The good side of the BDSM-community is that it is relatively easy for people to talk about a traumatic past. This will be understood and the vast majority of people will be helpful and supportive. This is often very helpful to the healing process of the victim. The flip side of this coin unfortunately is that it almost seems like one (submissive oriented females especially) “has to have” a trauma background.

This flip side is sponsored heavily by those, who oppose BDSM and usually non-mainstream sexual activity. In their “promotion”(apart from claiming any – in their book – non-desirable inclination to be “wrong” and “sick”) they often claim the always is a traumatic background. THIS IS NOT THE CASE. It is actually much more likely a sexual inclination is at least partially the result of genetic encoding. Some of it may even be seen as rudimentary evolutionary”left over’s”.

A well known phenomenon (and a problem) in the therapeutic society is the fact that victims – once aware of the fact that they are a victim and starting to accept that fact – will confuse the acceptance, sympathy, support and comfort, they will experience as a result of telling other people about their trauma, with actual love. Suddenly the attention they never got and are now getting by telling the world about their bad memories will provide them a new, apparently acceptable and even – for a time – quite successful, “identity”. In their mind, being a victim is a successful route. By telling people you are a victim you get sympathy and attention instead of beatings and bullying.

This in itself is dangerous, because it will not help the victim to fully heal from the mistreatment and in a BDSM-context it is even more dangerous, since it may easily lead to such things a displaying “expected behavior” rather than fulfilling your own wants and needs in amateur and self-respecting way and regression (the need to re-live the trauma in order to try and learn to deal with it). The latter is outright dangerous and – if done at all – should be left in the capable hands of professional therapists. The former is deceptive and manipulative to the other partner involved.

The compliment is a danger

While the openness, supportiveness and tolerance of the BDSM-community towards trauma victims – and as a result the helpful and supportive openness in discussions – is one of the strongest sides of the community and the fact that – as a result – more and more people are opening up and finding comfort and support is an immense compliment, this is also one of the biggest dangers to the community. The natural inclination to feel compassion and the will to help and support may (and does) easily lead to situations and relationships that eventually turn out to be a disaster and not the solution they were intended to be. Besides, it opens a door for more bad things and predators taking advantage of vulnerable people.

In other words: although it is bad enough to be or have been a victim of traum of whatever nature and even though talking about that is – an often successful – tool in the healing process: BEING A VICTIM IS NOT AN IDENTITY! Talking to others about your traumatic experiences is a tool, one that belongs in a certain timeframe, that is successful, but should be left behind at some point in order to be able to move on.

When you are learning to ride a bike, the chances are that you will do what everybody else does, when learning to ride a bike: you fall and get hurt. When you are still learning it useful to talk to other about that. It will teach you lessons and it will help you to deal with the disappointment, the bruised knees and elbows and ego. But after you’ve been riding your bike for a year or longer, it becomes rather stupid to still talk about how you fell off your bike during your first and second attempt. You need to move on – if nothing else because if falling off apparently still is such a big deal to you. you probably are a very uncertain (hence dangerous) cyclist. To an extent this is also true for getting stuck in your victim-identity.

The above article is a reprint from our information/educational site Kink Culture.
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