How My Trauma Response Turned Into a Fun, Playful Kink

There was a time when arousal wasn’t safe for me. When pleasure itself felt like a betrayal of something deeper—something hidden, tangled in the roots of my body’s earliest memories. Shame and secrecy wrapped around my arousal like vines, not because my desire was inherently wrong, but because I had learned, young, that it should be.

Arousal was something that could be used against me. Arousal was something I had to tuck away, deny, never let them see. And yet—there it was, undeniable, a current running through me in moments I didn’t understand, moments that left me burning with a sense of exposure.

I lived with that shame for years. Until I stopped just surviving it and began to play with it.

Somewhere along the way, the weight of that trauma response shifted. The tangled shame unfurled, but instead of vanishing, it transformed. It alchemized into something… fun. Something hot. The same nervous system response that once curled my stomach with dread and shut my body down now sends a shiver down my spine in the best way. And so, what used to make me freeze now makes me flush.

My embarrassment became a kink.

Not just any embarrassment - specific embarrassment. The kind that comes when someone notices my arousal when I “shouldn’t” be having it. When I think I’ve hidden it well enough, but they see it anyway.

It can happen when someone tells a sexy joke or when I flash on a sudden delicious memory or fantasy. And then they point it out, with a little smirk in their voice, that knowing look in their eye.

“You liked that, didn’t you?”

My body answers before my mind does.

It’s not about being watched exactly, but there’s a thread of exposure in it—of being caught in the act of my own pleasure. And somehow, that thing that used to make me want to disappear now makes me want to lean in.

I wonder how many of us have kinks like this—ones that, at their core, are the nervous system’s way of reclaiming something that once felt out of our control. How many of our turn-ons were once the very things that made us shrink?

And what would happen if we talked about them out loud?

Because this is how shame loses its power. This is how we take our bodies back from the past—by sharing, by laughing, by letting the edges of taboo melt into the warmth of our own acceptance. Better yet, our celebration.

I’m not shy about my kinks. Not anymore. And I don’t think you should be either.

So tell me—what’s a turn-on you once thought you shouldn’t have, but now find yourself reveling in?

Let’s start a conversation.

Let’s stop whispering about our pleasure like it’s something to be hidden.

Let’s claim it. Out loud.

In sovereign pleasure,
Sharon

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