Codependency

In my view, an updated approach to mental health work today needs to understand diverse relationship modalities — non-monogamy, polyamory, kink — not as something outside the norm, but as valid terrain for professional work. From protocols to aftercare, these practices offer real tools for building relationships consciously. The practices and toolkits developed within BDSM and kink-affirmative work — negotiation, consent frameworks, aftercare — open up space for playfulness, for putting sexual experience into words, and for living it with curiosity, without guilt, and away from stigma or pathologizing frameworks. That's the work I do: helping people access their sexuality as something to keep learning about. I also think about how non-coital, kink-affirmative practices open up a broader, more inclusive sexual life — one that's more conscious and more respectful, beyond a narrow, coitus-centered idea of what sex is supposed to look like. BDSM has nourished my practice, both within and beyond the community itself — it's where I learned to look for what's possibilizing in an experience, rather than starting from pathology. I try to bring that same lens to everything I do. This is grounded in my professional training (European Integrative Model of Couples Therapy, which explicitly addresses non-monogamous structures) and in my direct, ongoing experience with the kink and non-monogamous community — including years of prior work within the community itself, designing BDSM products and engaging directly with its members on relationship dynamics, communication, and safety.