The issue isn’t really the type of thing that Jen W. is citing; we all have our daily traumas, on various levels, that we work out iin the course of our normal activities, be they BDSM-related or vanilla. I’ve had to deal with two, relatively long-term relationships with submissives that were in therapy, though not for anything directly related to our D/s actiivities.

For one, it simply led to an inability to let go, or be in the moment. Her therapy was teaching her to examine her actions and their root causes and, as a result, she could never find the right headspace to resume her previously happy role as a pain puppy. Without that perspective, she simply couldn’t let her body go where it needed to go. We parted amicably when we realized what the issue was, and she later returned to the seen with her now husband and is able to enjoy herself, after working out whatever issues there were that were in the way.

The second was in lots of therapy that started when we came across a veritable minefield of triggers when pushing D/s limits. Unfortunately I soon discovered that she was the type of person who felt that if you treated the symptoms, the root cause didn’t matter, and it became such a chore to be involved with her, as more and more issues popped up everyting she thought she had addressed on (it became a game of emotional “Whack-A-Mole”). we remain friends, but to this day she still doesn’t understand why we broke up, despite the daily drama she inflicts on herself and those around her while saying “Why me?”

She was searching for answers in BDSM, when she should have been focusing on the analyst’s couch.

And, FWIW, actual “gun people” that I know in the scene are rarely the ones that are interested in “gun play” roleplay scenarios. Too many years of drilling in that guns are not toys makes violating evwery possible safety rule in the search for sex games a line they won’t cross.

This piece struck me, too. As a person who’s been the object of real violence in a way that’s stuck with me, I get a little sad when I hear people saying that I’m somehow not eligible to play in their kinky, freaky sandbox.

I do have lingering issues about trust and control stemming from those violent experiences, and I do get a lot of clarity, insight, and comfort from the kind of sex I have with my partner — which by anybody’s estimation is pretty rough sex.

The thing is, I’m married to my partner. My issues aren’t news to him, and he has to deal with them anyway — we have slept in the same bed for 16 years. He knows when I wake up from a nightmare. He knows when I don’t want to enter a room during a social occasion. He’s engaging in that kind of sex with me because we both want it, and because I fully recognize tops have limits too: he doesn’t ever have to do anything to me that leaves him feeling like a perp afterward, and I would never push him to.

I do think that many non-kinky people conflate kinky sex with violence, when in actual fact they are very different.

I made a list of all the ways in which kinky sex and violence are not the same thing over on my blog, but I’m sure there are plenty more.