Empowering SM: Kink as Self-Therapy by Tanonymous

BDSM Play and Safety: by Tanonymous Empowering SM: Kink As Self-Therapy?

While I don't think BDSM play is necessarily unhealthy, I do think some of us use it as a positive way to play out and gain a sense of empowerment over hurts that happened to us in the past - a kind of self-therapy that can be remarkably empowering and effective. Scripts etched deeply into our mind in childhood can feel somehow comfortable, even if they're dysfunctional and terrible for us and painful to act out. Regardless of the roles we choose to play, and who we choose to be to one another, we are all potentially healers and healed, nurturers and the ones taken care of. It's all right to be afraid, sometimes. Try to keep this in mind. Your personal feelings, your fears and your weaknesses are your right as a human being. You have the right to be little and scared, and held and reassured. That's a lot of what some of us BDSM'rs like to play with, the need to be nurtured when you're scared or hurt. Different things scare and hurt different people; depending on what happened to them when they really were little, and the choices they made then. Some of those things are too terrifying to play with, and some of them are the things that we most want to play with. If you ever got caught trying on Mommy's clothes, or if you were caught masturbating, often that sense of shame is internalized, eroticized and sometimes fossilized in the cores of ourselves.

Unless we deliberately replay those sensations, and make the choices again in our adult lives, it can continue to shape who we are without our control or our consent. This is one of the reasons why we play. We are talking to those deeply buried feelings within ourselves, and even when we don't remember why we have them, we have the need to control them and eroticize them and make them into something positive and healthy. We reclaim our own power over ourselves and our own healing by voluntarily choosing to replay old scripts with new outcomes. Yes, the naughty little boy gets punished - but he also has an orgasm. It's OK to put on Mommy's clothes, and instead of being disapproved of, you're told how sexy you look. You're forced to do something "terrible and degrading", and of course you love every minute of it, since you suggested it in the first place. You surrender yourself and are made helpless, and no harm comes of it. Or you surrender yourself and you are beaten; but then you are hugged and held and loved, and the pain becomes both an expression of caring and a cathartic release. These scripts might once have been genuinely abusive, emotionally or physically, but through consensual and caring play we can transform them into something positive and healing. The healthy BDSM'r says, "This is something I choose now for myself, and it makes me stronger. I am empowered and I am healed by honoring these feelings I have, and acting them out in a healthy way with a consenting partner."