Healing Through Sexual Role Play

Can the wounds of sexual trauma be healed with role play?

No one wants to focus on trauma when it comes to sex. Even those of us who really enjoy pain aren’t necessarily interested in long talks about old heartaches or abuse.

Some of us want to reenact the abuse and experience it erotically, but don’t want to analyze it inside out.

We all have traumas, and some are sexual in nature or otherwise related; some are about the integrity of the body or our body image, and some are about betrayal or violation or witnessing something terrifying or painful.

Sex can be dangerous. And it can also be a very healing medicine, putting us into our bodies as a source of pleasure and connection. It can help us restore power and reclaim ourselves.

Using Role Play for Sexual Healing

All sex can help heal old wounds in the right circumstances, but role-play sex may be especially suited because we can literally take on various roles on our own terms.

Revisiting with Role Play

We can revisit victim roles safely from the vantage point of our own rules. We can change the outcomes. We can switch between dominant and submissive roles and play the bad guy.

In our fantasies, played out in real time, we can rewrite our story, or simply visit the source of our shame and experience the eroticism we still feel without shame or judgement, allowing us to work through it.

We do not need to specifically spell out any of this, either. While some find it a very helpful ritual to play specific, familiar roles, all of this can operate under the radar. We don’t have to dwell on or think up our traumas at all. We can simply go ahead with great sex and find this stuff playing out beneath the surface all by itself.

There’s a reason we can get such a rush from playing an amazing and powerful role, or by laughing for an hour after our playful, hilarious attempt at assuming a particular character, or by entering subspace. There is so much going on at the subconscious level.

Read: Should You Indulge Your Date’s Rape Fantasy?

Ever realize out of the blue that something that plagued you for a long while, something you couldn’t shake, disappeared into the ether? You can sometimes pinpoint the minute a painful burden dissolved, and other times, you come to realize that you are no longer carrying it. Maybe you tried for years to rid yourself of it, and now it’s really gone but you don’t recall how.

You Choose the Role and Direct the Play

Erotic empowerment—kink and power and abuse games on your own terms, with you writing the endings—can turn something painful into pleasure, or erase something you didn’t sign up for in the first place.

Dominant Leah Peterson wrote about trauma and kink at A Beautiful Perspective, her now defunct blog. She said kinky BDSM can help “rewrite traumatic moments from the past in a new way where she’s in charge, instead of them happening to her.”

She confesses that for many years she tried to manage her own pain with self harm.

“I would cut myself and my brain would send in the troops, that morphine-like hormone cocktail to numb my mind and body. It was those endorphins my brain was craving all along. What if in BDSM I had found a way to elicit that rush without hurting myself or doing drugs?”

Role play in kink or BDSM is a way that we can take on our own dark fantasies and confront them in a place where we hold the power. We can get in touch with different aspects of our own nature, different places from our past, and different fantasies we have dreamed of.

Healing Role Play and Psychology

Role play is a powerful psychological tool, and not just in the realm of sex!

You’ve heard of “method acting” where actors fully submerge themselves in a role to experience their character. Actors often describe such a process as cathartic and empowering, even if it was terrifying at the start.

Psychologists and doctors also use role play to “transform trauma” and help clients better understand things that happened to them, or rise above negative experiences. It is sometimes called psychodrama, drama therapy, post incident role play, and play therapy.

While we certainly don’t want to pathologize kink and fetish, which are not just the domain of abuse victims (lots of vanilla sex lovers experienced trauma too), we can’t deny the rich variety of healing and catharsis that kinky sex and fetish role play can bring.

Self professed “pain slut” Cupcake Sinclair told Vice Magazine, “So many of us shy away from pain. Being able to embrace it allows me personally to feel the catharsis I need, as well as to remind myself I’m stronger than any problems I might be going through.”

The Healing Power of Kink and BDSM

The ritual of kink and BDSM can operate overtly as we enter into the places that scare us and rewrite the script. But many of us engage more playfully, approaching kink from a variety of angles, without specifics in mind. Our goal is to receive and give fun and pleasure, to get creative, and to relieve sexual tension.

This, too, is powerful medicine. Without fun and pleasure, what is life? Life is stressful, even the best life, and sex helps us relieve stress. You know what they say—living well is the best revenge.

Read: Sexual Roleplay: A Guide for Roleplay Beginners

How role play fit into your kinky life? Do you find it healing?