My story
About three and a half years ago, a knowing started stirring in the back of my mind. It told me that I would take another leap into the unknown. That I would again gather up my courage and molt: shed the super-good-person-nonprofit-campaign-director skin that had protected me all those years from my own shadow. I remember telling my best friend that I had no idea what my new career would be, but I knew I would write a blog that hit somewhere at the intersection of BDSM and healing and body positivity and shadow work and magic. Welcome to that blog. :-)
I’ve experienced my life in three phases, so far. The first is the early part of my life, when I lived through deep trauma and developed killer coping mechanisms that I believed were just regular, healthy living. (Because I personally went the way of people pleasing, over-achieving, and repression, I gave the appearance of being very well indeed.)
The second phase was my life after I left my family home and became an adult out in the world. And because I was not aware that I had any trauma that needed processing, it all stayed unconscious. I had all these parts in me, that sought out the same situations and relationships we had always known as “love” and “success.” I performed my life so very well during this phase that I didn’t even notice that I was deeply unfulfilled and unhappy.
The third phase has been my personal development and healing journey. I started to tell the truth about my deepest desires that I had been repressing. I started to see the ways that my traumatic experiences and socialization actually influenced everything about how I saw myself and the world and what was possible for me. I learned how to see all my activation, conflicts, shame, and fears as reflections of parts of myself that needed love, and I learned how to love them. My life shifted dramatically in a few short years, and I’ve uncovered so much more of the stunning, powerhouse, magnetic, playful, divine spirit that is actually me.
I want to tell you a little bit about the first two phases, because I know that many of your will find pieces of your own experience reflected in mine. General trigger warning that while I don’t go into graphic descriptions, this post mentions sexual assault and emotional abuse.
So here’s my damage, and how it shaped me:
I was the upper middle child in a family pummeled every day by severe mental illness and addiction. I was the caretaker and the peacemaker. I learned how to read people to anticipate possible explosive reactions. Everything I said went through a series of filters aimed at anticipating how my truth would be received. All my truths were twisted into the most palatable versions possible, or else simply withheld. I believed that loved ones’ difficult emotional states were my responsibility to prevent. And if I failed at my job then it was my responsibility to make their emotions go away at any cost, including lying about how I felt and pretending not to have needs or boundaries. If anyone was unhappy with me, it felt like my world was ending.
I was raised Catholic, and the concepts of guilt and shame resonated deeply in my system. I believed that centering my needs or having boundaries was selfish and that selfishness was a sin. And as a real scaredy cat, I was absolutely terrified of Hell.
My early experiences with food, exercise, and body image were a reflection of the ethos of the 90s and 2000s. I got the message loud and clear as a child that fatness was deeply shameful. Let’s just say I wrote a journal entry in the 3rd grade about my family’s trip to the Red Sox game, and the whole entry was about how many calories were in each of the snacks that my siblings and I chose (I was very proud to have chosen the lowest calorie snack!) I started fad dieting in the 9th grade, which made a perfect polarity to my sugar addiction and occasional binge eating, which I used to numb the torrent of emotions constantly flooding my poor sweet empathic body.
In middle and high school I learned the crushing lesson over and over again that I would never get the guy I desired. And even when I could find guys that would go out with me, they didn’t want anything to do with me sexually. So while my friends came into their sexual selves with their boyfriends who I was secretly in love with, I sat on the sidelines and hid my absolute horror and shame that I would always be alone because my fatness disqualified me from attractiveness, desire, or pleasure.
I was sexually assaulted as a child. I didn’t start to uncover this information in my system until I was 30 years old, but boy did I have kinky sexual desires that I was deeply ashamed of for as long as I can remember. (It bears clarifying that I don’t believe a proclivity for BDSM necessarily indicates sexual abuse in someone’s past: all of us are kinky MFs if we’re willing to tell the truth about our darkness. And, I also know that many survivors have sexualized fantasies that reflect the trauma we experienced deep down in our systems.) I developed a part in response to this trauma who worked hard to ensure that I would stay disgusting via fatness so men wouldn’t desire me sexually—even as I had other parts that were so deeply pained by my undesirability.
When I went to live in Ecuador in my early 20s, I learned that my blonde hair and blue eyes were somehow enough to make me attractive, even with a fat body. I landed my first real boyfriend. He was controlling and jealous and deeply manipulative. I lived in total fear of his moods and random accusations of invented wrongdoing. I knew I didn’t like how he treated me, but I was so relieved to finally be wanted. I had not seen a model of a healthy adult relationship so I thought this was just kind of how it worked. Of course no one close to me noticed anything off. In fact, once, as I detailed my worries to my dad about how miserable I thought my boyfriend would make me if he ever moved to the U.S., he responded, “I know it’s hard, but I just know you’re gonna marry this guy.”
A few years later I dated a guy who was dominant in bed, and we explored kink without any tools for communicating or negotiating. He violated me in ways that were “part of play,” and which left me feeling absolutely demolished. I decided I was foolish for thinking my kinky desires could be met in a way that felt good: they were the most shameful parts of me. I vowed to stop trying to date dominant men, because of course they were assholes. I vowed to choose love over the perceived other option of dark, soul-crushing sex.
All these factors set the stage perfectly for the relationship that would become my marriage. I found a partner who was even better at running from the darkness and pain inside him than I was. Together we projected an impressive image of happiness. We were “making it!” We hosted a picturesque destination wedding and bought a home we couldn’t really afford with an ocean view. I was on a thrilling trajectory at a powerful nonprofit. We were both proclaimed feminists. But behind those doors, we were reliving the exact patterns of emotional abuse we had both observed in our homes and believed was what love looked like.
In the months leading up to when we were to start trying to have a baby, as the madness in my home escalated, the distant alarm bells in my system started ringing louder and louder. Finally, on a solo trip to Bali I had the absolutely terrifying experience of confessing my shameful sexual desires to a healer. It felt like I had been turned inside out and exposed. To sit across from another person learning the worst things about me, and to be still held with love, was absolutely shocking, and something opened in my system. If I could still be lovable even if I wanted kinky sex… maybe I could still be lovable if I told the truth about the other things I wanted for myself. I knew instantly I had been telling all manner of lies about who I was and what I wanted. I knew that I longed for a life in which I felt free. In which I was surrounded by deeply intimate, sex-positive, kinky community and having really hot sex. In which I danced often. In which I had so, so much fun with my people. In which I could rest as much as my body needed without being shamed.
I felt like another life was calling me.
I left my marriage and dove into kink, accessing healing beyond my wildest imagination through physical and spiritual exploration as a submissive. I started going to Internal Family Systems therapy, which purports that we all have a whole, perfect, healthy higher self and that self can be accessed by acknowledging and integrating the parts that formed in our systems to help us adapt and survive. I dove deep into Carolyn Elliot’s Existential Kink, which says that there is a part of us that really gets off on the miserable situations of our lives, and it’s not only okay, but actually helps us clear the unconscious blocks if we let ourselves find the turn on in the exquisite pain of our most familiar troubles.
After years of therapy, deep practice with Existential Kink, and extensive life coach training, I found my mentors at the Light Dark Institute, whose sacred containers of play and power and truth using BDSM taught me how to meet and fall in love with all the shamed parts of myself. I’ve trained extensively under them and learned how to create my own BDSM-adjacent containers that allow for parts to be expressed in play and for lightning rods of repressed truth to finally crack into consciousness.
Nowadays, I’m living the life that called to me four years ago. And it’s my passion and my vocation to guide, coach, and heal others who are ready to escape the prison of their perceived unworthiness. We all deserve to live the life of our dreams. <3
