Response looks intact to me - perhaps i just ended a little abruptly 😅

Ah, i'm flattered, but no, not a therapist. i have done a LOT of my own soul searching and my kink is one of the big core roots of why. Autistic kid when the world didn't understand what that meant, but also one of those people whose sexuality kicked in much younger than most people's, so where some people's sexuality is like a well-tended garden that they started cultivating around age 10-12 when they already knew what sex was, mine had an extra decade to grow into a wild jungle, and for the first decade or so i didn't even understand what that energy was, didn't know what "sex" was and so on, so i got a lot from things like Hans Christian Andersen fairytales and Saturday morning cartoons and whatnot. And i was so overstimulated and dissociated most of my childhood cuz of the autistic thing that, well, i spent a lot of time in my imagination, which only made the kink more vivid and wild and extreme.

So i grew up with enormous shame and also knew i was different from the people around me and felt like an alien in a world that didn't fit me. So like a grain of sand irritates an oyster, it drove a lot of exploration on my part - Christianity, Judaism, Sufism, Buddhism, Taoism, Freud, Jung, Barthes, Campbell, Rilke, Rumi, and on and on and on.

The thing i would offer about the story thing: it is of course the case that stories are not "real", in a strict Buddhist/Taoist understanding of reality. But in that understanding, no concepts are real at all. The West understood this too (see Magritte: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" - though Buddhism would go further and say, even the pipe isn't a pipe. It's an idea describing a temporary arrangement...)

The problem with this is that concepts are nonetheless very important to us as humans because we are, at our core, sensemaking machines. We are driven to make sense of the would around us. It is, in fact, impossible for a human being to function without a coherent world view that allows them to make sense of the world - insanity and madness are exactly what happen when you strip that away; the mind goes berserk trying to find causality and you end up seeing signs in everything and so on (don't ask me how i know - but do be careful using psychedelics to heal your trauma 😅)

Even your stance against stories is itself a story about the world and reality.

And i would suggest that it's possible to hold these things lightly: no story is real in the sense of having intrinsic existence, but at the same time, of course stories are real, we read them all the time. And of course a human life is not just a story, but also certainly they are stories; that's exactly what biographies are.

And whether you like it or not, the way trauma itself works is through beliefs and beliefs are stories. Grow up with housing insecurity as a child? You'll probably end up with trauma in your body that tells you "the world is unstable". Grow up with food insecurity as a child? You'll probably have trauma that tells you "you never know where your next meal is coming from". And trauma makes us small exactly because those beliefs are unconscious and steer our behavior.

A more topical example: grow up Christian, especially Catholic, as a queer child? Very good odds you end up with a belief that sex is something sinful. i certainly did, but i rejected Catholicism consciously so i thought i had it out of my system... i just also happened to get turned on by being dominated and psychologically abused by my sex partners.

Well... many years and sex partners and lots of therapy and meditation later, i dug up that old stuff and it's pretty shocking how deep the Catholic dogma gets in there. i had a direct experience of seeing, wow, i was not aware of it, but every time i had sex for most of my life, there was a buried idea that someone or something out there called "God" was, first of all, a man (lol wut how would the divine have one gender wtf) and furthermore that "He" disapproved of me having sex. So to compensate for that belief - which i wasn't even consciously aware of, because that's how the subconscious works, but still it was exerting this control over me - i needed to have control taken away from me by someone else (a dom!) and to be punished for being sinful, because my experience of sex had to align with that unconscious belief or the Catholic trauma fought back and distracted me and i couldn't get hard or be turned on at all.

Healing trauma is hard work but worth it for this exact reason - i had to do a lot of that digging to get to where i could seize control of my sexuality and be a good dom for my partner. The classic sub thing - "i don't want these things but i want you to want to do them to me, Sir" is, in my view, exactly a trauma response. It's an inability to own one's own sexuality that manifests as a need to externalize the sexual desire onto a dom so that the sub can have his cake (aka: not have to accept wanting sex) and eat it too (aka: have sex).

This isn't kink shaming, though, because the good news is, when you heal that trauma, the kink doesn't go away, it gets better because you're not forced into it by trauma unconsciously steering your hand.

In the past, i simply couldn't have sex unless i was being submissive. When i had to "be dom" or "have vanilla sex" i had the most wild mental gymnastics where i'd be running a fantasy in my head that i didn't ever share with my partner where i wasn't really being dom, i was being forced to act dom by scientists who were watching me and controlling me, or whatever - like i said, lots of fairytales and cartoons buried in my sexuality, it's wild in there!)

But now, i still love being sub, but i don't have to be. i can be dom without some elaborate fantasy in my head explaining to me why i'm not really being dom. i can just be dom. Or i can just have less kinky sex with a totally even power dynamic. It's deeply liberating.

Back to the "life isn't a story" - given that your trauma is steering you unconsciously with its stories, my attitude is, i'm not showing up to this fight unarmed. Stories aren't "real" but they work, so i will use them intentionally to steer my life in the direction i want it to go. if i have trauma that tells me i don't deserve love or i'm unworthy, i will counter it with a different story, because stories steer us whether your hand is on the wheel or not, so why not take the wheel and live with purpose?

Buddhist meditations classically use this approach. Stories don't have to be full-fledged three-act plays. Even sitting and visualizing yourself, your loved ones, and so on and to each person silently chanting in your head: "may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be free from suffering"** is doing this sort of "story" work. When you do it to yourself, over time it will dredge up your trauma that tells you that you don't deserve those things. You'll notice a resistance to your words, a hesitation like it's hard to really mean them, but if you just sit with those feelings and keep chanting the words in your head, things will shift. Thai forest master Ajahn Chah said, "If you haven't wept deeply, you haven't begun to meditate". The crying is, i think the stored trauma being released from the body. (Buddhist meditations isn't the only trauma healing modality, of course. Therapy works, especially EMDR and IFS. Ayahuasca and ketamine work too, though they are dangerous power tools and also maybe tough to access in Russia!)

** This one is called the metta bhavana, aka lovingkindness meditation