A lifetime of kink shame and controlling boyfriends

I knew I was kinky from a very young age, but I was deeply ashamed of my sexual desires. They were dark, they were sinful. They meant there was something wrong with me.

Because even watching porn was too edgy for me, I used to read erotica about women being tied up, dominated, and used by men. The darker the fantasy, the more explosive the orgasm. But as those orgasms would bloom through my body, I was horrified to learn they were actually made of shame. Exquisite, forceful, dark, terrifying. I’d panic and shove it back into my womb. Then I’d straighten myself up and go back to pretending to be a feminist who loved herself.

My first experience exploring sex with a dominant man solidified the very lessons that I’d gleaned from 50 Shades of Gray: dominant men are abusive. Having kinky sex must come at the expense of my physical and emotional safety. Anyone who wants to experience perverse things does not get to have their boundaries be respected.

I took this lesson so deeply to heart that I chose to marry a vanilla monogamous man who I knew had no interest in having the kind of sex I wanted. I thought I was choosing the smart, safe path for myself. After all, what kind of person would choose sex over love?

Quick introduction to my methodology: I believe we’re all made up of many parts that developed at earlier moments in our lives to protect us. As long as they’re unconscious, they come out anytime they perceive a threat. They throw a blindfold over your eyes and take the wheel.

The truth is that I had a deeply submissive one in me, who longed to relinquish control to a strong man. Because I believed she was wrong and bad to have in my system, I disowned her and denied her existence. The result was that she took the driver’s seat permanently in my relationships. I crafted all my relationships and eventually a marriage such that she got to have her needs met in the shadows with extremely controlling men. I was a powerhouse in my outward-facing life, but behind closed doors I had no boundaries. I accepted my husband’s will as “an unstoppable force” and submitted to it, even as he drove us farther and farther away from the life I desired.

When I left my marriage and finally dove into exploring kink, I found that giving my submissive one a sandbox to play in changed everything. I also found that the foundations of the BDSM community are actually clear communication, consent, and safety. E.L. James didn’t know about this world. The dominant man I explored with didn’t know about this world.

But when I started exploring and allowing my submissive to be met in a lovingly negotiated BDSM container, I got to meet her. To know her desires and delight in how hot they are. She gets to feel every last delicious moment of her powerlessness and worthlessness. And the thing is, in her fully expressed truth and her empowered choice to exchange her power, she is stunningly powerful. I love her for all the hotness and freedom she has brought into my life.

Because now I can see her consciously, I can straight up ask her what she wants and then GIVE IT TO HER in containers crafted with total love. And because her needs are getting met, she doesn’t blindfold me nearly as often. Et, voila: no more unconscious attraction to controlling boyfriends.

The truth is that we all have darkness in us. We all have dark desires. And while not everyone is practicing BDSM consciously, you can. Bringing shame gremlins into the light is utterly transformative, and it can absolutely be done in a context of respect, consent, and deep love.

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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

Methodology

My Portal Play methodology is made up of four different areas that led me and that lead my clients to profound transformation.

Desires Play:

The quiet whispers of your heart that you dare not listen too closely to are the first key to getting the life of your dreams. They are your destiny. They show what your life would look like if you were living in your turn-on. When you don’t know what to do, your desires are the yellow brick road to your future.

What our sacred, pulsating hearts really want is so big. We want the whole entire world. We want love and abundance and riches and pleasure. We want heat and passion and connection and thrill. We want safety and comfort and belonging.

But we don’t usually allow ourselves to see our deepest desires clearly because it would require a different set of underlying beliefs than we currently have. Our life up until this moment has been structured around our wounding and our socialization, and it matches a picture of what we have believed we deserved or could access up until this point. We have parts in our systems that believe going after our desires is most certainly going to bring pain and ruin, so they block our vision from even being able to see those desires much of the time. They just turn us in another direction blind eye and tell us a little story about how thinking about it too much jinxes it. Or how it will be better not to get our hopes up so that we don’t feel too crushed by the disappointment when it doesn’t happen. And we usually say, “good point,” and move along.

You won’t move toward a dream you won’t admit you have—it’s just not an efficient path.

For my manifesting fans: it’s also true that spending time accessing your desires and allowing yourself to imagine they are already met is the very thing that brings them about faster. Getting onto the frequency of your desire helps you attract everything that is also holding the frequency of your desire. It’s how you find the people who will help you bring it about. It’s how you tap into the potent, magnetic, Higher Self energy that knows how deeply worthy you are.

I help my clients create containers of safety that allow you to not only see clearly, but also really experience the hotness and the magnetic power of your desires.

Parts play:

I was always so excited by the teachings around manifesting and the power of positive intention, but I was deeply frustrated that my attempts only sometimes worked, and I could never tell why sometimes they failed.

The reason it’s not that simple is that in order to get on the frequency of “I already have it,” we have to move through all the energy in our system that vibrates on the frequency of “I’m not worthy of that” or “I can’t have that.” Luckily, we can think about all that energy as different parts of ourselves that were born in moments throughout our lives when we were not able to hold all the pain or fear or shame that flooded us. Those parts are frozen in time in our systems, and they’re working overtime to protect us from doing anything they believe puts us in danger of re-experiencing horrific pain. They care deeply about doing this job well because they love us fiercely.

Motives aside, these saboteur parts can derail our most earnest attempts to bring about the changes we want to have in our lives. After we mess something up, we usually revert directly to shame. “I guess I’m just not worthy.” But instead we should be asking ourselves: What part in my system didn’t feel safe?

There’s a whole process for identifying and meeting these parts, and once your learn it it will change your life forever. It’s not that you won’t have to do the play or that it won’t be scary when you do: we’re always going to be growing and healing, we’re always going to be identifying new parts that are ready to come out of the shadows to be integrated. But once you put in the time and attention to learn the process of identifying and relating to your parts, your life is shifted onto a different trajectory because you can go back for the ones in you that have been disowned and trapped and hurting.

My approach to parts work is deeply informed by years of receiving Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. My approach takes the basic tenets of IFS and brings it into a role play process that immediately lands the concepts of embodying a saboteur part, accessing the divine love and wisdom of Higher Self, and giving the Saboteur exactly what they need. I teach this process in my Loving the Saboteur workshop.

Portal play:

This is the realm where we bring in a little parts work and a little mysticism. I learned how to create sacred BDSM-adjacent containers where parts can be expressed in play from my mentors at the Light Dark Institute. In the three day retreat experience I did with them, it was like these lightning rods of repressed truth finally cracked into consciousness in my system.

I came to understand that when you allow one of your parts to be fully embodied in role play, you become so much more empowered. Imagine bringing the inner critic that rips you to shreds on a daily basis into consciousness so you could distinguish its voice from your Higher Self’s. Imagine letting yourself enjoy, rather than rejecting, the deep turn on you get from the emotional masochist in you who loves to get hurt in the same ways over and over. Imagine allowing the most pitiful, shameful parts of you to be witnessed in the light of day and still be loved. Imagine expressing the truths in you that you’ve always deemed unacceptable and denied. Imagine you could learn how to love every last part in you.

Over time I developed my own approach to the concept of sacred ceremony for personal transformation, which I call Portal Play. Together my clients and I choose an intention for the portal. When we go into ceremony, I embody my sacred Domme persona known as Goddess Vortexx. She can be anything from a gentle, divine mother to a fierce, terrifying reflection of your own self-loathing and anything in between.

Whether it’s a specific role play we design to allow you to embody and express one of your Saboteur parts, or a ritual that allows you to make a choice about your healing, or a kinky scene that gives you access to a darkness you’ve been denying, we surrender to the truth that is revealed inside the portal and allow it to change us.

Pleasure play:

You literally don’t have the capacity in your nervous system right now to tolerate all the goodness you will someday have.

You know when you kind of brown out after something really good happens? Our systems have the capacity to hold only so much charge. And the high sensation of pleasure and pain feels very similar in our systems. Many times we dissociate and leave our bodies when something good is actually happening because our saboteurs are terrified of the unknown circumstances. Our parts don’t know pleasure charge from pain charge, or good new from bad new. They want status quo because they know how to keep us safe there. When our parts don’t let us actually feel the positive new experiences we’re having, we never get used to the feeling of the good things, so we never have the chance to show our parts that the good things are safe.

We literally need to expand the capacity of our nervous systems to tolerate the sensations of pleasure and love and abundance. It’s like, a thing to literally train for. If you’re serious about getting after the life of your dreams, you have to be willing to lovingly work with your system to stretch it.

The good news is, it’s like the most fun training you ever had to do. All you have to do is practice staying in your body while experiencing pleasure, love, and abundance.