Somatic healing can help us process trauma that has become stuck in the body.

It can bring us back to the body. This way, we can slowly, gently, move away from being stuck in survival and move towards living in a state of nervous system regulation.

This isn’t always easy. Often, trauma survivors find a body scan triggering. If you’re used to living in a state of hyper-vigilance, letting your guard down can feel scary and destabilising.

It needs to be done slowly, gently and compassionately.

The Mechanics of Healing through Kink

Trauma survivors may be drawn to kink for a number of reasons, or a mixture of reasons. These include (but are not limited to): autonomy; safety; intimacy; embodiment; play; pleasure; mindfulness; community; and reframing.

Let’s look at these in turn.

Autonomy

A sense of autonomy is often stolen from survivors of trauma.

If your body had things done to it, without consent, you likely felt a deep lack of autonomy, agency and control.

If you were put in dangerous, uncomfortable or unfamiliar situations without having the space or voice to say no, you likely felt not in control of your own life, body and selfhood.

In contrast to this lack of stability and autonomy is the clear, consent-centred, structured world of kink. Negotiations,  clear communication, aftercare, safe words, protocols: all of these can help trauma survivors test boundaries with themselves and others; learn what it feels like to have your “no” respected; and begin to feel in control.

Safety

Once we feel in control of our bodies and our selves, we can begin to feel safe.

Trauma often makes the body an unsafe place to be and makes relationships feel unsafe. For many, the structure of a kink relationship provides the scaffolding that is needed for the body and for other people to feel safe.

An embodied sense of safety is measured through social engagement (feeling valued, heard and trusted), compassion (feeling connected to others and to the self) and bodily sensations (breathing, facial expression, tension).

Even though scenes often lean into a sense of fear – the exact opposite of safety – they start and end with this embodied safety and always keep one toe in regulation, helping trauma survivors to inhabit their own bodies.

Intimacy

Many trauma survivors learned that intimacy is dangerous, and the safe thing to do is to shut down in moments of intimacy. It can take time for someone in this position to start to feel safe in moments of intimacy.

But intimacy can also be one of the joys of life and one of the joys of kink.

Intimacy is not only physical: it can be about opening up to others; about being yourself around others, feeling relaxed and safe and close to others.

Kink, at its best, can be a space where that guard comes down slowly and safely.

Embodiment

Somatic embodiment can feel scary and unsafe for many trauma survivors.

We often learn through trauma to become disembodied: to dissociate from ourselves to survive. The journey back into the body, the reunion of body and mind, can be terrifying against the backdrop of a learned disembodiment response.

A felt sense of autonomy, safety and intimacy are needed in order for us to become attuned to our bodies; and even then, it can be challenging.

Only once we feel this sense of safety can we start to notice the bodily sensations associated with this safety: how does my breathing feel? What is my heart doing?

This can look different in different contexts and different kinks: the sensations of rope, impact and other sensation play; embodied intimacy with trusted others, the hormonal rush associated with pain play, and much more.

Over time, this becomes an embodied resource we can return to as we learn to inhabit our body, and that we return to in moments of stress.

Play

Play is joyful, embodied and deeply somatic.

We need to feel safe and autonomous in order to be able to play.

Play, therefore, is often stolen from survivors of trauma. Play can be seen, in this context, as the opposite of shame and disbelief often experienced by trauma survivors.

If we feel safe and in control enough, we can access the novelty of play; explore new movement patterns; and potentially change the fear response our body is used to. This exploration can in turn lead to a greater sense of safety in the body, as well as resilience, well-being and capacity for social engagement.

I wrote a whole series about how kink is nervous system play: how we deliberately push our nervous system to its edge.

Pleasure

Closely linked to play is pleasure. When we play we feel joy; we feel embodied; we feel uninhibited: and in pleasure too.

Integrating pleasure into kink scenes can help to reestablish felt safety in the body and in intimacy. If the body was a place of dread, fear or misery, we can shift towards safety, intimacy and joy through pleasure; whether physical, emotional, hormonal, cognitive or otherwise.

For some, especially bottoms and submissives this pleasure involves surrender: allowing yourself to release all control over a scene.

While this can be deeply therapeutic for some, it is not available to others. “surrender” can imply submission and joyful abandon for some; but for others, it comes with a sense of capitulation and frightening abandon.

Surrender is not some standard we have to hold ourselves to; and if it is not available to you now or ever, that’s good. Acknowledge the wonderful drive for agency, and take what you need from a scene.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is an integral part of somatics. It’s about slowing down and noticing the moment: how you feel somatically, the sounds and smells of the moment, your thoughts.

For many trauma survivors, conventional mindfulness like body scans and meditation can feel impossible or triggering. The mind distracts to keep you safe.

Kink, with its heightened sensory input, can be the vehicle through which mindful embodiment finally feels possible.

Community

Trauma often robs people of community: a sense of shared experience is the exact opposite of the isolation of trauma, especially childhood trauma and CSA, can cause.

The fact that the kink community specifically centres consent, communication and safety, can make it the community that trauma survivors feel at home in.

We don’t need to share our experiences of trauma in order to find community. We can create shared experiences through scenes, munches, rope jams and much more.

Reframing

Rather than some sort of drive to relive something traumatic, kink for many people is about reframing traumatic events into something safe.

Trauma-play was developed to support Black women with a history of trauma. The disembodiment of objectification and exploitation can be healed through kink, if done properly.

While rooted in the experiences of Black women, this framework has since been extended to support other trauma survivors, including other marginalised groups, to reframe traumatic events.

Far from being a compulsion to relive, this is a deliberate way of rescripting traumatic events by reenacting them in a safe environment where you feel in control, slowly replacing the somatic memories of fear with ones of empowerment.

A well-held kink scene done with the purpose of reframing can map onto the therapy modality of Child-Centred Play Therapy (CCPT), which follows the Four S’s Model:

·       Sensory: First, we willingly reactivate sensory memories of trauma: visual, auditory, tactile and motor responses that we had during the moment.

·       Soma: Then we relive the somatic memories of trauma: becoming stiff, flinching; allowing the trauma energy to come into the body.

·       Surge: Next, we play: acting out responses that were not available back there, back then. This reestablishes a sense of autonomy and helps us to discharge the trauma energy.

·       Soothe: We finish with the calming, healing sense of safety and security of aftercare.

This reenactment will probably feel unavailable for many, and in therapeutic settings is done with a lot of planning involving a trauma-informed therapist, a kink educator and an experienced BDSM practitioner. This is not something to be taken lightly.

This is not a type of healing that is available for many in the scene, and that’s okay. The other items on this list are much more accessible to many people; you can start there.

Is Kink Healing?

Kink, for many, is a instrument of healing. It can help us to feel safe, to find community, to feel in control, to feel the joy of play and pleasure, or to reframe traumatic incidents.

That being said, kink isn’t therapy, and doesn’t replace therapy.

Reframing, in particular, holds a real risk of retraumatisation if done without the structural safeguards used in Therapeutic BDSM – which involves a team of experienced professionals.

Everything above is best done within a context of curiosity: exploring your responses; being compassionate when things go wrong, and playing with your nervous system.

Conscious kink, done this way, can be one of the many ways that the body finds its way home.  

Disclaimer: This space centres consent, autonomy, harm reduction, and nervous system awareness. I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice.

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