The clusterfuck of the unacted desire
“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” – poet William Blake (Proverbs of Hell)
The proverb stuck with me since college as a revealed truth: if your desire is powerful enough to make you ache, you have to act on it. Or, as Blake saw it, better never to live at all than to live with a gnawing hunger. It’s a powerful admonition for people who don’t allow themselves to pursue their hearts’ desire.
Blake’s words come to mind when I think about consensual kink. Kink may be a different kind of hunger but, to kinky people, it’s as valid as any other. An unfulfilled desire for kink sits in the middle of your soul and gnaws at the fabric of your life. Those who never even try to live it can end up feeling angry — angry at themselves for their perceived cowardice; angry at the world for their delusion that it was the world that denied them their chance.
We’ve all met people like that. We need to learn from their mistakes and resolve not to repeat them.
Denial — a vine that grows bitter fruit
I knew a guy (I’ll call him Ed) who was kinky af. Ed had many deliciously depraved submissive hungers. Perfect BDSM partner, I thought. Surely someone would snatch him up.
There was just one tiny problem: Ed was deeply unresolved about his kinks. He was so closeted, there was a locked closet in his closet reserved for BDSM.
“Kink doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t define me,” he’d say before vanishing for weeks or months at a time. He’d go back to his so-called real life, where things like BDSM and kink were viewed as mental defects, spiritual perversions, and God knows what else.
Ed thought he could walk away any time. But sooner or later, there he’d be, careening around a club like a pinball, then disappearing again. Over the years, one couldn’t help notice he was drying up inside: more defensive, more fragile, more likely to complain and criticize others. The binge and purge cycles were turning him into an angry, bitter person, someone who needed kink to feel whole but hated himself for the need.
Finally, he found the holy grail, someone who could’ve been a perfect match for him. What did Ed do? He ran away.
The real cure for the kinky and conflicted
Kink itself is sex for kinksters. Our erotic needs and desires, as odd or outrageous as they seem to non-kinksters, matter as much to us as non-kinky sex matters to non-kinky people. Whatever your kink, chances are that it gives you more pleasure than almost any sex act.
Like Ed, my client Laurenz had a long-time love/hate relationship with the Scene. He didn’t WANT to find his place in it because he was afraid of where it might take him. Laurenz picked me because he knew I was at the top of my field and figured that I would be the best bet to help him. With a “cure”. He wanted to be cured of this desperate craving to be dominated by a stern woman, to be forced by her to take a pegging, to be owned down to his core. He was in the same cycle of binging and purging, with ever-increasing depression about it.
At first, Laurenz was disappointed when he found out that there is no cure for BDSM/fetish. It shocked him that contemporary research abundantly illustrates there is nothing abnormal about people embracing it as a core identity. Indeed, a majority of adults have been curious enough to experiment with aspects of kink and incorporate it into their intimate relationships.
Listen to the science
Resistant though he was at first, the science won him over. It comforted him. It made him see that he was not the only pervert in the world. There were millions of men like him out there. The only difference between himself and the people he saw online was that they had accepted their kinks and were having fun with their lives.
That made him question his way of looking at it. The difference between his feelings of desperation about kink and their happiness with it all pivoted on self-image. As long as he saw himself as a wicked, pathetic person for having these needs, he was sabotaging his own chances at leading a happier life.
Examine assumptions
We talked about the forces in his early life that made him ashamed of being sexually different. We talked about his family, his religious upbringing, the peer pressure he encountered in school, and the conservative industry he worked for that made him fear he’d be blacklisted for life if anyone found out his secrets. We talked about his failed relationships with non-kinky women. In the end, they all bored him and left him hungrier for kink. We talked about the opportunities he had fled too — just as Ed had run away from the best chance of a true kink/love bond he’d ever known.
As we talked through and examined the stories and ideas he had lived his life by, Laurenz began having one breakthrough after another. He wasn’t doomed to loneliness. In such a vast sea, maybe he could catch a shiny fish after all. His self-esteem started to grow. He felt more normal, more acceptable. Maybe not at work but in his private thoughts. New hopes bloomed and threw shade on the old negativity.
Learn to love yourself
He also learned a key principle of life: you have to love yourself AS YOU ARE to be happy.
Eventually, Laurenz began putting his new perspective on kink into practice. He stopped dating “totally vanilla” women. He began, timidly at first but still very bravely, dating women who were open to his kinks. Instead of watching people play online and crying with envy, now he was playing and crying with relief.
Laurenz got happier and more comfortable with himself and the world opened to him. He had escaped the shame trap that swallows up so many lives. He had found a place of peace with his kinkiness. He accepted himself.
Shame is the problem that needs fixing. And self-acceptance is the real cure.
You can’t fix it, so embrace it
I recently heard that Ed had died. From what I could cull off the kink grapevine, he had continued to be an on-again-off-again player. “He wasn’t himself the last few years,” a source confided, “he was cranky and argumentative, and complained about everything like he was in his 80s, not his 50s.” No one knew why he died so young, either, but I had my guesses. How long can you nurture unacted desires without it taking a toll on your mental and physical health? It haunts me to think he went to his grave unhappy, never having accepted his kinky self.
There is a special place in my heart for people who want to come to terms with their BDSM/fetish needs.
My observations, after two decades as a therapist and thousands of clients:
- Kinky people who live without kink won’t stop being kinky, they’ll just be unhappy.
- If shame is your demon, that demon will keep you in an eternal hell loop of emotional pain.
- The path forward is not a cure, not a prayer, nor a resolution never to do it again. The path forward is to accept yourself as the kinky person you are.
- You are ok. On the day you accept that, your life will begin to change.
If you’re ready to accept your kinky self, I’ve got room for a few new therapy clients right now. Learn more at https://gloriabrame.com/servicesandpolicies/
