Kink Aware Psychotherapy

I am a gestalt therapist, who over the years has negotiated a longstanding need to be a slave/submissive. This has presented me with a number of challenges, not least how to embrace my sexual urges and have a career. Therapy has helped me to reconcile my different needs, and come to feel more at ease with my sexual interests.

Many people who are kinky choose to have therapy to negotiate the challenges life throws at us in the same way as non-kinky people. Your kink/BDSM interests may not be the main reason you come to therapy, but when you do not feel comfortable sharing these parts of yourself with a therapist, this can limit the benefits you get from it. Sometimes our sexual inclinations express early relational patterns that you might want to look at, and sometimes they encode trauma. The taboos around sex make it harder in conventional therapy settings for some people to engage with their material - particularly those parts that are encased in shame.

As a therapist who has probably had fantasies, or enacted scenes as weird, wild, and dangerous, or dirty as yours, I am unlikely to be fazed by the sexual parts of you.

Feeling shame around fetish/kink is normal, and in some ways healthy; shame is there to protect those parts of us that have been hurt before and we’ve learned are not okay, or not loveable. Shame is lessened by experiencing it with a safe person, knowing this person won’t leave us or reject us. It’s why the bond in kink/fetish settings where we can share our shame without fear of rejection can be so healing.

My own trauma happened at a young age, and this supports me to work with the impact of child sexual abuse, and/or early developmental trauma.

I work with a wide diversity of people and sexual expressions. My life experience has led to an interest in marginal experience, in power/oppression, in trauma/addiction, and in sex and gender. I define as a cis man, however the way I inhabit my body sexually can feel more feminine. Whilst I may not share your experience(s), my history opens me to the importance of sharing and hearing marginal narratives towards reclaiming whole(r) senses of self. 

I welcome people from all countries for online therapy. I am based in the UK. Please look at the rest of my website for more about the way I work and my attitude to therapy, and please feel free to contact me if it resonates. 

There are articles about my work with kinky clients and what I have learned about the role kink plays in facilitating exploration of existential dilemmas, accessed via the Links and Resources page on this website. Please also check out my book - there are sections on kink and on addiction.

There are a number of other places you can find kink affirmative therapy. The Pink Therapy Directory is a UK based therapy directory that allows you to use a BDSM search filter.