Trust, Vulnerability, Childhood Trauma…and Kink?

This is a very personal post. It’s a deep dive into my head, my history, some of the things that have shaped me, and is about me figuring it all out. I started writing it on January 14, 2025, in the midst of some deep emotional pain, some of which I am still navigating. I’ve revised it over 30 times before finally posting and WordPress tells me it is 4129 words long. I mention some of the childhood abuse I experienced in this post, including physical, psychological, and sexual abuse – so a word of caution for those who may be sensitive to such subjects.

Please know, you don’t have to read this – you really don’t, but if you do, and you decide to comment, please be kind.

Why do we bother?

This is a question I’ve had for myself for a few months now. I’ve am fairly sure I have mentioned this on this blog before, but haven’t told the true and full backstory of where it came from, and I think now is the time: since I was 19 years old, I pigeon-holed my kink. I stuck to the most familiar, easiest (for me to access without much vulnerability), and most straight forward manifestation of what I held inside (fairly straight forward anyway: daddy-thing, rarely real-life, physical intensity, etc). I did this for a few reasons, but the primary one was that I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t think I was safe. I didn’t think I was the kind of person who could be trusted to try new things – especially deep seated and vulnerable ones – and handle it, that if something went wrong, I’d overreact or react badly. In order to trust someone else to do these things with, you must first trust and believe in yourself. I didn’t.

I thought this for a lot of reasons. My childhood was traumatic and abusive. I experienced a number of “adverse childhood events” which are described as “potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood” by the age of 11 – more by 13 and 18. The American Society for the Positive Care of Children has a short quiz where you can get your “ACE score” – mine is 8 (out of 10) – which is calculated by events ranging from birth to age 18. My parents separated when I was very young and divorced by the time I was 8. I am one of four children, the only girl, and was raised by a single parent in poverty. When I was born, we lived in a one room cabin without running water. My father was an alcoholic (who likely struggled with anxiety and depression his entire life, only to have it exacerbated by his own alcoholic abusive parents and then his time spent in the navy) and that disease ultimately lead to his death from suicide when I was 13. 

One of my older brothers has been receiving treatment for, and was hospitalized regularly for, mental health issues from toddlerhood – this was in the late 80s/early 90s and is nearly unheard of today let alone then. Today, his diagnoses include Bipolar Disorder, ODD, and ADHD, along with intellectual disabilities. He has been institutionalized, in prison, or hospitalized for most of his life since the age of 10. Many of the mental health and psychiatric disorders he lives with, can be genetic and looking at my immediate family (parents, parents siblings, biological grandparents), this seems to be the case. When I was 11 (he would have been 13), during one of his monthly overnight visits, he snuck into my bedroom and cut my panties off with a pair of scissors, using a flashlight to look at me. I screamed, hid in the bathroom, and eventually woke my mom up. She called the police and his social worker and while we waited for them, there was a blackout. I was so terrified and convinced he had somehow woken up, knew I told her, and cut the power lines, I made us leave the house to wait for everyone outside in the driveway. I am still afraid of the dark today. Later, in therapy, he told me he was glad I woke up when I did, before it escalated. We do not have a relationship today. He was not the only one of my brothers to assault me.

Some of my mom’s abuse included “spanking” – which usually consisted of a lot of screaming and chasing us into a literal corner and screaming at a sibling to “get me a spoon!” (wood, plastic, metal, didn’t matter) and then hitting wherever she could, usually below the waist. She would call this discipline, I call it abuse. Interestingly, I never equated these moments to my interest in spanking. It was so far from the fantasies in my head, and I’m grateful my mind never made a connection between the two. I did crave the fictional calm, collected, loving depictions of spanking I read about, but those are truly fiction, and I suspect the fantasy was all the stronger because of how far my own reality was to it. Hitting children is never ok in any real-life context. She’d pinch or smack or slap in reaction any perceived slight or disobedience. She was physically rough.

It’s not the physical abuse I really remember being the worst, though. No, it was her words. Sometimes I think physical abuse would have been easier to contend with, but I know that’s more trauma thinking. I was the only girl of four children and had very different expectations for behavior and life in general. I was basically expected to be perfect and exactly how she wanted me to be. Surprise: I was not. I actually was very well behaved by nature, but I was also terrified of her and knew she didn’t love me, not like the boys. I’d been a disappointment from early on. I wasn’t a girly girl – for a start. For another: I was desperate for a positive, loving, male role model in my life. Very classic daddy issues. On a daily basis, my mom made me feel like I was a bad person and always would be. She constantly told me I was a bad daughter, a bad sister, a bad friend, and a bad person. Any normal childhood misbehavior would be overblown, overreacted to, and – this sticks in my head for some reason and is the root of many of my insecurities – she would call her closest friends or my grandparents (her foster parents, her mother died when she was 16 and her adoptive stepfather was a checked out alcoholic himself) and tell them all about it, while I could hear her.

I heard her regularly telling other people the negative things she thought of me. To this day, I have near daily anxiety (finally controlled with medication!) that people I think like and care about me actually hate me and are talking about me negatively behind my back. I am extremely sensitive to perceived rejection and I have had to fake a lot of confidence. She would tell me to my face that I was selfish and disloyal and on more than one occasion, would encourage my brothers to treat me like I wasn’t a person – she’d join in, also, of course. This has perhaps been most impactful. Last fall, I received a deeply hurtful and cutting email from a friend, who knew about a lot of my childhood abuse, and so much of what they wrote triggered the same feelings I had when my mom would behave this way. I felt abused all over again. It was that same feeling of not being a person worthy of basic consideration let alone respect. To be routinely put down and demoralized, sticks with you. Although I’ve done a lot of therapy and been very aware of my childhood trauma for a long time, this was the first time I felt any of it had been directly triggered (due to some savvy life navigating on my part to avoid anything that might do so!) and I was completely caught off guard by my reaction to it.

Until then, I knew the ways my trauma was impacting my parenting but I had to do a lot of work to deconstruct the verbal abuse and examine how it was making me think about myself and how that was impacting my ability to parent how I wanted, also. The last few years have been a lot of therapy (because: parenting, mostly) but in the midst of this, I got in to see a psychiatrist for the first time in my life. I was there for an ADHD assessment but he was being thorough and because I have a child, he’d asked about anxiety in parenting, etc. and I said “I don’t really have those kinds of intrusive thoughts. I mostly spend a lot of time worrying about the ways in which I am already failing my child and also, being terrified I may have a psychotic break, myself.” due to my brothers severe mental health issues and those of some other family members. My mom had so thoroughly gaslit me that I was a bad person, literally a failure as a person, and I believed it. I realized I’d spent most of my life waiting for everything around me to come crashing down and the anxiety surrounding that has consumed me. Unsurprisingly, treating the anxiety and then the ADHD, with medication, has been literally life changing. Experiencing what not feeling anxious on a day-to-day basis feels like has made me startled in the moments I am anxious, that I actually lived like that for so long. What I thought was primarily an anger issue, has been mostly resolved by treating the anxiety I was contending with.

All three of my brothers have/have had substance abuse issues. One has been clean and sober for 6.5 years. Both of my parents were raised by physically violent and verbally abusive alcoholics – my mom saw not drinking as the only generational cycle she was capable of breaking. I’m grateful for that, but it doesn’t excuse the abuse I suffered at her hands – both physical and emotional. As an adult, I can look back and realize she was poor, under resourced, had a lack of access to education & opportunity, and that she has likely been struggling with her own mental health issues – that she will never admit to. I’m not sure knowing this makes it easier though – because surely, she can see it was wrong? Anyway.

It’s honestly a wonder I made it out alive, let alone mostly (sort of?) functioning. I hesitate to say normal because who am I to declare that? *wink* Of course, I am not without my own battle scars or struggles, baggage, bad habits, trauma responses. Before I turned 18, I never thought I’d make it to 18. I couldn’t explain this to anyone. Despite the history of suicide within my family, I wasn’t suicidal, or depressed really, I just couldn’t imagine a future beyond a day or week in front of me. I could not imagine a reality where I was a living thriving adult person. My first time in therapy, in my early 20s, I discovered there’s a name for this: a sense of foreshortened future. It’s a trauma response and a symptom of PTSD, born out of feeling so unsafe, you’re unable to see ahead, plan ahead, in any meaningful way. I still struggle with this and until recently, hadn’t even planned so much as a vacation more than a few months in advance (not even my own wedding). Not being able to imagine a positive future, milestones, or good things happening or someone staying in my life beyond the now is one of my greatest insecurities. The fear of abandonment weighs heavy, the sense that people you trust will always leave, never truly leaves you.

When I actually did turn 18, it was a revelation to me, but I still had a sense that I had to do everything as soon as possible because I couldn’t imagine a future in which I’d get to. So I jumped in head first to the thing I was most afraid of missing out on: spanking. I jumped in recklessly before 18, but I’ll talk about that another time. I was rejected by many spanking video producers despite being so young and genuinely a spanko, because I was fat by their standards. Except one, at first, then another two or three. I wrote about this experience recently as well. I shot a lot with them the summer of 2007. I went into it with a completely open mind, “no limits”, and the cocky, reckless abandonment afforded primarily to the young. It was very nearly a totally positive experience until the second to last day of a long trip with a lot of shooting. I had one limit after all: no hair pulling. I was eager to interact with female tops because the idea was very foreign to me (my childhood fantasies were very daddy/parental and focused on a domestic M/F ideal). During the filming of a video, one of the other girls – who was a switch but would be topping me in this video, pulled my hair. It’s possible it was an accident, but I’d had the sense the whole week that she didn’t like me, and it felt like that was coming to a head. As an aside, this sense of being unable to tell if someone is acting or genuinely mad at me, is one of the reasons role-play has never worked for me.

For lack of a better term, I freaked out. I pulled her hair and yelled “Do not pull my hair” – was immediately horrified by my reaction (and remain so, to this day), and fled to my room, sobbing. The fallout at the time was vast, though 18 years on, probably very few have a significant memory of this beyond me (I hope?). The girl and one of the producers insisted she hadn’t pulled my hair and that I was unstable, overreacted, was crazy, etc. They gaslit me. Another of the producers handled me very gently and for that I am grateful. He was kind and comforting and honest but never cruel. I was told recently by someone who has seen the footage, that this girl really had pulled my hair and that was affirming and lead to processing a lot of latent emotions related to this. This is part of what lead me to stop making videos at the time; I also never played with a woman again which means I never got the chance outside of video work, and I pretty much stopped trying new things all together. I even closeted my bisexuality. I clung to what I knew, the things I knew were safe, that I already had experience with. I spent the next 16.5 years keeping a firm grip on my kink, how I played, and even how scenes would go. I maintained control. 

[This wasn’t the only less-than-ideal experience I had shooting videos and I did say I’d touch on some after I posted about my time shooting last week. One of the first sets I was on, the producer requested one of the bottoms in the video (there were 3 of us) volunteer to do anal play on camera – she wanted one of the spankers to use a gloved finger and a suppository. Now, I feel no shame for being into this kind of anal play but the other girls shooting were more experienced and said no immediately. I felt I had to say yes. If I had said no, and didn’t do the shoot, I’d have been out the cash (which I desperately needed) and I had no ride to get me until the shoot was meant to be ending. This was the days before Uber and smart phones. I’m not ashamed it exists either, but I wish I had had the resources to make a more informed choice about it – in this case, it didn’t really feel like a choice. For another shoot, I arrived about 10 minutes early – as one does – and the producer used that in the video and called me rude and disrespectful for being early because they weren’t ready. Again, I had to get through it, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.]

I met my husband, we were aligned in that we shared a spanking fetish and aligned on life, most importantly. Kink was important, but by sticking to the safe things, and a few “new” things that felt safe with him, I didn’t feel I was missing much kink-wise. I knew he had no interest in discipline or dynamics and I decided those things weren’t important to me since they would involve a kind of vulnerability I refused to engage with. As I have written about, we have things that work really well for us and I liked that – I still do. In the safety and comfort of a committed relationship, I finally allowed myself to explore the more explicitly sexual side of my kink. It may not be the biggest part, but it does exist and feeling safe to dive into it with him was validating. He is the only person I’ve ever really wanted to explore spanking fully sexually with and that’s special. I’ve opened up more recently, of course, about those more vulnerable aspects of my kink and it feels good to have done so.

Fast forward (a lot) to 2018 and I got pregnant. This was totally planned but if you have kids or have been through a pregnancy yourself, you’ll know you can’t plan much beyond the deciding to have a child in the first place. Pregnancy was delightful for me – I had some nausea that was easily managed, fairly normal fatigue, I felt great most of the time. But my libido and kink drive, plummeted. A complete change from how I had been. Hormones and preparing for a baby kept me busy though, and it was a gradual shift that didn’t feel noticeable until much later. By the time my child was 4, I was wondering if I’d ever feel kinky again. I was having an identity crisis. I still talked to some scene friends, we played occasionally at home – mostly as foreplay, since for me there’s no sex without kink – but I felt a little lost. I’ve written about this, but I was worried it would never come back to me in the way it had been. It felt like a fundamental part of me was missing and I didn’t know how to find it. The identity crisis that often comes with new parenthood was amplified for me.

It turns out, the answer was also: time and hormones. The shift happened around the time my kiddo was 4.5 and kink came back into my head with a vengeance. I had been so unsettled by it being gone, worried of losing it forever, that I let those long pushed back parts, come out, too. I touch a bit on those early thoughts of discipline and structure (and uniforms) in this post. I had denied them for so long, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be willing to put in the effort to seek them out again. I didn’t see myself as worthy of it – and I’ve been questioning that even more recently. I reached out to someone I felt was safe – someone I had known a long time, someone whose kink I felt somewhat familiar with, and had always felt comfortable with and around. They weren’t ever a play partner and live 3000 miles away so it also felt safe to initiate these conversations for those reasons – I never thought it might ever escalate to play. I just needed someone to talk to, someone who got it. To my surprise, we aligned remarkably well on kink and it did escalate to play. Because of my history with this person, it was much easier for me to be open and vulnerable than I might have considered when trying to find a new play partner. I honestly don’t think I would ever seek this out with a “stranger” – the foundation of friendship is so important to me in the idea of a play partner at all. Now, I am unsure of seeking it out with anyone at all.

Unfortunately, a lot has changed in the last year and a half. Not all of it good, not all of it bad. Change is hard just by the nature of it being change. But it’s lead to the question I asked at the opening of this post: why do we bother? For many of us, kink is not so much – or only – about our sexuality or orientation, but it’s about how we connect with other people. Like I said in this post, it has a lot to do with how we connect with ourselves. It’s how we feel seen, cared for, loved even. These are some of the key things that make us human. Casual play isn’t uncommon in the spanking community, however deeper connection is not only possible, but highly sought after. How do we build those connections? How do we nurture them, how do they manifest, how do we manage them? What are they rooted in?

For me, a deep kink connection comes first and foremost from trusting someone fully with myself. That’s only happened three times and one of them is my husband. Knowing someone is seeing you and your vulnerabilities and insecurities and strengths, without judgement, but perhaps a bit in awe, is the start. Most people don’t see me that way – I’d venture to say other than these three people, no one really ever has, but that’s part of what makes it so special and meaningful – it’s not everyone, but it is how many of us connect deeper with those select few. As of right now, I am feeling a sense of loss of one of those other two meaningful connections outside of my marriage – the thought that it may be lost to me forever is one I can’t really bear, so I don’t, for now. The likelihood that current circumstances are temporary, exists, so I go one current moment at a time because it’s all I can control.

So why do I bother? Because what else is there? As humans, we want to connect – we all do that in different ways. Spanking, the vulnerability of it, is the primary way I connect with other people. That is the point. Who are we without meaningful connections? I know how I feel without meaningful connection, even as an introvert who primarily prefers to recharge alone and spend time in gentle quiet: lonely and alone. I believe we want to know other people are out there, other people who might feel like we do, see the world similarly, have shared life experiences – everything. It feels very simple in that sense, that it’s about connection, but it’s really profound.

I am still, generally, feeling a little knocked down by the first three months of the year. Lately I’ve felt like I may be coming out of the fog a bit, but losing the companionship and intimacy of some of my oldest and closest scene friends has taken its toll and been, frankly, crushing. My confidence is still really shot, my insecurity is through the roof, but by focusing on friendship, community, and the social spaces that are important to me, I am really trying. This post has a lot in it, because there is a a lot to me and a lot going on, and a lot of what is going on has thrown me back in time in some weird ways. It’s not all so serious but I’ve been dealing with a lot and finding the fun stuff again is taking some effort.

But this is me. This is a big part of who I am and why I kink the way I do – why I kinked the way I did for a really long time, and why now that I am re-exploring my kink and taking ownership of it again, that I do it in a way that feels really right for me. Eventually, I think that will be playing with women again – I hope. It means no longer hiding the role of discipline in my kink, not lying to myself about it’s importance and wanting it, enjoying finding a context (uniform) for a concept I’d had in my head for so long, and importantly – the one I struggle the most with: acknowledging that I deserve all of it. I am worthy of it.

Oh – the medications that treat my anxiety and ADHD are also really great, too.

-M