Bound, Tied And Leashed: Kink And Attachment (4 CE Hours)

Description

This presentation explores how BDSM and kink dynamics intersect with attachment styles, emotional regulation, and relational development. This presentation invites clinicians to examine kink not as pathology, but as a sophisticated relational technology—one that amplifies vulnerability, trust, play, and power in ways that make attachment patterns highly visible.         Drawing on contemporary research, case studies, cultural history, and community practices, this presentation explores how power exchange, ritual, sensation play, and negotiated vulnerability can both reflect and reshape attachment experiences. Participants will learn how motivations for engaging in BDSM may be rooted in secure exploration or compensatory strategies linked to insecure attachment, and how consent structures, negotiation frameworks, and aftercare practices can foster emotional safety and connection.

This presentation also addresses the complexities clinicians encounter when working with kinky clients, including internalized stigma, discrimination within and outside the kink community, intersectional challenges, and distinguishing consensual BDSM from intimate partner violence. It will explore the healing potential of kink—its capacity to support trauma processing, renegotiation of boundaries, embodied empowerment, and co-regulation—as well as its risks and misuses.

This presentation provides an attachment-informed, trauma-sensitive lens for understanding kink as play, identity, spiritual path, and relational practice. Attendees will leave with concrete assessment strategies, clinical considerations, and therapeutic interventions to support clients in cultivating safety, intimacy, authenticity, and secure attachment within kinky relationships.

Learning Objectives

At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Describe how attachment patterns shape adult sexual expression, including motivations for engaging in kink, BDSM, and power-exchange dynamics.
2. Differentiate between secure, insecure, and trauma-driven motivations behind kink/BDSM engagement and identify how these motivations appear in relationships and scenes.
3. Recognize the ways power exchange, ritual, play, and negotiated vulnerability can reflect, reinforce, or repair attachment experiences.
4. Assess client case material for indicators of attachment needs manifesting through kink behaviors, scene preferences, negotiation styles, and aftercare patterns.

Activity Schedule

2 hours: What Kink Is 

1 Hour: What Kink Is Not 

15 minutes: What Kink Can Be 

45 minutes: Attachment and Kink

Speaker Bio

Raven O’Rourke is a certified sex therapist and licensed clinical social worker in private practice at Between the Lakes Therapy where she works with high-achieving professionals in Tennessee. Prior to opening her private practice, she was the social work team lead at Vanderbilt Comprehensive Care Clinic, one of the largest HIV clinics in the nation. She is passionate about sexual and reproductive justice and helping clients advocate for themselves. She earned her AASECT sex therapist certificate in 2023 and her MSW and MPH from Tulane University in 2010 and 2011. She loves to travel with her partner and read with her two “lap” dogs.

Class originally recorded: 1/12/2026.

Social workers completing this course receive 4 clinical continuing education credits.