Introspection in Kink is Good
My hot kink take is that it’s good to introspect and psychoanalyze your kinks and figure out what base psychological urge you’re satisfying with them or what sort of strange trauma or circumstance of your development led you to develop these fetishes.
For one, sometimes it can help you realize that your relationship to a particular kink in the way that you currently engage with it is or has become unhealthy and you need to address this baseline need in your vanilla life in a more normal way before you return to engaging in the kink. You don’t want engaging in your kink or with a particular kink dynamic or with a particular play partner to become an emotional dependency that is the only thing that grounds you when dealing with untreated mental illness or horrifying material conditions.
For instance, in 2014, during a very turbulent time in my life where I was experiencing a lot of housing instability and poverty, I realized that I was using hypnokink in a way that was unhealthy for me. I was a little too fixated, a little too obsessive. So I took a break from kink for roughly 2-3 years while I focused instead on becoming financially stable with stable housing and a more stable sense of identity. When I resumed really regularly doing kink in 2017 I had a much healthier relationship to it and to the people I played with. It was able to just be something I did for fun because it’s hot and not a way that I was deriving a sense of identity.
Not saying that you can’t be kinky and in poverty or a precarious life situation or when not in therapy… but that it’s important to think about if you’re using kink as a maladaptive coping skill where it’s not actually just something that you’re enjoying and scratches a certain unusual itch but is actually maybe something you’re fixating on instead of the real thing in your life you need to address.
Like if you are using having a high protocol 24/7 D/s CNC TPE dynamic to cope with a very insecure attachment style and abandonment issues, which is also something I had previously done personally, and have seen many other people do, then you’re very likely going to lose track of the fact this kink is supposed to just be for fun and not be, like, a real actual unethical power dynamic. You might start to genuinely worry that if you’re not able to obediently serve your partner that they’ll leave you or that if they aren’t giving you orders to follow that they’ll leave you or that if you aren’t serving someone you don’t have value. These are really not healthy feelings or a healthy balanced relationship. Especially when you involve hypnosis and brainwashing there is that risk of losing lucidity and becoming too sucked into the fantasy.
Also, identifying what odd psychological needs or desires are at the core of your kinks allows you to better identify other kinks you might also really enjoy or ways to make your scenes even more hot. For instance, realizing that a lot of my subby side is basically from wanting to get an A+ on an exam helped me realize that incorporating praise kink into any scene makes it way hotter to me. Waxplay? Oh it’s so much better when the top says “you’re doing such a good job taking this wax for me…”
I have a play partner whose many kinks all at their core seem to come from wanting someone to be very considerate of them. For someone to put them first and put in a lot of time and effort for their sake. Knowing that this is what Makes The Thing Hot allows potentially anything to become hot. Oh it’s not just about getting what you want, but about wanting to know someone was thinking about you while doing it. So something as simple as dressing up nicely for a scene and saying “I put extra care into my makeup for you” is really going to get them blushing. Fantastic. Amazing. And then they can just say “and you did such a good job at it!” To me in return and now I’m blushing. Somehow this is already very kinky even though it’s not even gotten to the bondage predicaments or hypnotic emotional sadism yet.
So uh yeah idk don’t vocally psychoanalyze other people without their consent that’s weird duh but do introspect you will enjoy what you find I think I think