, and it’s also the thing that destroyed both of his previous relationships — so I want to spend real time on it. Theo will plan an entire evening or an entire day around his partner’s pleasure. Every detail intentional. He’s thinking about what ingredients to buy for dinner — not because he’s a foodie, but because he remembers what she mentioned craving three days ago, whether she’s had enough protein, whether the meal should be heavy enough to ground her or light enough to leave her hungry for what comes after. He curates the music — not a playlist, a progression. Something ambient while she arrives, something with a pulse as the evening deepens, something with bass she’ll feel in her chest at the moment he’s been building toward for hours. He tested the volume levels while she was at work. He decides what she’ll wear — not because he’s controlling her wardrobe, but because the act of selecting her clothing is a decision she doesn’t have to make, and putting on what he chose is the first submission of the evening. He’s thought about the lighting. The temperature of the room. Whether there’s water on the nightstand for after, beca

    16. THE ARCHITECTURE OF THEO'S DOMINANCE & THE INTIMACY PARADOX

  4. Jun 3

    15. What Makes a Submissive Character Feel Real? Inside Jade Thompson's Kink Profile

    The submission isn't the starting point. The wound is. This week on Filthy Fiction With Feelings, we're running the wound-to-kink pipeline through a specific character — Jade Thompson, the submissive at the heart of A Soft Place to Land. Last week we talked theory. This week we show you what the theory produces. This is a character study, not a scene breakdown. No spoilers. We're going deep on who Jade is as a submissive, why her psychology is wired this way, and how every preference on her kink profile traces back to the woman she was before she ever walked into a scene. If you're a writer, this is a blueprint for building a submissive character whose kink is layer three all the way down. If you're a reader, this is the architecture underneath every scene you've read — and every scene that's coming. In this episode The woman before the submissive — Jade's ADHD, her chronic somatic pain, the cost of being the one who manages every room she walks into, and why her body learned to convert emotion into physical symptoms The distinction between obedience and surrender, and why Jade's submission style is earnest rather than bratty The five core preferences walked through at layer three: command and obedience, orgasm control, impact play, praise (and why "good girl" is the complicated one), bondage, being the center of orchestrated pleasure, and aftercare The "good girl" problem — why those two specific words are not a simple pleasure point for Jade and what reclamation looks like on the page Why aftercare is non-negotiable, and the one thing that will end a dynamic faster than a hard-limit violation The hard limits as character architecture — what every "no" on Jade's list is actually telling you about the experience that carved it The difference between twenty-four-seven total power exchange and the integration Jade is actually seeking — and why getting that distinction wrong is how Dom-side abusers operate A craft exercise for writers: how to build a submissive character from the woman backward, not from the kink list forward The craft point When a character says "I won't do that," the reader should be able to feel the weight of what happened the last time somebody didn't listen. The list is the surface. The reasons are the character. Next week Theo. His kink profile, his wound, and why every quality his exes punished him for is exactly what makes his dominance devastating when it finally lands on the right person. If this week was about the courage of surrender, next week is about the courage of admitting what you actually are. Where to find more ROM 101 — the craft publication for writers who take romance as seriously as it deserves. Prompts, breakdowns, the real work. Free on Substack. A Soft Place to Land — Jade and Theo's story, releasing weekly on Substack. Find me on Substack and tell me which of Jade's preferences hit you hardest, and why. I have a guess. I want to hear yours. Get full access to Filthy Fiction with Feelings at filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe

    15. What Makes a Submissive Character Feel Real? Inside Jade Thompson's Kink Profile

  5. May 20

    14. WHERE KINK MEETS CHARACTER: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER EXCHANGE AS SHADOW WORK

    So last time we were here, I was talking about the difference between a kinky story and a story with kink in it throw pillows versus load-bearing walls. And one of the things I kept coming back to in that episode was the idea that in a kinky story, the kink isn’t just what the characters do in bed. It’s how they see themselves. It’s how they see each other. It’s the lens through which the whole relationship becomes legible. And after that episode dropped, I got a bunch of messages that were basically some version of: okay, I hear you, the kink has to be structural. But how do I figure out what kink my character actually needs? How do I connect the sex to the psychology? How do I make sure the power exchange isn’t just hot but actually means something? And I realized I never actually explained the connection I’ve been making between kink and shadow work. Which is wild, because I am always writing from Jade and Theo’s shadow. Every craft choice I make in A Soft Place to Land starts from the wound and works outward. But I never sat down and walked y’all through that process. So that’s what we’re doing today. This is a craft episode. We’re going deep on character psychology, and we’re going to be in here for a minute. If you’re writing kink and you’ve ever struggled with why your sex scenes feel disconnected from your character arcs, this one is for you. If you’re reading kink and you’ve ever noticed that one book’s bondage scene hits you in the chest while another one just hits you in the mechanics, this is the conversation that explains the difference. I’m going to give you the framework I use to build kinky characters from the inside out. The wound-to-kink pipeline, as I’ve been calling it. And I’m going to show you how it works in practice with Jade and Theo. Okay. Let me start with what I think most romance writers get wrong about kink, and I say this with love, because I used to get it wrong too. A lot of writers think kink is about what characters do in the bedroom. The accessories. The handcuffs. The blindfolds. Someone in charge, someone on their knees. The choreography of dominance and submission. The mechanics of who does what to whom and in what order. And sure, that is part of it. But if that’s all you’re writing, you are missing the entire point. Because kink real, psychologically authentic power exchange isn’t about what characters do. It’s about who they are. It’s about the wounds they carry, the needs they can’t articulate anywhere else, the parts of themselves they’ve been taught to hide or suppress or apologize for. Kink is shadow work with a safeword. And when I write it that way when I use power exchange as a lens for character psychology and wound exploration and emotional archaeology I’m not just writing hot sex scenes. I’m writing transformation. I’m writing the moments when characters finally tell the truth about who they are and what they need. That’s the difference between decorative kink handcuffs because they look hot and architectural kink handcuffs because this character needs to stop being in control for five minutes and doesn’t know how to ask for that anywhere else. One is set dressing. The other is load-bearing structure. And if you listened to the last episode, you already know which one I’m interested in building. So let me define what I actually mean when I say shadow work, because I throw that term around a lot and I want to make sure we’re all starting from the same place. In Jungian psychology, the shadow is the part of yourself you’ve disowned. The traits, the desires, the needs and impulses you’ve been taught are unacceptable, so you shove them down into the basement of your psyche and pretend they don’t exist. The shadow is everything you don’t want to be but secretly are. Everything you don’t want to want but secretly do. Shadow work is the process of going down into that basement, turning on the lights, and actually looking at what you’ve been hiding. Not to judge it or fix it or make it go away. But to integrate it. To bring it into consciousness. To stop letting it run your life from the dark. And here’s the thing about D/s dynamics that I think a lot of writers miss. D/s dynamics create incredibly controlled environments for exactly that kind of shadow exposure. Think about it. In a negotiated power exchange, you are explicitly naming desires you might be ashamed of. You’re saying out loud, “I want you to hurt me,” or “I want to make you beg,” or “I need you to tell me I’m good when I do what you say.” You are taking the thing you’ve been hiding and making it the point. That’s shadow work. That is integration happening inside a scene. But this is where most kink writing goes wrong. It stops at the surface. And I want to talk about what I mean by the surface, because I think there are actually three layers to kink writing, and most writers only ever get to the first one. Layer one is what I call surface kink. That’s the choreography. The mechanics. The physical acts. “He tied her up.” “She knelt for him.” “They used a flogger.” And that’s fine. That’s necessary. You have to write the thing that’s actually happening. But if that’s all you’re doing, you’re writing a report, not a revelation. Layer two is psychological kink. This is where you ask why. “He tied her up because she spends every day holding everyone else’s life together and she needs to stop being in control.” “She knelt for him because surrender is the only time she can stop performing.” Now you’re connecting the act to the need. Now the scene means something beyond the mechanics. This is where good kink writing lives, and honestly, if you can get here consistently, you’re already ahead of most of what’s on the shelf. But there’s a third layer. And this is where I want to live. Layer three is shadow-work kink. This is the thing beneath the thing. The wound they’re trying to heal or hide. The identity they’re trying to reclaim or escape. The truth they haven’t let themselves admit yet. So “he tied her up” becomes “she needs to stop being in control” becomes “she is terrified that if she lets go, she’ll disappear. That the only reason people need her is because she’s useful. And if she stops being useful, she’s nothing.” That’s the shadow truth. That’s the wound. And that’s what the scene is actually about. Not the rope. Not even the surrender. But the fear that surrender means annihilation and the desperate hope that maybe, with this person, in this moment, surrender might mean something different. Might mean rest instead of erasure. And let me make this really specific, because I think this is the sentence that unlocks the whole framework for Theo. Theo’s shadow isn’t his dominance. His shadow is the shame around it. I need you to hear the distinction, because it changes everything about how I write him. Theo has been dominant his entire adult life. That’s not the thing he’s hiding. He’s been making decisions, creating structure, orchestrating other people’s experiences since he was a teenager. That’s just who he is. What he’s hiding what he has shoved so far into the basement of his psyche that he doesn’t even know it’s down there yet is that he wants it. That he likes it. That the “too much” every woman in his life complained about wasn’t a character flaw he needed to manage, but instead a desire he needed to own. The shadow work for Theo isn’t becoming a Dom. It’s admitting he already is one. And has been for decades. And that the wanting doesn’t make him dangerous it makes him honest. When I write kink at layer three, I’m not writing sex scenes. I’m writing the moments when characters confront the truths they’ve been running from their entire lives. Okay, so let me get practical, because I know some of you are sitting there going, that sounds beautiful, Tasha, but how do I actually do it? How do I get from “my character is kinky” to “my character’s kink is doing psychological work on the page”? I have a process for this. I’ve been calling it the wound-to-kink pipeline, and it’s how I build every kinky character I write. There are four steps. (Like to hear ‘em? Here they go!) Step one: identify the character’s core wound. I start by asking, what is the thing this character believes about themselves that shapes everything else? Not their backstory. Not what happened to them. What they believe about themselves because of what happened to them. For Theo, the core wound is: I’m too much, and that makes me unlovable. Sarah reinforced that wound for years. Every time he was decisive, she called him rigid. Every time he created structure, she called him controlling. Every time he approached something analytically, she told him he couldn’t just feel anything. She made him believe his natural instincts were the problem. For Jade, the core wound is: if I submit to someone, I’ll disappear. She’s been burned by men who confused submission in the bedroom with submission in life. Men who wanted her small and compliant everywhere. So she learned to keep kink and romance carefully separated. She’d submit to partners she didn’t love because emotional distance felt safe. But combining submission with real emotional connection? That felt like a recipe for erasure. Step two: determine how the wound shapes sexual psychology. Once I know the wound, I ask, how does this wound show up in their sexuality? In what they’re drawn to? In what they avoid? For Theo, his wound makes him suppress his natural dominance. Sarah trained him to second-guess every instinct to take charge. So at the start of the story, he’s not confidently dominant. He’s someone who wants to lead but has been taught that wanting to lead is a character flaw. His journey is about discovering that with the right

    14. WHERE KINK MEETS CHARACTER: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER EXCHANGE AS SHADOW WORK

  6. May 6

    13. THERE’S KINK IN THIS STORY vs. THIS STORY IS KINKY

    I'm back from a month-long breaky-break, and I'm coming in with a declaration: from here on out, every romance I write is a kinky romance. Not a romance with kink in it. To kick off Season 2 of the podcast, I'm getting into the craft distinction that makes the difference — what I've been calling throw pillows versus load-bearing walls. I'm using S2EP01 "Cartography" and S2EP02 "Clean Slate" as my evidence, and I'm breaking down what it looks like when kink is the architecture of a love story, not the wallpaper — from a six-forty-three-in-the-morning sex scene that's actually about a man discovering the shape of his own dominance, to a Tuesday kitchen moment where "Bellamy palette, three o'clock, go" is doing the same structural work as a formal D/s scene. In this episode, I'm talking about why the distinction between a kinky story and a story with kink in it changes everything about how you write, revise, and talk about your work. I walk through the self-assessment test I give my editing clients to figure out which one they've actually written, why treating kink as the conflict is a story from a different decade, and the difference between kink as pathology and kink as identity that had to be protected — including why Jade's trauma backstory is not what some readers think it is. I get granular on service dominance as stillness and why Theo choosing not to act on his instincts is the most dominant thing he does in the entire season so far. I show how the same man doing the same job in the bedroom and the kitchen twelve hours later proves the kink is structural. I name the Khalil conversation as a negotiation scene that doesn't look like one. I talk about body doubling at Java Vino as submission expressed through nervous system recognition. And I leave you with a craft exercise: write a domestic scene where the D/s is the subtext, and see if the kink reveals something a vanilla version wouldn't. Episodes referenced: S2EP01 "Cartography," S2EP02 "Clean Slate," and the Season 1 finale episode on language accumulating weight inside a relationship. Mentioned: A Soft Place to Land (Season 2, live on Substack), Little Boxes (Before We Fell companion series), ROM 101 (weekly craft publication), The Love That Remains. Come find me on Substack. Leave a comment and answer the question: is your kink decorative or structural? Get full access to Filthy Fiction with Feelings at filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe

    13. THERE’S KINK IN THIS STORY vs. THIS STORY IS KINKY

  7. Mar 11

    12. "GOOD JOB, BESTIE": HOW TO LOAD LANGUAGE WITH HISTORY

    How does a single word become the most loaded thing in your entire manuscript? Not because you wrote it beautifully — but because you’ve been investing in it for years without knowing that’s what you were doing. In this episode, Tasha breaks down one of her favorite structural craft moves: relationship vocabulary as architecture. Using the word “bestie” in A Soft Place to Land as the primary example, she traces how a word that started as ironic deflection between two best friends became — by Episode 12 — one of the most erotic and emotionally devastating words in the story. No announcement. No explanation. Just fifteen years of history doing exactly the work it was built to do. This episode also includes a bonus behind-the-curtain conversation where Tasha talks honestly about what it’s been like to write Season 1: where the story came from, which character surprised her, which scene cost her something personally, and what she’s most nervous about heading into Season 2. Mild spoilers for Episodes 12 and 13 of A Soft Place to Land throughout. In this episode: The difference between associative weight and relational weight — and why only one of them is yours as a writer. Why borrowed genre vocabulary (”good girl,” “sir”) does predictable work, and why built vocabulary does work nobody else can replicate. The five-step mechanics of loading a word with history deliberately. Why Theo’s Dominance developing without a D/s lexicon is a feature, not a limitation. A ROM 101 writing prompt you can use in your current manuscript today. Behind the curtain: how A Soft Place to Land started as 800 words and a vibe, why the two-entry-point architecture of the series was built on purpose, which character showed up fully formed and which one completely ignored his character notes, and what Tasha is most afraid to write in Season 2. Mentioned in this episode: A Soft Place to Land, Season 1 — serialized on Substack, Episodes 1–13 complete. Start from the beginning. Little Boxes — the first story in the Before We Fell companion series. New Year’s Eve 2021, New Orleans. The year Jade and Theo almost said it out loud. Drops March 20th on Substack. #20kin5Days — the next writing challenge runs April 22–26. Twenty thousand words in five days. Get on the list, ROM 101 — daily craft prompts and writing education, Monday through Friday on Substack. This week’s ROM 101 prompt: Find the word in your manuscript that your characters use only with each other. Ask what it’s protecting them from. Then find — or write — the moment the context changes and the protection falls away. Don’t announce it. Let the word carry the weight. Trust that it already does. Get full access to Filthy Fiction with Feelings at filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe

    12. "GOOD JOB, BESTIE": HOW TO LOAD LANGUAGE WITH HISTORY

  8. Mar 4

    11. THE MARKS HE LEFT: ON CLAIMING, CONSENT, AND AFTERCARE

    This episode breaks down why the instinct to tend to what you’ve done is the first real evidence of care-based Dominance… … and what Episode 12 of A Soft Place to Land reveals about writing characters who arrive at power exchange through wiring rather than education. In this episode, we talk about: * What aftercare actually is — neurologically, not just as a kink community practice — and why most romance fiction skips the most revealing character beats by ending the scene when the sex ends. * The difference between knowing a word and knowing it’s yours. Why a 45-year-old man with internet access and a dead marriage isn’t a blank slate, and why the distance between ambient knowledge and lived practice is where the real characterization lives. * The two movements of care in Episode 12 — the emotional aftercare on the porch before the sex, and the physical aftercare in the sheets after — and why both are doing the same work from different directions. * Why “We’re okay” is a different sentence than “It’s okay” — and what precision in grounding language tells us about a character’s instincts under pressure. * How Devon, Khalil, and Theo each handle the aftermath differently — and what Jade’s body learns from the contrast. * The joke as a return signal — why “You smell like a Peloton class” is the aftercare completing its purpose. Spoiler warning: This episode discusses Episode 11 and Episode 12 of A Soft Place to Land in detail. Writing prompt: What does your character do in the aftermath that the internet couldn’t teach them? What instinct shows up that no forum thread prepared them for? Mentioned in this episode: A Soft Place to Land, Episode 11: “Things I Never Said” (Jade’s POV — the accidental reveal) A Soft Place to Land, Episode 12: “Yes, Teddy” (Theo’s POV — this episode’s focus) Announcements: Little Boxes drops March 20th — the first novella in the Before We Fell prequel series. New Year’s Eve 2021. New Orleans. The almost that’s going to sit in your chest for days. The next #20kin5Days writing challenge is scheduled for April 22–26, 2026. Prep framework drops the week before. Mark your calendar. Where to find everything: Read A Soft Place to Land from Episode 1: https://filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/s/a-soft-place-to-land Little Boxes — available March 20th: https://www.tashalharrisonbooks.com/book-shop/p/little-boxes-before-we-fell-1-preorder New craft and commentary episodes drop alongside each chapter of A Soft Place to Land. Get full access to Filthy Fiction with Feelings at filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com/subscribe

    11. THE MARKS HE LEFT: ON CLAIMING, CONSENT, AND AFTERCARE
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Filthy Fiction with Feelings is the craft-and-commentary podcast of author and editor Tasha L. Harrison where she breaks down her own romance writing process in real time. filthyficwithfeelingspod.substack.com

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