I don't treat kink, power exchange, or non-monogamy as pathology, and I'm not going to spend our time trying to talk some part of you into wanting less. Our work focuses on whatever actually hurts, which often turns out to be the shame built up around having to hide, not the desire or the relationship itself.

I offer kink-aware, sex positive, non-monogamy affirming therapy online across Washington state. You won't be the one educating your therapist, justifying how you live, or translating your own life into terms a stranger finds palatable.

Kink-affirming therapy: the assumption worth refusing

A lot of well-meaning therapy still works from the assumption that if you're kinky, something bad must have happened to you. Desire is often viewed as a scar, and the clinical job is to find the wound it points back to. Despite its popularity, the idea that trauma makes us kinky is questionable under scrutiny.

While some research identifies a link between consensual BDSM and past trauma, is not reliably causal, and other studies have found that kink practitioners don't show elevated rates of past trauma compared to the general population at all. More importantly, when researchers actually ask kinky people where their desires come from, most describe it as simply part of who they are.

The formal clinical guidelines for this work now state the principle directly: a therapist should not assume that any concern you bring to session is caused by your kink. So I don't start there. Your desire is not a symptom waiting to be decoded.

The more interesting truth is the one underneath that correction. Some people who are kinky are also survivors, not because the kink came from the trauma, but because trauma is common. And for some of those people, structured consensual play becomes a place where old wounds actually get healed, not merely reopened. The research on survivors who practice kink describes exactly this: we may use kink to reclaim power by setting and holding boundaries, rebuild a self-concept that abuse distorted, and redefine what sensation means on our own terms. The retraumatizing experiences these survivors reported clustered before they learned the structure of consent, negotiation, and limits, not after. It was not the intensity of kink that harmed them, but the absence of a safe container.

A well-negotiated scene and a well-paced piece of trauma work have more in common than most people would guess: both depend on structure, consent, containment, and the freedom to stop. If there is old pain tangled up in your kink practice, we can get curious together about the role kink might play in your healing, and what content needs to be revisited in the therapy space. In the latter case, we may process the original wound through EMDR, in titrated doses small enough to stay tolerable.

Non-monogamy affirming therapy: the structure isn't the problem

Non-monogamy gets a different misreading than kink. Stereotypes, some of which make it into the therapy room, often frame CNM relationships as evidence of insecure attachment, fear of commitment, or a relationship already failing and shopping for an exit. The research thoroughly contradicts these ideas.

Around one in five Americans has practiced some form of consensual non-monogamy (CNM) at some point in life. When researchers compare non-monogamous and monogamous relationships directly, they tend to find comparable levels of satisfaction, trust, commitment, and psychological well-being. Security is a product of how a relationship is conducted: attunement, repair, and reliability. It is not a product of how many people are in it. A monogamous marriage can be deeply insecure; a polyamorous constellation can be remarkably secure.

The American Psychological Association's Division 44 convened the first professional task force on consensual non-monogamy in 2018, and its guidance to clinicians is blunt on exactly this point: do not treat a client's non-monogamy as the cause, or the result, of whatever brought them in.

That guidance exists because the field has not been living up to it. In one large survey of non-monogamous people's experiences in therapy, roughly one in five said their therapist lacked basic knowledge of non-monogamy, and nearly one in ten said their therapist pushed them to end the relationship as a condition of treatment. So when I work as an ethical-non-monogamy and CNM-affirming therapist—with people in open relationships, polycules, and every arrangement in between—I'm not quietly assessing whether your structure is "really" working as a stand-in for some inevitable return to monogamy. I'm helping you build security inside the structure you've actually chosen.

Polyamory, jealousy, and what actually brings people in

People rarely come to a polyamory-affirming therapist because they're CNM, the same way monogamous people rarely come to therapy because they're monogamous. They come because of the knots: jealousy that won't settle no matter how reasonable everyone is being, a rupture between metamours, an agreement that worked last year and doesn't now. Relationship anarchy and solo polyamory bring their own questions about what we owe each other once we stop using the standard script.

As in all intimate relationships, many of the issues that arise in CNM relationships have to do with attachment, and we may use an attachment-focused lens to explore what’s troubling you. This could look like examining older fears and core wounds—the parts of us carrying burdens like “I’m not enough” or “intimacy isn’t safe.” It could also involve some relational work, where we get curious about how attachment dynamics show up in the therapy relationship itself.

Shame, desire, and the parts that learned to hide

Underneath both streams is the same mechanism, and it's the one I describe in full on my parts work page: most of us are not a single self but a collection of parts, and shame is what happens when one of them gets locked away because, at some point, being seen wasn't safe.

For a lot of kinky and non-monogamous people, the exiled part is the one that wants, or the one that loves in the "wrong" shape. It learned early that what it felt drew disapproval or withdrawal, and concluded (reasonably, on the information it had) that disappearing was safer. The protective parts took over from there: the one that performs a more acceptable self, the one that hides first to beat anyone else to the rejection, the one that feels ashamed pre-emptively. We aren’t trying to argue that part out of its shame, because that doesn't work. We might get curious about what it's protecting, and build enough trust that the part underneath no longer has to live in exile.

Intersectionality

It's not an accident that so many of my kinky and non-monogamous clients are also neurodivergent or queer. All of these identity pieces involve an element of challenging the societal norms many people take as a given, and the same early lesson tends to run underneath all of them—the truest version of you is too much; perform something more acceptable.

So this work rarely stays in one lane. It overlaps naturally with unmasking and neurodivergent work and with gender-affirming work. If more than one of these is true for you, you're not a complicated case. You're exactly who I built this practice for.