Dana Pharant, a master healer, life strategist, and former dominatrix, joins Tatiana Berindei to discuss how she incorporates the dominatrix approach in female empowerment. She brings 25 years of experience in guiding clients to big shifts. She draws on tools that are proven to work and field-tested with a range of people and organizations. As a former registered massage therapist, she’s extensively studied the human body, as well as human behavior and energy psychotherapy. Listen in as she shares her dominatrix approach to female empowerment.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Sex, Love, and SuperPowers podcast show. I’m your host, Tatiana Berindei, and I’m really excited to have with me today Dana Pharant. We’re going to be talking about the dominatrix approach to female empowerment. It is not every day that I get to interview a former dominatrix and discuss things from the shadow side, so I’m really, really excited to dive in with Dana today. Dana Pharant is a master healer, life strategist, former dominatrix and past CEO of a seven-figure business. She helps people get out of their own way and live — no excuses, no apologies — their most powerful, connected and fun-filled lives. Having grown up in a cult and survived just about every form of abuse, she’s made it her life’s work to heal herself first and then help others to truly step out of victim into authentic power, utilizing 25 years of working with clients and refining her process to what works. Let’s give a big, warm, superpower welcome to Dana Pharant. I’m so happy to have you here today.
Thank you, Tatiana. I’ve been looking forward to connecting with you in this interview.
Yeah, me too. I am going to start out this interview with a question that we love to ask people when they come on the superpower podcast shows, and that is what are your superpowers, Dana?
I would say one of my interesting superpowers is being able to smell the bullshit.
That’s cool.
There’s no lying to me because I can tell energetically.
Thank you. There’s no lying to me because I can tell energetically. So when somebody’s lying, there’s an energy resonance. When people are talking to me and they are deluding themselves as to who they think they are or what they’re capable of, I can really suss that out and then be able to feed that back to them. So I’m the bullshit sniffer.
I love it. I love it. I am just super curious to know more about you, about your life, about how you came into this work. Like I mentioned, it’s not every day that I get to talk to someone who’s worked in the dominatrix field. I find it to be a really fascinating world that I know very little about, but I’m very intrigued. What led you into that work, and how do you pull from that work into what you do today with your clients?
Thank you. I need to back it up. I’m going to go back to my childhood, in which I experienced sexual trauma and spent a number of years figuring out how to heal that. When I left home and left that cult, I went through all these different therapies and was trying to work through it. Along the way, I found that I had this desire to experience the kink world, so the BDSM, which is that whole whips and chains power play, pain and pleasure mix. That actually led me to discover that world. That scene setup was a way for me to heal the sexual trauma on such a deep level because I was able to surrender. I was able to re-create the experiences but have an entirely different outcome, which allowed me to take back my power. It also allowed me the actually physically release the trauma out of my cells at a level that I didn’t even know was possible.
So of course, that experience and my being a healer led me to want to take other people on that journey. So that’s where I traded sides of the whip, so to speak, and stepped into being dominatrix because I wanted to take people on this journey of healing and deep, deep transformation that is possible within that realm, and it’s something that a lot of people don’t tend to think about because on the outside, it looks like this power over kind of situation, and that’s not at all what it is. We pretend to have power over, but in fact, the submissive has all of the power. They have the ultimate stop. And we just do this little dance where they surrender their power so that the facilitation can take place so that this transformation can happen and this wonderful experience can happen. It’s actually very healing. Well, with a good person, it’s very healing. There are some interesting people in that world too. But for me, it was always in that healing bent, and the interesting play that can happen in allowing somebody to experience a deep level of surrender, a deep level of meditation that nobody ever gets to was such an incredible gift for me.
I heard you say that you were approaching it in a very healing way but that maybe not everybody in that world is coming from that place. A question that comes up for me is if someone is hearing this, say someone has experienced a lot of sexual abuse trauma in their past, and they make a decision to want to choose the path of seeing a dominatrix or seeing somebody in the BDSM community to work through that, what would you recommend that people look for in their exploration of that so that they find someone who is genuinely coming from a place of a desire to heal and not … because I think the lines can get blurred.
Absolutely. And great question. Here’s what I would suggest to map out. First and foremost, when you’re entering that world, that you need to have already done a certain amount of your own inner work. You can’t go there completely broken. You need to know where it is that you feel empowered, how that feels to be empowered. Approaching these situations and approaching people from the perspective of I don’t need to give up all of me in order to have this experience. The initial meeting with a dominatrix or a dom, which would be the male version, it should be neutral. You should be two people coming together as equals. If that does not feel like equals, in the beginning, run because then the other person is not from that headspace of having your interest in mind. So that’s one red flag.
The other red flag I would say to look out for is if you can, if you’re seeking out a professional, then get recommendations from other people. How does this person play? Do they respect boundaries? Do they respect hard limits? If you’re going the public route where you’re going to experience play parties, those are great because you can visually see how somebody plays and engages with others. That gives you a lot of information. So do your research. Just because you want to experience this and want to actually surrender yourself in this scene does not mean that you surrender who you are outside of the scene. I think that’s a really important distinction for people that you’re not giving up who you are in order to have that experience.
Thank you for that. I think that is a really important distinction to make. I think it can be easy to get lost in that world a little bit.
It is, and especially for some people who are new and they’re really keen and they really want to experience it. For people who are more submissive in nature, they tend to be the people pleasers and they’re the ones that often get walked on. I saw a lot of abuse happening within the kink community, where there were people who would take advantage of that. They know that there are these people who can easily be preyed on, like having somebody who can be your mentor along the way, a checkpoint. Before you say yes to playing with anybody, you can maybe check in with them and say, hey, what do you think of this person? If you don’t trust your own inner wisdom just yet, then have somebody else who’s got your back.
That is great advice. Thank you so much for that. You mentioned encouraging people to do a fair bit of their own work on their trauma before entering into that realm. What do you recommend for people to really move through some of the more intense traumas?
A lot of the stuff that I do is in that psychotherapy energy realm.
There’s a lot of different ways to approach this. I know for myself, I did a fair bit around group counseling. I went to a one-on-one counselor. Those were really great for the intellectual side of things. There are faster ways to move through it now, my opinion anyway. I like some of the energy psychotherapy tools, so neurolinguistic programming, even things like emotional freedom technique, which is meridian tapping. A lot of the stuff that I do is in that psychotherapy energy realm, and it moves people through it in a way that’s a little gentler, instead of having to relive it, which … we’re finding actually if you are reliving it, like going through the details and whatnot, you are actually retraumatizing yourself. So you want to have something that’s actually starting to move it out and getting into a place where you’re feeling more empowered in general.
Beautiful. I can’t wait to dive deeper into your story. We are going to take a quick break, but before we do, will you tell people where they can find out more about your work and how to find you?
Absolutely. My website is danapharant.com. You can also get to it via innerdominatrix.com. And then, of course, my name. If you Google my name, I am the only Dana Pharant in the world, so you can find me through all the social media that way.
That’s pretty cool.
It is.
That’s very unique, actually. Awesome. I really can’t wait to dive deeper into some real practical tips that women can walk away with from your own journey when we get back from the break. We’ve been talking with Dana Pharant about the dominatrix approach to female empowerment. Stay tuned. A lot more juicy stuff when we get back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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