Self Harm by Proxy
Over the years of being around kinky folk I have noticed a commonality. Some of the people who like or need to be spanked also self harm. I fall into this subset.
Just to be crystal clear on this, I am suggesting that some spankees may be using spanking as a form of self harming by proxy. I am NOT suggesting that because you like being spanked you are really self harming by proxy. Some people are just plain kinky and like spanking for spanking’s sake.
Some years back I was in a relationship with a woman who self harmed. She was a cutter and she had scars on her forearms and thighs from the razor cuts. Stress was the trigger for the cutting. She had been seeing a therapist who had put her on SSRI. She also suffered with an obsessive–compulsive disorder in the form of excessive cleaning. If she could not clean she got stressed which led to cutting herself.
My own self harming takes the form of biting my arms. Again this is stress related. I too have been on SSRI. I don’t have any scars as I never bite myself so hard I draw blood, but the half moon marks can last for several days.
The problems with two self harmers living together is that they feed into each others problems. The cleaning OCD is stressful to live with so that I would bite myself. This in turn stressed out my partner as she realised she was the cause of the stress. That made her cleaning and cutting worse.
It just spirals out of control.
Then I started an affaire with a work colleague. She was kinky. She was also sympathetic to my problems with my relationship. She urged me to leave the destructive relationship as she thought that it was probably the best move for both myself and my partner.
This is how I came to be living I’m my motorhome. I moved out and took to staying in the motorhome temporarily until I could find somewhere more permanent to live or sort out my relationship. That was about nine years ago. I soon discovered I liked living in my motorhome. Four years ago I bought a bigger and better motorhome. I digress: Motorhome living is for another blogpost.
With my new kinky partner I was able to explore the thoughts and fantasies that I had always had but was afraid to admit to. I also discovered that spanking relieved the stress that previously had led to my self harm and biting. I also found that once I was living my kinky lifestyle a lot of the stress just vanished. Suppressing one sexual desires and kinky desires is in itself very stressful.
I have not self harmed for several years. I have thought about it a few times but so far I have always managed to work through the stress, sometimes with spanking, sometimes with alcohol and sometimes just talking it through with my friends.
I have also arrived at a situation where I like the kinky lifestyle for it’s own sake.
When I first wrote this blogpost I did not dare publish it. That was some months ago. I did put a request up on Twitter for some input about self harming by proxy and I have had a response. I will post the email I received in it’s entirety. The sender wishes to remain private and that’s fine with me.
You wanted some input from others on the idea of self harm by proxy……
In my experience, a lot of bdsm and spanking models have self harmed at some point, but in my opinion, it depends on how you define “self harm”. If you assume that all cutting is self harm, then it rules out cutters who do it to get the same sexual high that they get from play. I know several cutters who do do it for that reason, it’s almost like masturbation to them. In those situations, I don’t see the sadists who play with them as providing self harm by-proxy.
I do believe I am fortunate enough to have not encountered anyone who I felt was using a dom or sadist in place of self harm – that is needing the pain for negative reasons, rather than positive ones. From what I have seen, the sort of bottoms who engage people to play with on that level tend to bring a lot of emotional baggage with them that they are not dealing with and that makes them potentially unsafe play partners.
I suppose I am using spanking as self harm by proxy. I did have a lot of emotional baggage but I think I have managed to lose most of that in the last few years. It’s not for me to say if I am an unsafe play partner but from the feedback I get from my kinky partners and friends I think I am safe to play with and I am aware of what I am doing and why.
I expect to get a lot of comments on this post and I hope it opens up a debate.
You’re definitely not alone in this one, Fred. I don’t self-harm often, but when I do it’s in ways that, for me, usually provide pleasure instead – by biting and by scratching.
I think partners can be of assistance in this – Adonis was often able to see that I needed the pain (was wanting to self-harm) and transmute that into pain together. Catharsis. Because it was open and consensual, it was less self-harm by proxy and more about actually dealing with the issues causing my need to feel the pain.
xx Dee
I meant to write a comment on this post for a while. In my opinion you have raised a very interesting topic, Fred! In one of my posts (and several follow-up posts) last year I asked the question whether spanking could be used as a kind of “therapy” (in brackets because I don’t think that spanking can substitute a professional therapy in case someone has real mental issues). The idea was that the spanking itself or certain fantasies and role-play scenarios that go along with it might be able to provide the participants with something they long for and which helps them to feel stronger and more grounded.
One aspect I talked about was self-harm and the question whether spanking could provide a safe substitute. I didn’t get any comments which implied that people use spanking like that. Instead, Prefectdt as well as Pandora reported that they had indeed tried self-harm when what they were really looking for was erotic spanking. You can read the post and their comments here, if you like. The follow-up posts are this one and that one. I found it very interesting to think about the possibility that signs of self-harm in our community could also be signs of tries to deal with the desire for erotic CP.
I find it very good that spanking works so well as a substitute for self-harm for you! It does not leave any permanent marks and it is a social activity which is related to positive things like friendship and eroticism. That sounds much better and healthy to me than being somewhere alone, biting or cutting oneself.