There Are No Magical Solutions To Your Kink Problems.

I have known Sharda for many years and while I wouldn’t say that we are friends, she does frequently confide in me about her troubles. Sharda is in a power-exchange relationship with a dominant person, and within this space she enjoys being cuckolded, emotionally tortured and physically demeaned. Often, in the wake of these experiences she finds she experiences a traumatic amount of drop that not only extends to weeks of insecurity and depression, but also causes significant strife in her relationship because she cannot help but lash out at her partner for the neglect she felt during the scene. Sometimes, her partner decrees that they shouldn’t engage in cuckolding anymore because it clearly causes a lot of emotional struggles for her and damages their relationship but that makes her feel even more insecure and she goes out of her way to curate and create more experiences of cuckolding for them, after which, the drop and lashing out return. The cycle continues and continues.

Frequently, Sharda asks me how she can make this stop—the drop, the insecurity, the fighting, the cycle—but she never likes my answers. She thinks I am holding out on her, that I have some secret, magical information that would fix everything for her instantly but I am unwilling to give it to her. She makes a point to mention that I must know how to solve this problem because I too engage in cuckolding and I never seem to have the same issues. She never really implements any of the suggestions I make to her but she does obsessively watch my relationship, my emotional state and its mechanisms so that she may *discover* the secret I am not sharing with her. Each week, she postulates a different theory based on her *observations* but it never works and I know exactly why. *It’s because there are no magical solutions.*

Ever since I started teaching within the sexual and kink realm, one thing has remained absolutely constant and that is questions like the one Sharda has been asking me for years. The questions have a somewhat varied form. *How do I stop feeling like shit after doing this thing I maybe enjoy? How do I keep myself from experiencing the type of drop that makes life impossible for me? How do I keep my reactions from interfering with my relationship? How do I continue to do this filthy thing I love even though each time I do it, it exacerbates my trauma or makes me treat people in my life horribly?* I do answer these questions but no one likes my answers because they are not the magic-fix that they want. Before we proceed, I’ll just answer the question, real quick. If you are traumatized, triggered or acting out because of your sexual/fetishistic decisions to the extent that it is unbearable and/or is fucking up your life/relationships, and you would like to stop having those reactions, you have to factor the drop into your risk evaluation and *change* what you do based on what you can and cannot withstand. The risks of play, a scene or a dynamic extend far beyond what you experience in the *moment*, because in the moment when you are aided by arousal and/or fun hormones/neurotransmitters, you could probably damn-near withstand *everything*, so it’s really in the *drop* or the aftermath, that I find, the answers to questions about what you can *handle* really lie.

A certain amount of drop is natural, of course. It is just what it is, a rapid change in physiological and emotional states and the time it takes to adjust to that. Then, there is *traumatic* drop which may look different for different people but will likely make it much harder to function, trigger a form of trauma (response), last much longer than the average drop or cause you to act out in ways that violate other people emotionally. The approach to drop that I see most commonly is the acceptance of *whatever* degree of it as an inevitability, the presumption that it is impossible to predict to any level and the attempt to deal with it in a way that only gets put into motion *after the fact*. So, for most people, *how* they experience drop has absolutely no bearing on what they choose to do or not do. The idea is, usually, that they will do what they want to do and just *deal with what happens later*, and to me, it’s no wonder this approach does not work. How could it when it is so blatantly unaware of the self? I’m not, at all, saying that some people may be able to and want to risk some amount of traumatic drop in order to do what they want, but for the most part, I encounter people who absolutely refuse to acknowledge, cater to or evaluate it for information.

Sharda knows *exactly* how it is going to go but she refuses to change anything about her approach, instead she opts to defensively and wishfully double down on what is not working. Mostly, when people come with a problem like this, I tell them to try identifying the emotional experience they are trying to create and the one they are trying to avoid, and from that they can devise alternative methods to get to the same place, ones that aren’t as triggering, and maybe, unfortunately, not as intense to begin with but almost no one wants to hear this solution because almost everyone believes that a magical word, trick, phrase or hack will instantly solve their problems altogether and all at once. I think I understand why. Aside from the *drop-is-inevitable* mentality, I think there is also the *surmounting-a-challenge* mentality and one that especially afflicts s-types in power-exchange wherein overcoming *anything* that is hard for you is necessarily equal to growth, devotion and being the bestest submissive there ever was and the measurement of that is on an arbitrary (and sometimes destructive) scale where what you *cannot handle* or do not want is equal to what you *need*.

It’s not fucking yoga, yo? I hate stretching out my shoulders because they are the least flexible part of me but I need that for my own good because the stiffness actually causes me pain and discomfort. I hate participating in touch-deprivation as part of torture in a dynamic but I don’t *need* that for my own good because it makes me feel sad, unwanted and unloved in a way that does far more damage than it causes pleasure. It’s not the same fucking thing. From time to time, all of us need to alter our approach based on what we can handle because of what it is causing but also because of what we may be going through. We want to pretend, sometimes, that kink/sexuality and “normal” life can be very neatly compartmentalised but they cannot. For instance, play with sharps (needles, knives, blades etc) is one of my primary kinks, but for the last four months or five months, I have been dealing with chronic anxiety that is heavily hinged on contemplating my mortality and the limits of *good* health so I *know* that if I engage in sharps, as unthinkingly as I have for most of my life, right now, I bear the risk of spiralling into exaggerated concerns about blood-infections that I *definitely* have, so I am refraining until I feel confident again and getting my pain in different ways in the meanwhile, ways that don’t feel as dangerous to my fragile sense of existence right now, because the risk of acute phases of panic is not something I am willing to bear and I know I cannot magically wish-away my anxiety long enough to be able to do whatever the fuck I want.

Although, I will say, this desire for magic solutions is not always or only about how we view ourselves, sometimes it is also about how we view kink and fetishism itself. I think we have a tendency to view kink as *the solution*. On a vague, subtle and conceptual level I see insinuations of kink as the *solution* to the problems of *vanilla* relationships, kink as the *solution* to issues of sexual repression/identity or kink as the *solution* to issues of communication in relationships. I don’t know that I agree with that because I don’t think kinky people are really any different from non-kinky people and so the issues we deal with may arise within a different type of structure, and may warrant a different type of solution, but the idea of the structure itself being a solution is pretty damn ambitious. Still, I think sometimes that wishfulness carries forward to individual decision-making. For instance, if you feel insecure about your partner or yourself within a relationship, the belief that you would feel secure if you did the same thing within a cuckolding set-up does not make any sense to me, it’s not going to *fix* you or the problem because you brought kink into it or your brought the problem to kink.

Obviously, it is entirely possible to use sexual and fetishistic spaces for problem-solving or even confronting our own issues but not everyone is capable of that and not every moment in our lives is one that is necessarily conducive to that and perhaps, most importantly, even doing that requires a good deal of awareness, intentionality and communication, you cannot just do it and *hope* it fixes everything because it must, because it is kink. It’s like showing up to the gym every day, walking around for 45-minutes, taking selfies and wondering why you’re not getting any stronger or healthier. It's not the act of entering the building or paying the fees that makes it work, just like it is not merely being into kink, playing or being in a dynamic that *solves all issues of you* to make your sexuality perfectly and wonderfully healthy. It doesn’t all have to be healthy, of course, but if there are undeniable issues you face, that you do not wish to face, you cannot seriously believe the magic of the existence of kink will fix them. It may be *different* from other sexual expressions but it’s not so different that it contains magic rules, hacks and secrets, it’s not a video game you are trying to best.

Finally, I think, like with Sharda, that sometimes we aspire to what other people are able to do in their relationships and journeys and start to believe, that if we replicate their actions, we will be able to do it too and when that does not work, we start to believe that if we replicate their emotional systems, we will no longer have the problems we do. Sharda truly, truly believes that if she figures out my secret, she can be like me and then she won’t feel insecure anymore. She believes the secret lies I how I process my emotions. It doesn’t and it does. I have many struggles but insecurity is not one of them and maybe that is because of how I am built, maybe it is because of how I process emotions or maybe it is simply sublimated under a different issue. Cuckolding doesn’t trigger me, it causes no emotions that make me traumatically drop and it really only makes me feel more intimately connected with the other people involved. That’s not a trick or a magical solution, it’s just how I am and what works for me. There are many things that other people do that wouldn’t be as easy for me and that’s just how it is sometimes. Just because someone else can do something doesn’t mean they have a secret that will allow us to do the same thing in the same way. Like dietary requirements. A person may have cut out carbs to lose weight and succeeded, but if you do a fuck tonne of cardio every day, cutting our carbs with not serve you the same way.

We are different. We do things differently. Just because some people can handle some fetishes in ways that you *wish* that you could does not necessarily mean you *can* if you learn their methods because sometimes there are no methods, just who they are and whom you

aren’t.