Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Conversation >

Bdsm in therapy and other stories...

Page: (1)2

Horatio Hellpop

16:20 / 02.09.05

recently i went to see a therapist for the first time and mentioned, during a summary of my history, that my high school girlfriend had been into bdsm which had made me uncomfortable at the time (the idea of hurting her disturbed me, even if she wanted me to do it) but that i thought i would be better at it now, a number of years later, if a similar situation arose. the therapist responded that i was right to feel uncomfortable, that [bdsm] was perverted and that modern society was too non-judgmental about this particular perversion.

what reaction do most therapists have to this particular topic? is there any kind of concensus or clearly delineated schools of thought in the field of pyschology?

does her response reveal something essentially (overly) judgmental about her (other-wise very nice) character? (it should be noted that i was basically relieved that she actually questioned some of the things i said instead of echoing everything back to me, which is to say not taking what i say at face value but instead of on its merit.)

my continued (primarily hypothetical) interest in bdsm is to me, a symptom of my desire to experience personally more extreme (i hope this doesn't sound too naive and/or condescending) aspects of human life and sexuality. do therapists tend to encourage this kind of exploration or condemn it as a barrier to introspection? in my experience, most therapy seems to privilege thought over action (this seems to be the therapists' equivalent of the quantum physics difficulty in being able to determine either the position or velocity of an electron; in this case, the dilemma is between isolating behaviour and changing it). is this true? if true, is it the correct or most useful way to be?

does anyone have positive experiences with therapy that led to being able to more fully experience the world, especially areas considered outside the sphere of normative behaviour?

Tryphena Absent

16:48 / 02.09.05

the therapist responded that i was right to feel uncomfortable, that [bdsm] was perverted and that modern society was too non-judgmental about this particular perversion.

Did she really say that or did she just seem to imply it?

Horatio Hellpop

19:05 / 02.09.05

yep, she said it. i'm paraphrasing but she definitely used "perverted".

19:23 / 02.09.05

what reaction do most therapists have to this particular topic? is there any kind of concensus or clearly delineated schools of thought in the field of pyschology?

Short answers: No idea, and no, I don't think so. There's very little by way of actual mainstream writing on BDSM as we understand it here, and no real research to speak of, so there's no established consensus or "clearly delineated schools of thought". I'd imagine that much would hinge on the experiences of the individual practitioner.

19:28 / 02.09.05

One might speculate, however, that any given therapist is unlikely to unequivocally encourage potentially risky behaviour unless their experiences and/or reading have reassured them that they're not being therapeutically irresponsible. I'd imagine it's lack of knowledge of the intricacies of the BDSM scene that's the barrier here, rather than the thought-over-action principle you suggest.

Tryphena Absent

20:18 / 02.09.05

But to use the word perverted...

Horatio Hellpop

20:29 / 02.09.05

"I'd imagine it's lack of knowledge of the intricacies of the BDSM scene that's the barrier here, rather than the thought-over-action principle you suggest."

that may be true in this specific case but i'm still coming to be convinced that Pyschology, as a result of codifying behavioural practices and measuring statistically normal behaviour, has a tendency to steer people towards the middle (which must seem like the safest place to be) and not necessarily in the spiritual interest of the people involved. i digress. think think think that's what they want. do we already contain all knowledge? is there no purpose in lived experience? pyschology seems (i use "seems" because i'm emoting and haven't actually made the study) focused on revealing root causes in order to eliminate behaviour. is there an additive pyschology that creates new behaviours? what does pyschology do with the creative drive and/or creative interpretation?

my discussion with the psychologist didn't touch on being part of a scene, although i've since realized that my peripheral awareness of the scene was much greater that most people i've encountered (who tend to have zero awareness). maybe she doesn't know about bdsm but she didn't seem entirely square, i talked about drug use without her batting an eye (well, i didn't go into details). is an awareness of the scene necessary to have an opinion on the acts involved? (not a rhetorical question). one may gain an understanding through study but lose perspective by knowing the details. (i don't mean to be dismissive at all, but for example, there are dance steps i remember thinking completely ridiculous before i learned them and now i take them for granted. i know how to do them and explain them; i know differences in quality and tone; i don't, however, really know whether or not i like the steps.) i may just be overeager to suspect my own judgment, or too willing to bow to her assumed authority in the context of the session.

i should ask her exactly which sexual practices she finds acceptable. (i probably won't as it seems rather a conspicuous waste of money just to prove a point.) that might yield some interesting answers if she was willing to play along.

Horatio Hellpop

20:33 / 02.09.05

her use of "perverted" made me shrink up because i was immediately aware that there were certain things about which i might automatically be judged. she may have said it because she thought she was being sympathetic to what i was telling her; i wonder, if i had been talking about something i found pleasurable (instead of something my girlfriend found pleasurable), would she have used the same language?

21:01 / 02.09.05

i'm still coming to be convinced that Pyschology, as a result of codifying behavioural practices and measuring statistically normal behaviour, has a tendency to steer people towards the middle (which must seem like the safest place to be) and not necessarily in the spiritual interest of the people involved.

I'm not sure it's possible to generalise about the entirety of Psychology on the basis of a single (IMHO, highly atypical - using "perverted") encounter with a "therapist". I'd be interested to know whether this individual was US/UK/elsewhere based, as I suspect this would have a considerable bearing on the likelihood of meeting psychologists (or psychotherapists or counsellors or whatever) with particular "spiritual" interests.

Horatio Hellpop

21:11 / 02.09.05

of course it's possible to generalize. i just did!

she's in and from new york city. and you're right that it's not necessarily accurate to generalize but it seemed like a good springboard from which to ask questions and provoke discussion. i'm also curious to know if anyone else has been in similar situations and what they did with or thought about them.

21:14 / 02.09.05

I'm trying to address some of your other questions, but it's tricky because I feel you're overgeneralising to the extent that the term "psychology"'s actually being quite devalued. I think you're talking about dynamic psychotherapy rather than "psychology" (which is a rather wider concept).

Anyway:

do we already contain all knowledge? is there no purpose in lived experience? pyschology seems ... focused on revealing root causes in order to eliminate behaviour. is there an additive pyschology that creates new behaviours? what does pyschology do with the creative drive and/or creative interpretation?

Umm, no and no, there obviously is purpose in lived experience. Psychology (assuming you mean psychotherapy) isn't necessarily (or even usually) focussed on "revealing root causes in order to eliminate behaviour", although this is certainly a popular, if reductive, meme. Yes, obviously psychotherapy creates new behaviours (visiting the psychotherapist) and might well be considered psychologically "addictive". I don't really understand the last question.

is an awareness of the scene necessary to have an opinion on the acts involved?

No, but it's necessary to have an informed opinion.

i should ask her exactly which sexual practices she finds acceptable. (i probably won't as it seems rather a conspicuous waste of money just to prove a point.) that might yield some interesting answers if she was willing to play along.

If she's a dynamic psychotherapist, she won't talk about what she does and doesn't find acceptable. Then again, she's already expressed rather more by way of personal opinion than would most dynamic practitioners. As you say, though, it's your money and your choice.

21:17 / 02.09.05

of course it's possible to generalize. i just did!

My mistake. Imagine "validly" crowbarred in there.

she's in and from new york city. and you're right that it's not necessarily accurate to generalize but it seemed like a good springboard from which to ask questions and provoke discussion. i'm also curious to know if anyone else has been in similar situations and what they did with or thought about them.

American, then. Not a surprise. I'm sure the UK has its fair share of biased psychotherapists, but I doubt you'd find many sufficiently spiritually-inclined (if, indeed, this is about religion rather than simply personal prejudice/distaste) to use the word "perverted" in such a context.

Horatio Hellpop

21:27 / 02.09.05

my apologies, ganesh, "pyschotherapy" is really the word i should have been using.

21:28 / 02.09.05

i was immediately aware that there were certain things about which i might automatically be judged

Indeed. Which is why no half decent therapist would say such a thing. Get a better therapist, who will want to encourage you to be as open and honest as possible. None is perfect but there are good therapists and bad therapists and fair-enough-most-of-the-time therapists.

I'm not sure whether this is your first experience of a therapist-client situation or if you're an old lag. Maybe after more sessions, you can find some positives developing. It's early days, or is this a very short course of therapy?

Horatio Hellpop

21:30 / 02.09.05

i'm not sure what makes it "dynamic".

21:37 / 02.09.05

Psychology is, essentially, the study of human (or, I suppose, animal) mind/behaviour. There isn't necessarily a 'therapy' element.

Psychotherapy is the treatment of emotional/behavioural problems by psychological means (as opposed to medication/surgery/ECT/etc.). There are various subsets of psychotherapy, many of which focus on the 'here and now' rather than seeking "root causes".

In practice, most psychotherapists are broadly eclectic, in that they utilise elements of various 'schools'. What you're talking about sounds like it's meant to be generally exploratory/(psycho)dynamic, but the use of "perverted" doesn't really fit. Personally, I wouldn't spend any more money on this particular individual.

21:46 / 02.09.05

i'm not sure what makes it "dynamic".

Your description of it so far sounds broadly like (psycho)dynamic psychotherapy - but hey, I may well be wrong. The "perverted" thing is something of a conceptual spanner in the works.

Horatio Hellpop

21:47 / 02.09.05

early. this was my "intake" session. i've been in therapy before with a few different people. i'm a little skeptical about the process but i'm also interested, so while "perverted" does ring a little alarm bell, i'm still curious to see what she'll do and (i think) i'm smart enough to take her biases into account. in fact, i'd almost rather have biases be clear and immediate instead of subtle, pervasive, undefinable... is this measuring of bias unavoidable in therapy? is there really a therapist without bias? does using nonjudgmental language make someone trustworthy?

21:49 / 02.09.05

Yes, no, no.

(You know this, really.)

Incidentally, what are you having psychotherapy for?

21:54 / 02.09.05

Oh, and Wikipedia really is your friend. Good outline of the basics, with links to excellent summaries of the subtypes.

Goodness Gracious Meme

22:12 / 02.09.05

I'd agree with 'nesh.

While it's entirely appropriate to for a therapist not to wish to disclose their own definitions/opinions, a therapist who describes a practice as 'perverted' is already revealing personal prejudices.

In this situation, I'd say that most professional action would be to refer you on to someone else, but this doesn't happen as much as it should.

There is a little bit of work/research/discussion on counselling/pyschotherapy and BDSM. Not much, it's an emerging area. If anyone's interested in this, I can post references/links.

This tends to conclude that a client has the right and should feel free to exercise choice over their therapist.

This is a service you're paying for and clients may wish to choose a 'BDSM/kink-affirmative' therapist*.

The therapist, however, if they are working to pyschotherapeutic basic principles of empathy/congruence/being non-judgemental should be able to work with any client.

eg, in my own experience of 'coming out' to my therapist as a BDSM'er, it was the strength of those principles and our relationship that made the coming out process (which I'd been terrified of) a really positive experience, not her sexuality or reference to it.

This isn't your concern, however, and I'd say that this interaction would, if it happened to me, have me finding a new therapist asap. Bad news.

* a therapist who advertises as x-affirmative doesn't 'x'(the research thus far suggests that this unbalances the relationship as much as an 'anti' position), but demonstrates that they approach x as unpreducially as possible/may well come from the xgroup eg lgbt/feminist/faith-affirmative, (if yr interested in this, I could try to dig up some NY-based info for you. drop me a PM if so.)

Goodness Gracious Meme

22:19 / 02.09.05

No huuman being is bereft of prejudices, of course, but a professional operating with empathy, congruence and postive regard (which basically means respecting the human and seperating this from their acts) works with and past their prejudices.

Labelling a practice 'perverted', and especially in an initial session(ie, this therapist knows *nothing* about you) shows
poor judgement and that this issue circumvents those fundamental principles, which doesn't bode well for a therapeutical relationship.

22:25 / 02.09.05

Quite. No human is free of bias, but it's crap practice for a therapist so display such apparently vehement personal prejudices at such an early stage of the therapeutic relationship. If I were you, I think I'd be examining my own reasons for wanting to continue with this individual - hence my question about what you want from psychotherapy generally.

Goodness Gracious Meme

22:30 / 02.09.05

oh yeah, and as nesh says: yes, no, no.

The work that has been done on this has generally been done within already 'fringe' areas (usually LGBT-specific) of psychology/psychotherapy research(or from within the BDSM community) but it is there, and is making its way glacially slowly into mainstream discourses.

References:

Bridoux, D. (2000). Kink therapy: SM and sexual minorities. In C. Neal and D. Davies (Eds.) Pink Therapy 3: Issues in therapy with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender clients. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Moser, C& Kleinplatz, Peggy J. DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: An Argument For Removal

There's a forthcoming(Nov, I think) special issue of the UK Lesbian and Gay Psychology Review on SM, which will contain a variety of articles/work on this.

More refs when I've dug 'em up.

Goodness Gracious Meme

22:34 / 02.09.05

yep, as nesh says, this does make me wonder why you're seeking therapy, and considering having it with someone who frankly, sounds crap.

Not crap because she finds BDSM perverted, but because she allows her own personal prejudices into an early/assessment session in her professional milieu.

I'm not entirely understanding why would you want to see someone whose prejudices are so glaring and obstructive.

22:36 / 02.09.05

Yeah, there's stuff by (mainly American) LGBT writers dating back half a century, and there are specialist 'sexology' journals - but it's all very fringe. Of course, the fact that even otherwise 'non-square' people like your therapist readily perpetuate stigma about BDSM means BDSMers are notoriously difficult to study...

Goodness Gracious Meme

22:41 / 02.09.05

Indeed. It tends to mean that most knowledge circulation is social/anecdotal.

Horatio Hellpop

23:52 / 02.09.05

why am i seeking therapy?

...

it's not entirely clear. there a few contributing things: i've been having problems with girlfriend and i'd like to sort out how much of the problems are things i can fix about myself so that i don't have to go through them again and again with her or with the next one; i've been stuck in the same shit job for over four years (for which there are a number of real and real-sounding reasons); i'm not productive artistically (i've been in art school for the last couple of years and i'm frustrated by my complete inability to make art independent of scholastic expectations; and basically i don't know what i'm doing with my life--goals that were clear seem to stay the same distance away despite my efforts and i feel like i've lost track of a number of them completely. i've lost the image of what my happy life will look like. at the end of the session she said that i was clinically depressed (based on our discussion and a questionnaire). she recommended taking anti-depressant medication in addition to continued therapy. stifling relationship, stifling job, stifling brain.

that's my life story!

Horatio Hellpop

00:02 / 03.09.05

bdsm is not part of my lifestyle or particularly part of my fantasy life making it practically easier to overlook someone with a bias against it, but not if the bias reveals some more fundamental professional/(arguably) personal flaw which it seems to. anyway, i'll see her again at least to get a better sense. this one statement does not invalidate all of the positive feelings i had about her during the rest of our session. if i still feel uncomfortable, certainly i will have her recommend someone else to me (which she mentioned that she was willing to do).

00:18 / 03.09.05

Hmm. Well and good; just be careful not to fall further into passivity as a result of having started seeing a psychotherapist and/or commenced medication. Not saying you have, but it's a risk where one is unsure about the aims of psychotherapy, and the stuff about "root causes" made me wonder whether you've had the chance to properly discuss goals/process with your therapist. You should've done so at the first appointment...

Tryphena Absent

00:50 / 03.09.05

I don't think goals and process necessarily become clear because you've discussed them though, that's the kind of thing that can take quite a long time.

00:56 / 03.09.05

No, but there should be some sort of explicit discussion of the aims and processes of psychotherapy right at the outset.

Tryphena Absent

01:03 / 03.09.05

But it's a huge step between that explicit discussion and later clarity.

Not that I'm assuming that a probable dynamic therapist who actually used the word perverted in an intake session would understand that she should be doing that. Hellpop your therapist needs to wash her mouth out with soap and get re-trained. Out of interest how did you find her?

Tryphena Absent

01:04 / 03.09.05

Damn, I've been trying to stop my bile pouring out and look, there it is for the world to see.

01:13 / 03.09.05

But it's a huge step between that explicit discussion and later clarity.

Sure - but, particularly when one is paying for the therapy, I'd say one should have a li-i-ittle more idea than seems to be the case within this thread - which is why I've linked to Wikipedia, which at least provides a basic overview/summary. From HH's account, it seems not unlikely that this shortfall is at least partly due to inadequacies on the part of the practitioner herself.

If she's recommending medication, I'm also hoping she's got some psychiatric training too...

Page: (1)2