IN THE BEGINNING….

I haven’t written this sort of kinkily introspective post for a while, but I came to something of a revelation about the possible origins of my kinks while I was in the US. I shared my thoughts with my therapist which helped to solidify them enough to contemplate writing a post.

The introspection was prompted by listening to a long book about Internal Family Systems therapy on the long drive from Vegas to San Diego. Once I’d left the city limits and the SatNav had given the instruction to “stay on this road for 206 miles” I settled in, taking myself through some of the therapy processes the author, Richard Schwartz was using with his clients. Like him, I identified troubled parts of me that had been there since childhood and interrogated them.

I once wrote this about my mother:

My Mother was a boarding school survivor, probably a more obvious case than me, and she also lost her father early on. She once told my wife (not me) that she hadn’t been openly loving to us when we were small because she knew we would have to go to boarding school and wanted us to be ready. I think that was her way of rationalising the fact that, because of her own upbringing, she hadn’t really known how.

Later I found out she had been abused by the older distant relation to whom she had been sent when her father died. Poor Mum hadn’t ever known how to show physical affection, but only when I started therapy did I become conscious of this having been missing from my childhood and to think about how that might have affected me.

My father was a single child, brought up on a farm. I remember his rough and tumble games with me and my brothers but that’s not the same as a loving hug. He too kept a tight lid on his emotions throughout his life.

Most of my early-life memories come from after we moved to Africa when I was six, but I can still picture the house where we lived before then. I remember a snowy winter and I remember being in bed with Mumps (these were pre MMR vaccine days). I also remember, presumably after having done something wrong, my mother holding me tight up against her 60’s flowery print dress, holding me tight into her body, while she leaned over me and slapped my bottom repeatedly.

I’d have been five or possibly six.

I can see her now, feel it now, in the hallway of the bungalow where we lived. I can distinctly remember that combination of unaccustomed physical intimacy and punishment.

I’ve always fought against the notion that my kinks arise from things that happened (or didn’t happen) when I was a child. Kink is such an important, fundamental component of what it is to be me that I have always preferred to think of it coming from nature rather than nurture; something innate, built immutably into my DNA.

I think Pandora Blake’s excellent presentation at Eroticon exploring the many ways that our kinks can originate and develop let me give myself permission to rethink this and open myself up to the, perhaps obvious, notion that pain and punishment might have become tightly linked with intimacy and connection from that time.

A second memory, this time of watching my father picking my brother up and holding him close to his body while he smacked him, has also lingered. Was I jealous of my brother being held so close in my father’s arms in that way? Did I want that for myself? I think perhaps I did.

Psychology tells us that the period from four to eight is important in the development of character and characteristics. My earliest memory of seeking out physical pain was at eight years old. I had been left, supposedly sleeping, in the car with my two, genuinely sleeping, brothers while my parents attended a film night in the officers’ club in Nairobi. I experimentally smacked myself with the hard case of my father’s reading glasses. I’ve used the earliness of this memory to support the notion that my kinks have been an innate part of my nature from birth.

But perhaps, just perhaps, finding myself alone and in the dark, I had sought to recreate that feeling of comfort that came from being held really close and tight by my Mum while she spanked me.

Perhaps that’s why the giving and receiving of pain remains an intimate act of love for me.