Let’s not be flippant about kink as healing

There’s a line Maeve McBride uses that stayed with me after our conversation: “Healing begins where the wound was made.”

I love it, I also believe it for myself. But I also think it needs constant interrogation.

Kink has an unusual ability to take us towards things that can look a lot like old wounds: powerlessness, fear, pain, restraint, humiliation, being controlled. Sometimes that resemblance is part of the attraction. So when somebody tells me kink has been healing for them, I believe them. We just need to be very cautious to approach kink and exploration as healing on its own.

Maeve is a trauma survivor who has also experienced trauma within kink, and she still chooses to play. She also actively participates in her own therapy. She talked about using kink as a somatic practice: paying attention to what happens in her body rather than automatically escaping it.

That interests me because consent clearly doesn’t make us immune to our history. You can know perfectly well that you chose what is happening and still have some other bit of you reacting as though you didn’t.

Which version of you is in the room?

I’m not a therapist, so take the following as me borrowing some useful ideas rather than attempting to diagnose anyone.

There are a couple of therapeutic models that describe what Maeve discusses.

Transactional Analysis, developed by psychiatrist Eric Berne, talks about Parent, Adult and Child “ego states”. Very roughly, the Adult deals with what is happening in the here and now, while the Child can contain thoughts, feelings and responses rooted in earlier experience. That doesn’t mean we literally contain three tiny people arguing over the controls. It’s a framework for thinking about why our present-day rational understanding and our emotional response don’t always agree. The American Psychological Association has a useful overview of the model here. APA: Transactional Analysis

So I can imagine being in a scene where my Adult knows: I chose this person. We negotiated this. I can safeword. I am safe. At exactly the same time, another part of me might be reacting from somewhere much older.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) uses different language but has a similar idea of internal multiplicity. Rather than treating an unwanted response as irrational bullshit we need to defeat, it asks what a particular “part” might be trying to protect us from. I find that quite a compassionate way of thinking about triggers. Instead of why the fuck am I reacting like this?, the question becomes what is this response trying to do for me?

Both methods are clear in that the person having the experience is not psychologically simple. Part of me can want something, part of me can be scared of it, and both can be real.

The new data point

This is where Maeve’s own theory becomes really interesting.

She talks about giving her nervous system new “data points”. If she enters an intense scene and discovers that she can stop it, change something, look away, speak, or have somebody else notice that something is wrong and intervene, that experience is different from whatever came before.

I initially thought the healing bit would be successfully staying inside the difficult experience. Actually, what struck me was almost the opposite. Sometimes the new information might be: I am allowed to leave.

That feels important when talking about trauma and kink because I think we can accidentally romanticise endurance. We like stories about pushing through, surrendering deeper, finding catharsis on the other side of terror. Sometimes that may genuinely be the experience somebody wants. But if the original wound involved having choice removed, surely exercising choice now can be just as significant as enduring the sensation.

This is also where Maeve’s question “What’s this really about?” feels useful. Not because every kinky desire needs a psychological origin story. God forbid. Sometimes you want to be hit because being hit is sometimes just hot. But when something unexpectedly floods the system, asking what else is happening inside you seems more useful than either panicking because you were triggered or bulldozing through it because you technically consented.

So is kink healing?

Sometimes, probably. But I think “healing” is such an attractive word that it can stop us asking better questions.

Did the experience leave me with more agency or less? Did I trust myself enough to speak? Could I change my mind? Did the person I was with make room for that? Am I getting better at recognising what is happening inside me, or am I repeatedly throwing myself into the same experience and calling the aftermath growth?

That distinction matters because kink isn’t therapy, even when it feels therapeutic. Your Dom is not automatically a trauma therapist. Your submissive is not a rehabilitation programme. And a cathartic experience is not evidence that something has been resolved.

What Maeve describes feels less like using kink to erase the past and more like learning that the present can be different from it. I find that much more convincing.

Maybe healing doesn’t mean going back to the wound and proving it can’t hurt us anymore. Maybe sometimes it means going back with things we didn’t have before: language, choice, self-knowledge, people we trust, and an exit.

Maeve and I get much further into trauma, embodiment, kink education, nervous-system regulation and her rather brilliant journey from birth work into sexological herbalism in the full episode of Buried Alive.