Childhood Abuse, and BDSM Desires

by Laura Goodwin

After twenty years of hearing your true stories, and especially after reviewing the replies to my survey, I am convinced that the following statements are true:

The majority of people who are into BDSM were never abused as children.
Most people who were abused as children do not later abuse their own kids, or get into BDSM.
Many who were abused kids grow up to love BDSM despite their childhood experiences.
Some abused kids actually eroticize their painful childhood experiences as adults.

All of these things are ~normal~.

As woman who has been both a child and a parent, I assure you that neither kids nor parents have it easy. As a parent, I have had to do some pretty weird things to my kids that as infants they couldn't possibly understand. For example: When my baby got a cold and couldn't breathe while nursing because his nose was plugged up, I had to use a little suction device to open up his nose for him, because he didn't know how to blow his own nose. If I said, "blow your nose", it meant nothing to him because he was an infant in arms and didn't speak English yet. He couldn't do it for himself, I had to do it for him.

Well, it happens that he thought it was pretty outrageous when I would pump out his little nose, but I had to do it, or he couldn't eat. He has to be able to breathe while sucking, or he can't nurse.

That is not child abuse, that is normal child care. Parenthood is a minefield of such petty struggles. Kids misunderstand and resent a lot of things that you, as a parent, have to do. That's life!

Babies stick anything in their mouth. If they can put their mouth on it, or bring it to their mouth with their hand, they'll try to taste it. They don't know what they are doing. They don't know that *that* is a dangerous practice. They also naturally don't understand, and noisily resent it, when a frantic parent tries to get them to vomit up whatever it is that they have stuck in there.

The surgeon has to cut you before he can heal you. Similarly, parents sometimes have to do things that their kids don't like, in order to take care of them. That's life!

I'm sure that many of us do retain vague memories of the many pains and humiliations we endured at our parent's hands as infants, but how much of it was really abuse? That's the question!

Most BDSMers were not abused as children. This is one thing I learned from a survey I ran a while ago. The ones who considered themselves to have been abused was a tiny minority, maybe ten percent. This jibes with what people have told me at ULC meetings over the years.

Mind you, we aren't calling parental discipline "abuse". Perhaps half of the people who participated in the survey said they were spanked, slapped, or whatever, as kids, but hardly anybody classed it as abusive punishment.

Parental discipline is not abuse, and going crazy and hollering with anger at your kids when they screw up is also not abuse. That's normal. What's NOT normal is when a parent constantly terrorizes a kid; when there is an ongoing campaign of intimidation, harsh punishment, exploitation (like sexual abuse) and/or neglect.

However, it is very common for people who are into BDSM to FANTASIZE about living in a climate of intimidation, harsh punishment, and sexual exploitation, even when they never experienced anything like it in real life. Nobody knows why this is so.

Some people take painful abuse that they experienced as a child, when they had no control, and use it as the basis for their BDSM fantasies, over which they do have control. Some BDSMers who were abused as kids do the exact opposite: They get off on almost anything else BUT the type of stuff that they endured as kids. Choosing either approach is normal, and can be very healing psychologically, as well as satisfying in the kinky sense.

Such thoughts, such fantasies, are not in themselves a mark of poor mental health, whether they are based on your actual experience or not.

People who have BDSM desires who fail to act on them can get neurotic from the frustration. I am convinced that, in most cases, it's healthier to act on such feelings than to deny them. Of course, that's assuming you do it safely, and with all due respect for yourself and your partner.