ABOUT SERAPHINE

The venture capitalist who can evaluate a company in thirty minutes but can't stop looking at porn at his desk. The surgeon who operates for twelve hours straight but lies to her husband about money. The founder who built a company from nothing but can't stick to a boundary with his ex-wife. I've worked with all of them, and here's what they have in common: they're brilliant at everything except governing themselves. By the time they find me, they've tried the therapy and the apps and the accountability partners, and what they're actually looking for, whether they can name it or not, is for someone to take the choices away entirely.

I spent fifteen years in corporate leadership before I realized the most interesting problems were the ones no one wanted to name out loud. I rose to C-suite positions at companies you would recognize, left to work as an executive advisor, and now I spend most of my time diagnosing why high-functioning people can't execute the most basic commitments in their personal lives.

The other half of my professional background comes from a decade working as a professional dominatrix (and yes, these careers overlapped). Not the theatrical version, but a private practice where powerful men and women pay significant money to hand over control in ways no one in their lives would ever know about. Some people may find this combination strange, but in my experience, the work is nearly identical.

When a board brings me in, their company is bleeding money and no one will admit why. When a client comes to me, he's bleeding time and energy and can't stop the same patterns.

In both cases, everyone knows what the problem is, they just need someone from outside the system to name it bluntly, and hold them to account.

The corporate work gave me frameworks for seeing where systems break down. The domination work showed me what happens when you remove negotiation entirely. Combine them and you have something most therapists and coaches can't offer: the ability to say "you're lying to yourself about this" with brutal honesty, refusing to accept excuses for an answer.

While my formal education is extensive, several master's degrees in business and organizational psychology (all the frameworks for understanding how systems fail and how humans organize themselves), the actual education came from spaces where people stop performing and finally tell you what they want. That's where you learn what actually changes behavior, as opposed to what we pretend changes behavior.

I came to domination work through curiosity about power itself. I wanted to understand why people who command empires in their professional lives seek out women like me and beg to be told what to do; why the release of autonomy feels like mercy instead of defeat.

Autonomy is exhausting. Infinite choice is paralyzing. Most people are desperate for someone who knows what they're doing to take the burden of decision-making away, even though admitting that would shatter the image they've built their lives around.

The psychology of power exchange is not fundamentally a fetish.

Power exchange is a framework for understanding how humans relate to authority and structure. Take religion, for example. We built entire civilizations around it in an effort to remove the burden of choice. A rulebook that governs every aspect of your life. No need to think. Just worship and obey. It sounds freeing if you think about it long enough.

I spent years learning how to wield authority in a way that feels like relief rather than oppression, how to read the shifts in someone's nervous system when they finally stop resisting, how to calibrate the right amount of pressure without crossing into harm. You cannot learn this from books. You learn it from repetition, from hundreds of hours in rooms where the social contract has been suspended and you can see what people are like when they stop pretending.

The House of Selection is what I call this convergence. Clients complete diagnostic work that exposes their patterns, then follow protocols I design for their specific failures. They report compliance daily. There are consequences when they don't. The work removes the burden of autonomy from people whose autonomy has produced the exact circumstances they are trying to escape.

Most of my clients are high-functioning professionals. Men, women, executives, founders, investors, people who lead capably by day and collapse in private at night. They are exhausted from the performance, from the gap between what they present to the world and what they feel inside. They come because they know the fiction is unsustainable and they are done pretending otherwise.

I worked with a CEO once who had been to rehab twice for drinking. Had a therapist, a sponsor, tracking apps, the whole infrastructure. Nothing worked because he could always negotiate his way out. An app does not care if you lie to it. I do. We did not fix his drinking directly,

we fixed his inability to do anything without leaving himself an escape route. Once that changed, the drinking became manageable.

That is the pattern I see most often: people who can make billion-dollar decisions at work but cannot stop scrolling at midnight. Who can lead teams through crises but cannot maintain a consistent sleep schedule. They have externalized all their discipline into professional performance and have nothing left for themselves.

I am highly selective about who I accept.

The application process forces people to be specific about their failures in ways most people are not comfortable with. If someone writes "I have been lying to my wife about money for three years and I know exactly when and how I do it," that is different from "I struggle with financial transparency." The first person is ready to be seen. The second is still managing their image.

When I decline someone, I tell them why. Sometimes they are grateful for the honesty and return later, ready. Sometimes they are offended, which confirms they were not ready for work that requires you to hear uncomfortable truths about yourself.

Most clients come through referrals, though I maintain a deliberate presence that makes the work findable for those ready to look for it.

I do this work because I have seen what happens when someone finally encounters the structure they have been searching for.

I have watched men who command empires cry, not from pain but from relief, from the release of a burden they did not know they were carrying. I have watched women who have spent their entire lives performing finally discover what they actually want when the conditioning is stripped away.

The transformation is permanent because once you have seen yourself clearly, once the pattern has been named and brought into the light, you cannot unsee it. You cannot go back to pretending it does not exist.

And unlike therapy, this actually ends. Most clients work with me for six months to a year. They have internalized the structure, see the benefits of it, and do not need me anymore. The goal is not to create dependency. The goal is to transfer the governance from me to them. Some clients try to extend indefinitely because the structure feels good and they are worried about losing it. That is when I know it is time to end.

This work is not mysterious or kinky or any of the things people assume when they hear about power exchange. It is just structure applied to humans.

Some people need external authority to function well, the same way some people need external deadlines to finish projects.

There is nothing shameful about that. The shame comes from pretending you do not need it and then wondering why nothing changes.

If you have read this far, you already know whether this is for you. The application will ask you to be more honest than you have been with anyone, including yourself. I will see things you do not want me to see. I will ask questions you do not want to answer. The transformation that follows, if you can tolerate the discomfort, is permanent.

But you have to be ready. Most people are not, no matter what they tell themselves. When you are, you will know.