I read a post somewhere where OP was saying how they had experienced severe bullying as a child and as they progressed with therapy as an adult, their sexual kinks (all revolving around humiliation, degradation and the like) were starting to disappear, and they no longer felt turned on by the subject as they worked through their traumas in therapy.
That got me thinking… I know it’s a defense mechanism to turn pain into an idea of pleasure, but on the surface it just seems so illogical that the mind gets programmed to seek out what has harmed it in the past. Can anyone explain to me how that works/what’s the point of it?
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This is really complicated and it’s a little difficult to do at an ELI5 answer so I’m going to do my best and then I’ll give the more detailed answer that hopefully the ELI5 helps connect the dots in.
Imagine you’re playing a video game, and there is a button that when you press it once, your character ducks. But if you long press it, your character jumps. You’re in a fight, you’re feeling a little panicked, you’re getting beat, and you need to duck but you hold the button for just a second too long and that causes you to jump instead. You’re now at a disadvantage because you jumped into an attack instead. So you’re even more panicked, this time you need to jump, but you’re worried about the button now so you press it and you press it too quick so you duck instead.
The parts of our brain that manage arousal and our fear response is the same part of our brain. And sometimes our brains get wires crossed. When that happens, our bodies accidentally send the wrong signal at the wrong time.
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That’s a very very big oversimplification.
A little more complicated, our brain has a few primal pieces to it that developed long before we were mankind, and have retained because they play vital parts in our individual and collective survival. One of the most notable of these is the amygdala. The amygdala is a tiny little walnut in the middle-ish of your brain that is primarily response for emotional response management and memory formation/storage, among some other things. When life happens, your amygdala mediates instinctive response to that stuff happening.
Your amygdala was designed for animals without higher thought, however, and while it’s very complicated, it’s also pretty simple. When you are in danger, before your conscious mind makes decisions, your amygdala is already firing neurons to release chemicals that will help you survive. It makes decisions (rational or not) to keep you alive, and it releases chemicals to make those decisions possible. Those chemicals are primarily serotonin, adrenaline, and related chemicals. They make you alert, responsive, and quick. They make you feel good and alive so that you can survive whatever danger is there is keep you in fighting shape.
Coincidentally, when you’re turned on your amygdala is also primarily responsible for responding to arousal stimuli. Sex is a survival mechanism, and our bodies want us to have sex. So we have a primal response to sexual stimuli, even when we don’t want to. We’ve all been in situations where someone you’re not really interested does something kind of hot and you just kind of go “oh…” and you’re turned on. That’s your amygdala deciding it’s time to uh..party. Coincidentally, the chemicals released that help this along are adrenaline and dopamine and serotonin among others. Like I said, simple but complicated. The same chemicals do very different things.
Now, when we go through something traumatic, one of the chemicals I didn’t list that get released are cortisol. Cortisol is really important but the process our amygdala uses to make memories is really chemically sensitive and cortisol sort of messes it up. So when we’re making memories of a traumatic event and our body is releasing cortisol. Those memories get a little messed up and instead of forming a single coherent memory, it forms a bunch of partial memories. Little bits of sensations and experiences and all the feelings we had in those moments.
Here’s part 1 of the kicker, people who experience extensive trauma tend to have a lot of their resources directed towards survival mechanisms, which means sexual arousal becomes more difficult – you don’t want babies of you’re constantly in danger. So, those people tend to not get all the feel good feelings they usually get during sex because your amygdala is trying to get you to not do sex right now.
But you know what is really close to the sexy feel good feelings? The danger survival feelings. Similar chemicals. Similar locations. Similar mechanisms. So, can’t get horny during sex because of rape trauma? Simulated rape to trigger the survival chemicals is a really close second. Your amygdala isn’t smart enough to distinguish between simulated and real rape, so once sex starts to feel like that..well…close enough.
This obviously gets more and more complicated with different types of trauma. So while not all kinks are rooted in trauma, triggering trauma responses during sex is a good way to get a chemical release you might not be getting otherwise.
The second part of this is that your brain wants to heal, and one of the ways your brain heals trauma is by exposure. There is lots of evidence that intrusive and ruminating thoughts actually support traumatic healing. By replicating trauma during sex, you have lots of good feelings that get replaced by the bad feelings associated with the trauma. And this builds resilience and capacity. Or so the theory goes.
Source: doctoral researcher that focuses on cognitive effects of trauma, mainly focused on homelessness but do a lot of adjacent work.
Bit of a trigger warning; talking about traumas. To add to the comments about control specifically, often shame is associated with trauma, whether it be sexual assault, religious deconstruction, LGBT+ thoughts and experiences, physical abuse, or emotional manipulation. Shame is also often associated with sex, such as masturbating in private or having “deviant” sexual preferences. As a way to hide the shameful/traumatic phenomena, sometimes it can be easy to subconsciously put it in the other “shame bucket.” This is useful, since it’s already normal to avoid talking about sexual kinks in everyday society, so it’s a way to hide those parts of you associated with shame, fear, and trauma.
For example, many trans people (and especially trans women) go through a phase in their transition journey where they consider being the other gender to be a sexual kink. That’s because the prospect of accepting being trans is associated with the fear and difficulty of the trans journey; the rejection, the uncertainty, bullying, learning to be a totally different person in public, etc. As a form of denial and hiding those thoughts and feelings, many trans folks consider that it is just a sexual thing that can be kept in the bedroom (usually privately) or sexual fantasies. I’ve had that journey myself, and I’ve seen other trans folks talk about it as well.
I don’t think it’s a coping mechanism so much as it is their low self esteem leaking out. I imagine it’s basically that you feel like garbage but you have to hide it most of the time and just live in society. But in the bedroom you can kind of release those feelings in a safe way with your partner. Its almost like a healthy version of self harm
I had something like this, a non-consent fantasy (towards myself) from childhood SA. But then after therapy the kink went away.
A lot of people are saying it has something to do with regaining control but I think that’s only part of the whole truth.
For me I think it was that I hadn’t processed the trauma, so I kept repeating it. Kind of like PTSD where your brain gives you mental flashbacks, but if you process the trauma the flashbacks go away or reduce. But for trauma-based kinks, the “flashbacks” manifest as a physical sensation of arousal mixed with other trauma emotions (like anger/sadness/shame etc).
Some people act out these kinks with safe partners and that’s how they process that trauma and regain the feeling of control. Some people process it by going to therapy and also regain control.
How I imagine it goes. Kinks hurt less than trauma is my guess.
This is partially the reason sexually abused kids become abusers themselves. Not sure why, but it’s a very commonly observed thing.
So it that why people who have had sexual traumas growing up, such as molestations and rapes, tend to be more sexual??
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