The body remembers what the mind forgets. Massage therapists often report certain emotional responses when touching parts of a client's body. This is why I am going to recommend working into negotiation touching all of your partner's body and noting what the responses are. Arousal is not always a sign this is their erogenous zone, but perhaps a trigger point for hypersexuality. We talked about the flight or fight response.
In traumatic moments the body is prone to make adjustments to accommodate this. Survival mode causes heart rate to increase, and cells to use more energy, along with changes in circulation. If this is experienced for an extended time frame the body shuts down its reserves to protect itself. Survival mode is not meant to be the body’s normal state, so things like PTSD that can leave someone in an elevated state of alert can lead to health problems.
Under most of our myofascial holding patterns is trauma. These holding patterns became entrenched with our memories of the traumatic event is stored in the limbic system. Here all the smells, sounds, tastes, visuals, and textures lie. All the senses are stimulated during trauma and stored as an emotional picture in the brain. Take note outside of the scene of any of these stimulates our partner complains about. It is these negative associations where the sorted pain hides. Healthy touch can retain the brain of someone who fears any touch at all. They are going to need to get more comfortable with touch in general before you pull out at Flogger. Retraining the brain is not an overnight matter and may require patience.
The basic rule of thumb for what we do as trained therapists in this field is to work with emotions as they emerge in sessions. One is to acknowledge and accept emotional expression. First, to work with other people’s emotions, it’s good to start working with your own. If you have a lot of denial, judgment, and fear to move into your feelings, it’s much more difficult to support others in theirs. So one might say that you have to start acknowledging and accepting your feelings first.
We spend a lot of our energy avoiding, denying, and judging our feelings. When I am depressed I am consumed by that energy shutting me off from being my most empathic. In a session when emotions come do not just proceed as if nothing is happening. This might be what happened to them as a child, and they were most likely told emotions were bad so they stuffed back down rather than unpacked it. How many times as kids have we heard parents say
“I’ll give you something to cry about”
Emotions can be awkward to navigate, to the point the emotional intelligence of the average American wants to avoid the emotion with some other kind of stimuli such as sugar or drugs that are more easily controlled. What if when emotions came from a partner you said
Something like “You are crying, that is good let the tears come”
In these sessions that is what should happen before they say their safe word to resume play. m the time and then allow them to say their safe word to resume play. Take as much time to process the feeling as you can. Keeping a journal for this is recommended. Always reconfirm that they are acknowledged and safe. This is an opportunity to be an active listener, hear what they are saying, and repeat it back, first saying
"So What I am hearing you say is..."
Emotions can be complex equations where logic and the psyche collide so perhaps they need to talk this through and by helping you understand they are in turn helping themselves understand. Feelings are not problems to be solved but energy that needs to flow and move.
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