This post is from Reddit. I did NOT write this, this is a repost from someone else. My intention with this post is to start a discussion on sexual fetishes that are weird, make us question our orientation or just don’t make any sense at all. I too „suffer“ from a fetish I wish I never had, and it took me a lot of inner work to come to conclusions on what I have it. Turns out it’s trauma induced. I will end MY text by saying that you are NOT your kink, especially not of it affects you in a negative way. Here is the original post: ## Introduction Hello, all. A while back, someone DMed me asking for my thoughts about the causes of weird sexual fetishes, and in responding I realized I had a lot to say about that. At the end of the conversation, we both expressed frustration that this information is not really accessible. This should be something you just google, yet people don't talk about it in these terms unless they get *very* deep into therapy, and I think that leaves a lot of people either confused about themselves or acting very defensive, and I think that's because not knowing why you do the things you do leaves you vulnerable to that creeping feeling that there's something "wrong" with you. There's nothing wrong with people who have weird sexual fetishes, and there's nothing wrong with expressing them in a consensual, safe way. Still, in my experience, they have important meaning, in the same way that our dreams or any daydream or fantasy has meaning. They reflect our inner world, and being curious or concerned about them is an opportunity to learn more about ourselves, which is a fundamental component of trauma recovery. So what I want to do here is share all of the root causes I've found of my own weird sexual fetishes. These are *highly* complex behaviors; my therapist uses a twist on that old saying about sex. For him, the saying goes, "Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about everything." Keep in mind the importance of "narrative truth" here; there are many parts of trauma recovery where arriving at a firm truth about ourselves, other people, or our past is just not realistic outcome, and in place of firm truth we can rely on a narrative we build. That narrative is for us, to use privately to understand ourselves. That's what we're building here; we're not concerned with the concrete, only the story that best explains us, and it's a story that we need to allow to evolve and change over time without the shame that typically comes with revising what we know to be "true." Narratives are allowed to change as we increasingly understand ourselves. Okay, enough pre-amble. Here is the list as I've found it, and remember that for any fetish, it's likely that several elements on the list will apply. Feel free to add your own in the comments; there are just so many possible facets to this that there's no way one person could have experienced them all. But maybe as a group we can illuminate a good majority of what goes on inside our heads while we do these silly things to get off. Anyway, here it is: * * * ###The List 1. Extreme emotional pain or shame sometimes turns into pleasure as a self-protective measure. This can lead to re-enacting painful experiences from our past in a sexual context, and we counter-intuitively find that gratifying. 2. Sometimes we had to be something or someone to survive a traumatic period in our lives, and while we may turn that off in our daily life, when it comes time to be intimate, we can only feel safe by being what we had to be before. This is especially important for fawn types, IMO. 3. Sometimes someone demands something of us, and we have no choice but to comply for a long period of time, or face extreme danger. This is kind of a combination of the previous two, but thinking in terms of what was demanded can be illuminating. 4. Being presented with problems outside of your control by your caretakers can lead you to seek control. For example, a neglected and rambunctious younger sibling that can only be controlled by force can create a kind of love language based on power. 5. Sometimes we are not allowed to admit to ourselves or anyone that we secretly desire something, powerfully. This is a tricky one, and is usually pretty humiliating to find out. A classic example would be a neglected child who was bullied by a sibling, who then grows up to feel sexually gratified by being bullied, because *any* form of attention is better than neglect. Another example, a certain unnamable cult-y YouTuber suggested, and I believe with some truth, that something like a foot fetish could be connected to a busy parent who can't get off the phone, leaving an infant with only their feet to express love to. 6. Our attachment style can sometimes directly translate to our sexual preferences. Going beyond the four large attachment styles and understanding the *exact terms* of our attachment can be eye-opening. If you had a narcissistic parent that hated when you loved anyone or anything but them, whatever attachment you scraped up may have been conditional on denying yourself anything but their attention and approval. 7. A desire to punish ourselves or other people can manifest as masochism or sadism, respectively. Sometimes we're just really, really frustrated and/or angry, and it can find a way out in our sexuality. 8. Repetition compulsion can lead us to try to gain mastery over past traumatic events, either by repeating our victimization or taking on the role of the perpetrator. My personal experience here is that if this is allowed to go unchecked and unmonitored, we're likely to fall into unhealthy relationship and sexual dynamics. Big warning, here. 9. Any form of coping with a chaotic or incomprehensible home life can result in a desire to repeat those coping mechanisms as preconditions for intimacy later in life. Whether it was angry expressions of power, silent acts of passivity, mimicking the cruelty of our caretakers, eager acts of submission and fawning, etc. Really, anything. 10. A suppressed emotion may turn into a barrier to gratification. This is especially troublesome as you overcome a dissociative element of CPTSD; emotions you previously disconnected from will come in and demand to be released to achieve orgasm. And fetishes may be the tool that releases them. * * * ### Icky stuff I would also add a little bit about [Freud's theory of psychosexual development](https://www.simplypsychology.org/psychosexual.html). Any time you mention Freud in a post like this, you're going to get someone in the comments saying "Freud's ideas are outdated and were never proven to be true! Also he's a creep!" But we're here talking about weird sexual fetishes and seriously, that was Freud's specialty, so I ask you to hold the criticism and remember what I said about narrative truth. For my own narrative, the particulars of Freud's theory of psychosexual development have only been so helpful to me, but zoom out a little bit and you see that our libido -- not our sexuality -- is running rampant and wild until the age of 6 or so, then we go through a long period of latency until puberty, at which point our libido "reawakens" as sexuality. This has been important for me to understand myself, because those experiences before the age of 6 had a huge effect on my weird sexual fetishes. You can't really understand these things unless you're willing to get past the yucky, gross nature of their creation, which is that this complex tangle of attachment, vulnerability, and raw sexual energy that becomes our sexuality starts forming when we're *very* young. You'll hear people talk about their fetishes and say they were just a child when they first felt aroused by a power imbalance, and use that as evidence that it's some kind of genetic or fundamental element of who they are. Quite the opposite; that's *exactly* when fetishes first appear. Then they disappear for a while, and reappear sometime later in life, usually (but not nearly always) in our teens or twenties. * * * ### Can you get rid of your fetishes? Short answer, probably yes. But any effort to get rid of them has to come, ironically, from a fully accepting and loving place, because these fetishes are an expression of who you are and who you've needed to be. You can't suppress them without abandoning and neglecting a part of yourself, and as often happens with suppressing emotions, you usually wind up making them more powerful and less controllable, at the cost of a lot of energy. This stuff will come out of you one way or another, so it's best to be the one who chooses how it comes out. Leave it to your unconscious mind at your own peril. In my own experiences and in talking with some individuals about theirs, fetishes die in two ways: They either vanish suddenly the moment you understand their source, or they drag out for years while you work on a deep, core issue. Processing some shameful or painful event from your past can turn out to be the only thing a particular fetish needs to pop loose. I think this is more true of specific elements of fetishes, though. For instance, if a cheating ex gave you a cuckolding fetish, dealing with the emotional fallout of that betrayal and getting some of your dignity back can totally erase that fetish from your sexuality in a very short amount of time. Meanwhile, a general preference for dominant or submissive behavior may have more to do with your attachment style, and that can take years to resolve, and as you do so the specific expression of that dominance or submission will change, as various elements fall in and out of salience and relevance. Can you completely vanilla-ify yourself? I'm not sure yet, as I myself am in that long tail of working through attachment issues, but my working answer right now is "probably." An important question is, would you want to? And that's tough. Losing your fetishes, especially if you've been a part of community centered around them, requires working through a lot of grief. It's handy to have an orgasm button, and it's scary to let it go and let things get really, really complicated. For me personally, this was an easy choice, but it would make sense to struggle with it. * * * ###Conclusion I know this is a lot of material, but I really wanted to put this out there. It frustrates me that this information is basically impossible to find, but I also understand why: It's not scientific, and it sounds *very* weird and generally icky. Nobody can really put their name on something like this and pass it off as truth. But luckily, I'm just some guy on the internet and I have no reputation to worry about, so here I am, delivering the kind of stuff you don't really encounter until you're years into psychoanalytic therapy. I hope it helps you understand yourself better, and offers you some relief. Thanks for reading.
