As sadomasochism becomes more evolved, there is a tendency to transgress from the physical experience of spanking someone’s ass to a more emotional or spiritual adventure. For better or for worse that process touches more vulnerable places, and makes it harder for the dominant to successfully balance between selfishness and holding space. As the play might trigger one of the underlying protective mechanisms it becomes important to understand how they work, and what is at stake when fiddling with them. Trauma is one such protective mechanism. Addiction, emotional numbness, anxiety etc., are others.
Perceiving trauma as a protective mechanism, I think, helps. Someone had a shocking experience and is trying to avoid it again. This only makes sense. However, our nervous systems are not aware when circumstances change. So, depending on one’s past experiences connected with being wrapped tightly, one might feel either panic and need to escape or hugged and held. So feeling panic and a need to escape when wrapped tightly makes sense for some people, while others just feel hugged and held. As a bodyworker, I occasionally meet clients who have a traumatic history, and I also encounter general issues around sexuality, intimacy, control and power. Who doesn’t have some of these? I think it’s an entirely normal encounter in private sessions, retreats and festivals. It’s part of the learning for the client and, therefore, part of my work. I have a desire to share some of the experiences I gained over the years.
To begin, I think it’s essential to differentiate between three categories of possible trauma-related scenarios in sadomasochistic play:
- Dominating someone with a hidden trauma, where the goal is simply to have a good time, but then an unknown trigger may explode like a landmine to the surprise of everyone involved.
- Dominating someone who has a history of trauma and is aware of it, but the goal is still simply to have a good time. So call this a trauma-aware session.
- Dominating someone to approach a known trauma and establishing new healthier circumstances using consent and conscious boundaries. Call this a therapeutic session.
In short, landmine, trauma-aware and therapeutic sessions. As the dominant, it’s essential to ask yourself, what kind of session do you want to have?
If you feel insecure about or incapable of having a discussion about your partner’s trauma history, then I would recommend reading up on trauma, and Steve Haines’ 20-page graphic novel Trauma is Really Strange (2015) is an easy, helpful start.
So What Do I Do With A Traumatised Submissive?
Sometimes, on more cynical days, I think it’s better to approach someone unaware of their traumas as potential landmines because everyone has somehow been broken. But it’s a dangerous way of thinking because there is also a trend to generalise any unwanted experience as traumatising. This overshadows people who have been severely screwed over by life. It’s a bit like when someone keeps their room tidy and jokes that, oh they’re so OCD, but there are people out there who cannot leave their homes without checking the lock forty times. On less cynical days I think that most people more or less manage to have their life together and, therefore, can enjoy amazingly delicious sadomasochistic play without first spending three years in therapy. Not all instances of lack of social grace necessarily arise from trauma.
Most of my clients are curious about bondage and seek a trauma-aware professional to have their session, the second category from the list above, to learn about themselves for themselves. However, there is also “an in-between client” with a traumatised background that is contained so they can function to various degrees in everyday life. For example, maybe they engaged in talk-based therapy or some other bodywork or other forms of work on the self. So then, they want to re-enter a similar situation that caused the trauma, usually related to letting go of control in an intimate setting, and they wish to relearn with me what it means to surrender and submit while maintaining healthy boundaries consciously.
I write this to give a context as to why I don’t believe in catharsis. That trauma isn’t miraculously healed in a movement of pushing through a painful experience to reach some kind of enlightenment. I think it gets confused with rites of passage or overcoming incredible challenges. That is great for personal growth but poor for healing. As most bondage sessions are for fun, avoiding a traumatic response should be the goal. And if a landmine is encountered, then the focus would switch over to de-escalating the situation.
In the old-school sadomasochistic subculture, there is praise for the famous stopword. Be it jellyfish, red, or simply stop. Of course, it’s always good to have a stop button, but it’s more important to know that a traumatised person might not push it because they have learned to be borderless. If intimacy is associated with being forced into a traumatic response, knowing how to give consent is never discovered. In this way the people who cause trauma by overstepping boundaries are similar in that they are also likely to be borderless. Just like people who have been bullied are likely to become bullies themselves.
It’s as if something has been broken in intimate relating and consent as feeling together. In the more new-school-conscious kink world, enthusiastic consent is praised, but this doesn’t work either with someone who is borderless, in my experience. Tying rope with someone potentially traumatised can include taking complete responsibility for the boundaries they ‘should’ have but do not. I think most people do this unconsciously because it’s outside of their limits to deal with the trauma response of others. At least if their goal in bondage is fun, and they expect their partners to be able to protect their boundaries. But it gets dangerous when two borderless people meet, especially if their goal is catharsis.
Fight Flight Freeze Fawn As Potential Responses
I think it’s good to know about the four common trauma responses—the first two are the easiest to understand; fight and flight. The surge of adrenaline, the taste of panic, and the urge to immediately change what is happening. To get out or to fight the way free.
I often describe the difference between endurance and surrender. But endurance can be tricky, as I think we also learn to endure challenges without triggering the fight-and-flight system. It’s like learning to suppress the reaction to stay and overcome a challenge. So the submissive might have learnt to suppress their nervous system in order to stay longer in bondage or receive a harder whipping. Sometimes to overcome a challenge to be proud of themselves or to simply please their dominant. A common paraphrase is to feel one’s feelings but not have to act on them. However, if the fight-and-flight trauma response is triggered, it’s almost impossible to miss it.
The other two trauma responses are freezing and fawning. Freezing means no longer being present with the current experience. It’s also sometimes described as disassociating or floating away to another place. Peter Levine, a famous teacher of somatic work, explains it as the soul having left the body. While freezing as a trauma response can be problematic and requires attention and action to deal with properly, there is another phenomenon, very common to the sadomasochistic experience, that looks very much like the freeze response but is closer to what I might call a ‘mythical subspace’. I have experienced this and others also describe it as an otherworldly, surreal journey experienced when going deep into meditative sadomasochism. I can’t quite nail how it exactly differs from dissociation, but I know it is a big reason for many people stepping into sadomasochism in the first place. It is almost always described as extremely pleasant, meaningful, positive, and something entirely different than the freeze trauma response.
Finally, I think fawning is the most problematic response of all to deal with in a session. Fawning refers to adapting to something external through giving up one’s will and doing things one doesn’t want to. The goal of fawning is to prevent something worse from happening. Or it’s engaged in as it might appear easier to deal with the known unwanted situation rather than a threat of unknown proportions from something that might occur. This can be very insidious as a fawning response might even lure the non-traumatised partner deeper into a harmful situation. This process can be a tricky, sneaky one as not only does it make the fawner an expert in fooling their environment, they may even fool themselves by being unaware of their own fawning. Warning signs signalling fawning can include people changing their minds radically during a session, appearing borderless, or seemingly agreeing to anything. Fawning is trickier still as it can sometimes be confused as regular playing with submission, consensually giving up their will during sadomasochistic play.
Over the years I’ve encountered hundreds of people in my private exploration, as well in my therapeutic sessions that have fawning tendencies. Heck, I might even myself fawn sometimes to avoid an uncomfortable situation. Like saying yes, to that reunion coffee with a beyond-boring highschool classmate. Adapting to others is part of human behaviour. It’s tricky just because fawning shares borders with consensual non-consent, submission and devotion. I think the key is to evaluate if the fawning becomes addictive and destructive.
