Kink and Therapy: What Actually Comes Up
- Griffin Oakley
- Aug 26, 2025
- 6 min read
Someone in therapy mentions, partway through a session, that they're into leather. Or rope. Or being tied up. Or being the one who ties. Or some sensory thing they don't quite have a name for yet.
They've shifted in their seat. They're watching me carefully. They've maybe lowered their voice without meaning to. And underneath it all is the question they're not asking out loud:
Are you going to act weird about this?
What they usually don't realize is that the kink isn't the part we're going to spend much time on.
What we're going to spend time on is everything around it.
The thesis, plain
If you're kink-identified and looking for a therapist, the work in therapy is almost never about the kink itself. The kink is, in most cases, fine. You know what you like. You know how to engage with it consensually. You've already done the harder thinking about it than most of the people who'd judge you for it. Nearly half the general population reports interest in at least one paraphilic category, and about one-third have engaged in such a practice at least once (Joyal & Carpentier, 2017). You're already in larger company than the framing implies.
What comes up in therapy is usually one or more of these:
The shame around being kink-identified, which is usually older and louder than the kink itself
The family-of-origin story about what's acceptable about you and what isn't
The identity work, particularly for people also navigating queerness, gender, or other parts of themselves that didn't get a friendly welcome
The "is this a trauma response" question, which is real but rarely binary
The relational stuff — what it costs to keep parts of yourself hidden from the people you love, even ones who'd probably be fine with it
None of those is a kink problem. They're a person problem. And they're the work.
The shame is older than the kink
The shame people carry about their kinks is almost never about the kink. It's about what kink became evidence of in the environment where you grew up.
If you grew up in a religious household, the shame might tell you the kink is proof of moral failure. If you grew up in a family that punished any deviation from a narrow version of normal, the shame might tell you the kink is proof that something is generally off about you, and the kink is just where that leaks out. If you grew up in a family that was perfectly fine in theory but radioactive in practice when it came to sexuality, the shame might tell you nothing in particular — just that you can't show this part to anyone.
The shame isn't a reaction to the kink. It's a reaction to the story you were taught about people like you. The kink is just where the story has the most material to work with. Stigma research keeps finding the same thing: the negative messages we hear about groups we belong to get absorbed and turned against us — and the damage from that absorption is real and measurable (Hatzenbuehler, Phelan, & Link, 2013). The shame about your kink is doing work in your body that the kink itself isn't.
Untangling that — separating what you actually feel about your kink from what you were taught to feel about being someone with a kink — is real work. It can take months. It's worth the months.
The family-of-origin story
Most people I see who are kink-identified haven't told their family. That's often fine. There's no requirement that you out yourself to anyone, ever.
But what people don't always realize is that hiding it has a cost. Not because hiding is wrong — it isn't — but because the energy of managing what your family doesn't know about you is energy you don't have for the rest of your life.
The work isn't necessarily "come out to your family about your kink." The work is figuring out what it actually costs you to keep that part walled off, and what you'd want to do about it if you weren't on autopilot about the answer.
Sometimes the answer is: "yeah, I'm going to keep it private, and I'm going to put down the chronic low-grade shame I've been carrying about that being the wrong answer." Sometimes the answer is: "I'm going to tell my closest sibling and see what happens." Sometimes it's something in between. The point is that it becomes a decision you're making, not a default you're stuck in.
The identity work
For a lot of kink-identified folks, kink and other parts of identity travel together.
This is especially common for queer folks. The leather community has been part of gay culture for fifty years. Kink and being trans often intersect in interesting ways — the body becoming a place you have authority over, after a long time of feeling like other people had authority over what your body was supposed to be. Asexual folks have their own complicated relationship with kink that doesn't map cleanly onto sexual/non-sexual binaries.
If multiple parts of your identity got walled off in the same family, in the same childhood, in the same religious tradition — they often need to be untangled together. The kink work and the queer work and the gender work and the spiritual harm work aren't really separable. They're the same project: figuring out who you are when you're not performing for safety.
"Is my kink a trauma response?"
This one comes up almost every time the topic comes up at all. Real question. Worth answering honestly.
The honest answer is: sometimes, often not, and even when it is, that doesn't make it bad.
Sometimes kinks are a way of taking something that was once not in your control and putting it firmly in your control — choosing the rope, choosing the dynamic, choosing the timing, choosing the safe word. That can absolutely be a trauma response, in the sense that the wiring around it traces back to old material. It can also be deeply healing. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Sometimes kinks have nothing to do with trauma. They're just how you're wired. When researchers compared 902 kink-identified people to a control group, the kink group scored as mentally healthy as — or healthier than — the controls. The researchers' conclusion: BDSM is a recreational interest, not a sign of pathology (Wismeijer & van Assen, 2013). Same as the people whose preferences are entirely vanilla — that's their wiring, not evidence of psychological purity.
The work isn't to figure out which category your kink falls into. The work is to be curious about what role it plays in your life now and whether it's serving you. Most of the time, it is. Sometimes, it's not — and that's worth looking at. Either way, the kink isn't the diagnosis.
A note about leather, specifically
Leather is its own thing.
For some people, leather is a sensory experience. The weight, the smell, the temperature, the texture — it's regulating in a way that's hard to explain to people who don't get it.
For some people, leather is identity. There's a whole leather subculture with its own history, its own ethics, its own ritual structure. Leather-identified folks aren't dabbling. They've got a tradition.
For some people, leather is symbolic. It connects them to something — to queer history, to a community, to a version of themselves they don't get to be in their day job.
For some people, it's just a great jacket.
All of those are real. None is more or less legitimate than the others. The meaning isn't in the object.
Kink and therapy: what I actually do
I'm a trauma therapist. Identity, attachment, shame, the long shadow of childhood. That's the work.
I'm not a kink specialist. I don't have a certification in kink therapy. I don't run kink-focused groups. I'm not going to suggest play protocols or coach you on negotiation.
What I will do is not flinch when you mention kink in session. I will treat it as one part of who you are, not the only interesting thing about you. I will help you figure out what's actually weighing on you, which is probably not the kink itself.
If you want a therapist who specializes in kink work, there are kink-aware professionals out there — the Kink Aware Professionals directory is the standard starting place. If that's what you need, that's the path.
If what you need is regular therapy — for the trauma, the shame, the identity work, the family stuff — from someone who isn't going to need you to translate yourself first, that's what I do.
If this is landing
If you're in Oregon or Florida and what's in this article is hitting somewhere, the next step is a free consult. We'll talk about what's actually weighing on you. I won't ask you to explain kink. I'll ask you what you want different about your life.
Griffin Oakley, MSCP, NCC, LMHC, LPC
Founder & Therapist, Curious Mind Counseling
📞 971-365-3642
Griffin is a licensed telehealth therapist and the founder of Curious Mind Counseling, serving clients throughout Oregon and Florida. His work focuses on complex trauma, identity, and the kind of therapy where the parts of yourself you've kept hidden don't need to stay hidden in the room.
References
Hatzenbuehler, M. L., Phelan, J. C., & Link, B. G. (2013). Stigma as a fundamental cause of population health inequalities. American Journal of Public Health, 103(5), 813–821.
Joyal, C. C., & Carpentier, J. (2017). The prevalence of paraphilic interests and behaviors in the general population: A provincial survey. Journal of Sex Research, 54(2), 161–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1139034
Wismeijer, A. A. J., & van Assen, M. A. L. M. (2013). Psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 10(8), 1943–1952. https://doi.org/10.1111/jsm.12192
