Chronic pain and BDSM: why a little pain hurts so good

Sometimes, calling myself a sex writer feels like a lie. It’s not that my articles are untrue. If anything, truth motivates every piece I write, and I pour myself into each one with my whole being. Working as a sex writer has been a dream of mine since I was a teenager – and it’s a dream I know is still unfolding each day. But in my recent history, that goal felt so far from my grasp that I never dreamed I’d achieve it before thirty. It wasn’t just a matter of building my budding writing career: it was a matter of sex itself.

Specifically, the fact that my own sex life was in shambles. Nowadays, I rattle off about the lush garden of my sexuality, but it was once wilting and overgrown. Three years ago, my concept of myself as a sexual being was torn to the ground.

I was twenty-six years old and had just gotten a total hysterectomy, which thrust me into menopause after a decade-long battle with my disease. For the ten years I fought it off, I’d counted my blessings: despite all the other problems I endured, penetrative sex had stayed a pain-free miracle in my life. 

After my surgery, that changed. Suddenly, the one thing that had felt “normal” about my unreliable body was gone. I was starting from nothing all over again. Rediscovering my sexuality was a stilted process, and I felt like an old teenager. A train of half-explored lovers and therapy peppered the wake of my healing process. Early on, I knew something had to give. My sexuality was the one thing that had kept me afloat through the disease – and this new body of mine was just going to have to keep up. 

So, only a few months after my surgery, before I started practicing with penetrative pleasure again, my husband and I went to a play party. It was a sampling platter of different delights, from fire to a dominatrix who wielded a Violet Wand. But in that smorgasboard, there was one station that pulled to me like a leash more than the rest: the impact play.

In a body that no longer felt like my own, I was begging for something that would root my mind back to my fragile and changing frame. Stammering, so shy I thought I would incinerate there on the floor, I approached the person in charge of the impact station: a beauty named Dieja, tall and curvy and down to business. She was so in control that I was slightly terrified – and I surrendered to her, letting the feeling carry me.

Not knowing my story or the shape of my need, she started slow, leading me back into my body, before building up to a crescendo of paddling, stopping only to rub my red skin, keep me alert, wondering when the next hit would come. That grace of a breath only made the paddle’s sting that much sweeter.

I can’t say how long she spanked me, but I do know that by the end, she’d spanked me so thoroughly that we got a round of applause from onlookers. And after, I knew I’d be okay. It’s not that she cast a spell like some Good Witch, and I awoke the next morning cured of any identity crisis, but she did show me the path back to myself, reminding me of something I’d forgotten: I couldn’t be undone by pain. Pain had, in fact, forged me. 

My time at that play party wasn’t my first foray into impact play. Ever the budgeting kinksters, my husband and I had already broken exactly two (2) wooden cutting boards we’d used as paddles. I’d always been drawn to pain, probably because I’d always been in it. But Dieja reminded me that in moments of chosen pain, my body and my mind flipped roles: I was no longer controlled by my pain. I controlled it.

Why does it hurt so good?

My chronic disease may have tried to wield control over my existence, right down to the moment when I had to choose between young menopause and going on disability, but through BDSM and rough sex I found control over myself again.

This pattern began early in my sexual career. At first, I thought there was something wrong with me, that maybe I had some self-esteem issues so deep seated I thought I deserved to be in constant pain. Even though my conscious mind wanted health, maybe my subconscious was screaming for something else. 

That merry-go-round of feelings sows chaos. You feel ashamed to be so aroused by something that hurts when your body won’t stop hurting to begin with. It brings up uncomfortable questions like, did I actually want to be in pain, even though I tried everything under the sun to escape my physical suffering? Maybe I was just looking for attention. Logically, I knew that wasn’t true, but exploring the pleasure of pain only made me feel confused.

For a long time, I thought I was a total weirdo, the only one who loved impact play even though I’d been in so much pain before that I spent months being barely able to walk. Over time, nothing bad happened. I was still a decent person, So, I learned to accept myself, even if I believed it was counterintuitive to be a masochist when every single day of my life was painful. It was just who I was.

But still, I assumed I was alone. When I first started kicking around the idea of writing about this several years back, I thought nobody else was in this same boat. I was just some weird kid in a sea of healthy kinksters. But as I connected more with my chronically ill community, my reality burst open. We were all over the kinky scene. Bone issues, weak immune systems, fibromyalgia, chronic illnesses of all stripes – so many of us had surrendered to the pleasure of pain.

I was far from alone. If anything, I was an eel wriggling in a fat river of underrepresented cuties who loved to be their freaky selves right along with me. And the more I thought and read, the more I realized how normal our connection to pain was – and all the ways it helps us love our bodies.

We reached out to Pathways - experts in chronic pain for answers to this. They run a pain therapy app, and shed some light on how our perception of pain changes everything. Dr Price commented: “When we hurt and believe that pain is causing us damage, it makes the pain experience more intense. Whereas when we associate pain with pleasure, we almost instantly change our experience of pain. Feelings of pain can be damped by the thrill and exhilaration of temporary, ‘safe’ pain”.

You learn to manage pain

I’ll be honest: doctors don’t have the answers for chronic pain. Most of the time, their solution is masking it with painkillers that we build tolerances to. It doesn’t work and leaves us miserable. 

BDSM offers an alternative solution. Instead of masking pain, we’re invited to look it in the face in excruciating detail, to master the sensations that make our eyes water and turn our heads into weather balloons.

When my pain was at its worst, I felt like the only way I’d survive was by cresting each wave of pain, riding on the top of them. It wasn’t a metaphor. The experience was very literal. Gliding over the pain, and breathing through it kept me afloat, and if I slipped under, I’d lose myself to it and not be able to have sex, bake cookies, go to karaoke, or even empty the dishwasher. Like a superpower, people with chronic pain learn to ride waves of aches like surfers. 

BDSM helps. Sometimes, people even report a good scene ending flare ups. But even if all we learn is how to handle more pain with joy and grace, we’re winning. Because when we look it in the face, we master the thing that’s trying to wreck us. 

You return to your body

A common thing those of us with chronic illnesses or pain do is dissociate from our bodies. When it hurts all the time, why would we linger there? We often forget ourselves and drift through our day unanchored. I know I did. Many days, you’re just trying to make it through one more day.

With rough play, you’re reawakened. You feel alive, with a burning pulse inside of you, as your entire brain sings aloud and pulls into focus that one piece of your body that is being slapped or pinched or pulled. When the pinprick of a knife edge, a droplet of hot wax, or even the broad expanse of a paddle comes across your body, you’re jolted back inside of yourself, remembering who and where you are.

Although some people drift off into subspace after a good sesh, almost drunk on the experience, there’s still a sense of being part of your body when that happens. Instead of dissociating because it hurts, you’re floating away because you’re satisfied.

And in that, we find power.

You have the power of choice

Humans are taught to rail against powerlessness. We love choice of all kinds and embrace control over every facet of our lives. It’s part of who we are as culture, for better or for worse. Being told what to do or how to feel can be infuriating.

That agenda of independence gets flung out the window when a chronic illness takes the stage. Suddenly, the tissue and skeleton housing your mind is out of your grasp. The one thing you’re supposed to be in control of (your body) is an alien invader wrecking your home. No amount of creams, injections, or therapy can align your spine, undo that nerve damage, or stop those new growths from forming. Try as you might to change, you’re stuck like this. Chronic illness is an exercise in futility, every single day. Any new treatment is just another way you’re putting out fires..

So it makes sense that being able to choose when we’re in pain feels powerful. I get dizzy knowing how much I can take. I feel like a small god mastering my body. When my ears ring from a good slap across the face, I remember I’m awake, I’m alive, and I’m choosing when and how this happens. Many people feel the same way, finding power in how much pain they can take, turning something miserable into something erotic.

Not just masochists
Whenever you hear about chronically ill folks in the world of BDSM, you usually hear about us as subs. It makes sense. We transcend bodily pain and learn to master what we can handle. If an outsider gave BDSM and chronic pain even a glancing assessment, it’s possibly easy to write folks off as pain-happy weirdos who somehow have found comfort with the straws they’ve drawn.

But it’s not just submission that gets people with chronic pain conditions going, although the majority of us kinky spoonies do seem to turn to it. Another side of the same cookie, some folks find peace in dominating their lovers. Being able to have so much power over pain that you dole it out and are literally called “master” is dizzying for people who are often in so much pain they hide under painkillers and heating pads at night.

The kink community has always been diverse and strange at its heart, and chronically ill folks can’t be written off as just subs and masochists who are making the most of their situation. Some of the chronically ill folks who are sadists find home in the ways they can mete out pain. Living a more full-time BDSM lifestyle as a chronically ill dom has its perks for your health, as well: your loving sub can perform some much needed caretaking, bringing you pills, massaging the parts of your body that ache, drawing your bath, or helping with tasks around the house, including setting and breaking down any scenes.

It’s not all easy though. Being a dom requires a lot of finesse, and sometimes, our bodies just ache. For a lot of people, that means adapting to work with what you have. If gripping hurts, for instance, you may need to find an inventive way to hold a flogger or pin someone down. And if you have a chronic pain condition that leaves you tender and tired, you may need to shorten scenes from time to time, and communicate with your subs about how you’re feeling on a pain scale each day.

Whatever side of the equation you’re on, when you can consent with someone else and exchange pain as pleasure, you become the authority on pain, and your chronic illness takes the back seat. Even as a submissive, there’s one thing you’re dominating: your body.

At all costs, avoid the pity lover

If there’s one thing that’s the ultimate buzzkill in the bedroom, it’s a lover who’s afraid of your illness. The pity lover. All of us with a chronic illness have had one to some degree at some point. The one who thinks touching you might break you, or who feels so much guilt about potentially hurting you that they can’t get sexual with you.

At best, it’s annoying. At worst, it’s infantilizing. The root of the issue is that your lover doesn’t trust you enough to know your own body.

With BDSM practices, we put that notion to bed. BDSM is rooted in communication, and in trusting your limits. Play partners expect you to know yourself and say the safe word whenever you need it. Because of that, they believe you when you say you’re fine, because they’re used to pushing how much someone can take.

In a life where we’re so often at war with our own bones and joints and muscles, it’s a relief to lose yourself in a physically intense scene, to be trusted as an adult, and to not be held with kid gloves. 

The pain that washes over you comes as a relief – not an addition to our physical suffering, but a balm on it. And instead of pitying us, a good partner is turned on by our power. 

The poster child of chronic illness and BDSM

Chronically ill people don’t often make headlines – and when we do, it’s certainly not about our sex appeal. And since chronic pain is so rarely valued or researched (especially when it happens to non-men), it’s no surprise that few scientists are mulling over the link between kink and illness.

But one man took it into his own hands to pull us into the limelight with him. Refusing to stand in the shadows, he put himself out on display for the world to see. Bob Flanagan, performance artist, poet, and self-described supermasochist may have been dying, but he wasn’t about to go down easy. By the time he passed away at forty-three from cystic fibrosis, Flanagan had made a name for himself as a celebrity masochist and artist welling in empathy and a wicked sense of humor.

With a range of artistic expressions, Flanagan explored his illness and love for pain at every level, from shocking art installments to improv and stand-up comedy in the same troupe as Peewee Herman. He embraced the duality of being someone who was both a very sexual being and had spent far more time in hospitals than most of his peers. By the time he passed in 1996, he was a cult celebrity for the extreme BDSM lifestyle he shared with his partner, mistress, and creative collaborator Sheree Rose.

Flanagan talked openly about his love for pain through poetry, like in his book Slave Sonnets, a copy of which now runs for over a hundred dollars a pop. One of his most famous poems is called WHY, and it lays out all the things that drew him to pain and pleasure as he worked through his cystic fibrosis. It is a repetition, almost like a kinky prayer, sharing reasons ranging from early medical experiences to doing anything to stop the pain. 

His hard work paid off, and the more intense acts he was known for earned him widespread recognition in the BDSM community, even scoring him a lead role in a very NSFW Nine Inch Nails music video. What’s so interesting about Flanagan is the levity he managed to find in his illness and inevitable early death. When he passed, he was in the middle of writing a book-length prose poem on the relationship between pleasure, pain, and chronic pain called The Book of Medicine. Although it was never finished, you can catch snippets of it in his anthologies today.

His humorous take flipped concepts about chronic pain on its head. When he saw chronic pain paired with masochism, he saw power. “The masochist is actually a very strong person,” he once said. “I think that some of that strength is what I use to combat the illness.”

Bob Flanagan is an example of this connection pushed to the limits – formerly the poster child for cystic fibrosis, he is now maybe the poster child of chronic illness and sexuality. Not all of us put nails through our genitals, but the sentiment we hold is one and the same. We are seeking pain to find different ways to feel ourselves.

A way of coming home

Not everybody finds solace in pain – and not everyone who loves pain is chronically ill. But the link between the two is very real. Without it, I don’t know if I would be here right now, following a long-held dream of mine and writing about sex. Where chronic pain tried to smother my sensual nature, chosen pain saved it.

In the thirteen years since pain entered my daily life, I’ve come to accept that you can’t control everything. But through impact play and rough sex, I learned to ride those waves of my pain. Even now, exploring a life with painful penetration, I’m learning to love my body’s capacity for hurt. While penetration still brings a strange ache (and I have a feeling it always will) I trust myself to ride the wave, and find the edges of pleasure in those fine points of pain – even then. And if I see stars while I’m going at it with my love, I know there’s another edge left to climb.

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