Where Do Our Kinks Come From?

If you’ve ever found yourself thinking “why the fuck am I into this?”, you’re definitely not alone. It’s probably one of the most interesting questions we can ask about our sexuality, particularly when the thing that turns us on feels oddly specific, completely at odds with who we are outside of sex, or just not something we can easily explain.

Maybe it’s being told what to do when you ordinarily hate being told what to do. Maybe it’s praise, humiliation, being watched, having control or completely giving it up. Maybe it’s a particular object, sensation or scenario that your brain has apparently decided is incredibly sexy for reasons entirely unknown to you.

So, naturally, we start looking for the why. Was there something that happened? Did I learn this somewhere? Does it say something about me? And, particularly when we’re talking about kink, it doesn’t usually take very long before somebody asks whether trauma has something to do with it.

The frustrating answer is: maybe. Maybe not. Sexuality is rarely neat enough to give us the satisfying origin story we’re looking for.

Your sexuality didn’t develop in a vacuum

I think it’s useful to start here because sometimes conversations about sexuality fall into two camps. Either everything must have a deep psychological explanation, or we’re so worried about pathologising sexuality that we act as though our experiences have absolutely nothing to do with what turns us on.

Neither makes much sense to me.

Our sexuality develops alongside everything else. We grow up absorbing messages about sex, bodies, relationships, gender, pleasure, what we’re supposed to want and what we’re definitely not supposed to want. We have experiences, relationships and early fantasies. We discover things accidentally. We seek other things out. Something catches our attention and, for whatever reason, our brain files it under interesting.

Over time, all sorts of things can become associated with arousal. A feeling, a dynamic, an object, a particular type of attention, a sensation, a role or a scenario can all become part of the things that work for us sexually.

This is part of what we mean when we talk about an erotic template. It’s essentially the collection of things we’ve come to associate with desire and arousal: what catches our attention, what we fantasise about, what feels exciting and what creates that shift into an erotic headspace.

The important bit, though, is that knowing sexuality develops in context doesn’t mean we can trace every turn-on backwards until we find the thing that caused it. I’m not convinced human beings work like that.

So, is it trauma?

Sometimes.

And I think we need to be able to say that without either deciding that kink is evidence of trauma or becoming so determined not to pathologise kink that we can’t acknowledge that difficult experiences can sometimes become intertwined with sexuality.

If you’ve experienced something that affected your relationship with control, vulnerability, intimacy, your body or other people, it isn’t particularly surprising that some of those themes might also exist within your erotic world. Our sexual selves aren’t somehow separate from the rest of us.

But that’s very different from saying kink comes from trauma.

Plenty of kinky people don’t have a traumatic explanation for what they enjoy. Equally, somebody having experienced trauma doesn’t mean every sexual interest they subsequently develop should be analysed through that lens.

I think we need to be particularly careful here because there’s an assumption that can sit underneath the question. We don’t usually ask somebody who enjoys fairly conventional sex to explain what happened in their childhood to make them enjoy it. As soon as somebody mentions bondage, humiliation, pain, submission or another less conventional interest, suddenly everyone wants to know what happened to them.

Sometimes nothing happened.

They just like it.

But what if something did happen?

This is probably where it becomes more complicated.

You might be able to look at something you enjoy now and see a connection with something from your past. Perhaps the themes are similar. Perhaps you remember when a particular interest first appeared. Maybe you’ve always suspected there was a relationship between an experience and something that later became erotic.

Making that connection doesn’t automatically tell us what to do with it.

I think people can become frightened by what their arousal appears to say about them, particularly when something they enjoy sexually resembles something they didn’t enjoy, choose or want in another context. There can be this uncomfortable question of “If this turns me on now, what does that mean about what happened then?”

It doesn’t necessarily mean anything about what you wanted then.

Arousal isn’t consent. Arousal isn’t approval. And fantasy certainly isn’t a sworn statement about what we’d like to happen to us in reality.

Context changes things enormously. Giving up control when you’ve actively chosen to do so is very different from having control taken away from you. Being vulnerable with somebody you’ve chosen, within boundaries you’ve negotiated and with the ability to stop, is different from vulnerability being imposed upon you.

Sometimes people can take a dynamic that once existed without choice and experience something superficially similar within a context where they now have enormous choice. Whether that feels reparative, reclaiming, simply pleasurable or none of those things is going to be very individual.

And sometimes we can see a connection without needing to give it some enormous therapeutic meaning.

I wonder if “why?” is always the question we’re actually asking

This is the bit I find particularly interesting.

Because sometimes “Why am I into this?” really does mean “I’m curious about how my sexuality developed.”

But sometimes I think it means:

“Is it okay that I’m into this?”

Or:

“Does this mean there’s something wrong with me?”

And if that’s the actual question, finding the precise moment your brain decided something was sexy probably isn’t going to answer it.

There can be something really useful about understanding ourselves. I spend quite a lot of my work being curious with people about why something might make sense for them, what purpose something serves and how their experiences have shaped the way they relate to themselves and other people.

But understanding doesn’t have to become an investigation into what’s wrong.

Sometimes there isn’t anything to fix.

I’m often more interested in the “what?”

If somebody brought a kink into therapy and wanted to understand it, I wouldn’t only be interested in where it came from. I’d want to know what it does for them now.

What does it allow you to feel? What happens when you enter that particular erotic space? What changes?

Maybe somebody who spends their entire life making decisions finds something incredibly freeing about being told exactly what to do. Maybe praise allows someone to receive a kind of attention they find almost unbearable elsewhere. Maybe being watched is about exposure, being desired or simply the thrill of being seen. Maybe taking control gives someone permission to be demanding, selfish or powerful in a way they struggle to access outside of sex.

Or maybe none of that applies and it’s simply really fucking hot.

That’s allowed too.

I think we can occasionally become so determined to understand the psychological meaning of sexuality that we end up analysing the eroticism out of it. Not every turn-on is secretly trying to communicate something profound about your childhood.

Sometimes pleasure is just pleasure.

When would I want to explore it further?

For me, the more important question isn’t whether a kink is unusual. It’s what your relationship with it is like.

If something brings you pleasure, is consensual, you feel able to choose whether you engage with it and it fits comfortably within the sexual life you want, I’m not particularly interested in deciding whether it’s sufficiently “normal”.

I’d become more curious if you’re distressed by what turns you on, if you feel you need a particular thing rather than wanting it, if you don’t feel you have much choice around your sexual behaviour, if it’s affecting your relationships or wellbeing, or if your sexuality feels increasingly narrow in a way you don’t want it to.

Even then, therapy doesn’t automatically mean “right, let’s work out how to stop you liking that.”

It might mean understanding the shame around it. Exploring what it gives you. Developing more choice. Expanding what else is available to you erotically. Working through something from your past if that’s relevant. Or simply getting to a point where your sexuality feels like something you understand rather than something you’re frightened of.

Those are very different goals.

So, where do our kinks actually come from?

Annoyingly, I can’t give you a satisfying answer.

It could be our experiences, the associations we’ve made, things we’ve repeatedly fantasised about, relationships, culture, novelty, things that felt forbidden, things we’ve learned about ourselves or some complicated combination of all of them.

Trauma might form part of that story for some people. For others, it won’t.

And sometimes you can spend a very long time trying to work out why something turns you on and still end up at:

Nope. Still no fucking idea.

I’m not sure that’s necessarily a problem.

There can be real value in asking “Why am I into this?”, particularly when understanding something helps us make sense of ourselves. But I think there comes a point where we might want to ask some different questions too.

What does this give me? How do I feel about it? Do I have choice around it? Does it fit within the sexual life I actually want?

And perhaps the biggest one:

Do I actually want anything about this to change?

Because understanding your sexuality can be incredibly valuable.

But understanding something and needing to fix it are not the same thing.

If you’ve found yourself wondering why something turns you on, feeling ashamed of what you want, or trying to work out what your desires might mean about you, psychosexual therapy can give you a space to explore it without judgement and without starting from the assumption that something needs to be fixed.

I work with individuals and couples exploring kink, fantasy, desire, shame and the more complicated bits of sexuality that aren’t always particularly easy to talk about.

If you’d like to explore your relationship with your sexuality, you can find out more about working with me or book an introductory call below.