Trauma-Informed BDSM: Healing Through Counter-Normative Kinky Erotic Play
I’m not sure about you, but it feels to me like I spent a lot of years mired in the story that trauma and kink don’t mix. That BDSM is dangerous, that it deepens traumatic wiring, that it’s too much, too fast, too risky.
But like many stories that pitch a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ way, this attitude washes away erotic nuance and robs people of agency. What if trauma informed BDSM was more complex and potentially full of healing, wholing, and reclamation? What if trauma healing at its finest is sometimes found in intentional explorations of our most visceral selves? What if taking our deep wounds and infusing pleasure into them transmuted these wounds into a source of power? That edgy erotic play can be deeply consensual, taboo, AND transgressive? That we can be tender, fierce, fragile, powerful, scarred, and wildly alive… and sometimes all at once.
This is an invitation to explore and celebrate trauma informed BDSM and kinky sexy play as a realm of play infused with power and possibility— not in spite of trauma, but because of it.
Kink: Exploring Power, Play, Presence, and the Forbidden
For many people, BDSM is a conscious agreement where we explore beyond-ordinary states and feelings. When we weave in the ingredient of healing trauma, it includes an intention to taking care of our nervous systems, and/or with an eye to exploring past unwanted experiences in the present with choice and intention. Trauma informed kink can become about the stories we get to re-tell, the roles we get to try on, the edges we get to dance with, as well as doing so in ways that play with and honour our nervous systems.
Kinky play is often portrayed as the ‘opposite’ of healing, but in my mind that’s a false binary. It frames ‘normal’ healing in ways that centres a sanitized, colonial, medicalizing, pathologizing, and erotophobic attitude about how we take care of our mental and physical health, how we hold and recover from the wounds of life, and how we manifest empowered futures for ourselves. It frames ‘normal’ sex in ways that prioritizes colonial attitudes and ideologies… that is, that sex should never be far from it’s ‘acceptable’ forms: heterosexual, between two people, procreative, unpaid, and saturated with racist/ableist/gendered/ageist/classist attitudes. And ‘normal’ sex certainly isn’t kinky.
However, what if we looked at healing, kink, and eroticism with an infinitely more curious and creative lens? What if we played with the idea that BDSM can be a means to open doorways to our darkest moments as well as our most profound experiences of liberation? That through kink we can PLAY, be MESSY, feel PLEASURE, indulge IMAGINATION, and embrace IMPERFECTION - a rare opportunity in adulthood, with remarkable benefits for our sense of resilience, empowerment, and wellness (as an aside, these behaviours are considered ‘gold standards’ in trauma recovery - yet isn’t it interesting that trauma healing modalities rarely integrate them?)?
Survivors’ Erotic Wisdom
People who live with histories of traumatic wounding are often deeply familiar with feelings of powerlessness, hypervigilance, freeze, or reactivity. However, in kinky play there’s rich opportunity to play with these states, gain familiarity with how they feel, and create experiences that rewrite or reclaim the histories that we’ve been through.
In kinky play there’s opportunity to integrate the tools of negotiation, choicefulness, safety, and shared agreements - elements that were likely unavailable in earlier experiences of consent violation and other unwanted experiences. Integrating these tools in BDSM and kink containers can help profoundly reclaim and rewrite our past, while also dancing in a container that welcomes intensity and messiness and visiting our edges. When we choose to approach those edges with support, structure, and autonomy, we invite healing through establishing containers that feel safe enough so we can meet our bravery, complexity, embodied wisdom, and power.
Principles of Trauma-Informed Kink
Here’s what trauma-informed BDSM might include:
Shared Agreements: discussing what intentions you have for your scene and building agreements about how to take care each others’ desires, limits, and boundaries during the scene.
Nervous System Awareness: tracking and playing with your body’s experiences of excitement, bliss, overwhelm, and underwhelm.
Counter-Normative Dynamics: playing with power, restraint, sensation, fantasy, plus inviting in pro dom(me)s, sex workers, friends, or kinky community members exponentially expands the palette of pleasure and play available.
Embracing The Ingredient of Time: anticipation and slowness can be powerful erotic tools, as can be urgency or force.
Aftercare Matters: respecting that nervous systems can shift at any moment, and having pre-planned strategies and tools to support feelings of connection and belonging before, during, and after play or potential triggers.
Power is Co-created: no one is automatically in charge unless you agree to intentional power imbalances. Embodied voice and choice is prioritized and celebrated.
To be clear: you don’t need to be ‘healed’ before you play. You don’t need to play in order to heal. You can be exploring kink and BDSM because it’s hot, because it’s weird, because it’s new, because you’re curious—and healing can be a little whipped cream on top. You can be scared and aroused (read more about fear and arousal here). You can laugh and cry. You can be in a puddle on the floor and majestically in your power. Erotic experiences that stretch our capacity don’t always fit into neat boxes—and that’s part of their magic.
Kink invites us look in unvarnished ways at our stories, desires, and fears, welcoming them, and infusing them with pleasure. And, if we want, trauma informed BDSM can support us in exploring the places that were once too charged to face, saturate them with pleasure, and moan from them instead.
Getting Started
Curious? Here's some ideas of how you could begin:
Play with yourself first. Try blindfolds, solo sensation play, self-restraint, fantasizing, porn, erotica, or writing smut.
Communicate & listen. And, find a partner who listens and communicates. It’s important to ensure you can share and be heard in your desires, limits, and preferences - and that you listen and learn about theirs.
Go slowly. Set small time containers, include a slow build up to whatever peak experiences you have planned, check in regularly, and don’t start with your edgiest fantasy!
Discuss safety and strategy: Have agreements about safe words, what to do if a trigger shows up, and how each of you would like to be cared for post-play.
Journal or voice-note afterward: what came up? What felt electric, edgy, strange, nourishing, curious?
Embracing Erotic Healing in Nonlinear, Queer, Medicinal Ways
In short, trauma informed BDSM and healing through kinky play invites a non-formulaic, emergent, imaginative, adventurous attitude. And that’s the magic.
Healing doesn’t always have to look like regulating your nervous system and going to therapy. Sometimes it looks like being tied down and through your powerlessness finding freedom. Or tying someone down and marvelling in your power. Sometimes it sounds like drool-y laughter through a gag while wagging a unicorn-tail butt plug. Sometimes it feels like choosing pain on your own terms, and savouring the gift of joy (and endorphins!) that emerges. Sometime’s it’s getting triggered and being held well by another. Sometimes it’s boldly forging new paths into an unknown future saturated with pleasure, honesty, exploration, rawness, and erotic sovereignty.