In summer 2004, I decided to see a counsellor for advice on integrating my kinky side with the rest of my life. I’d suppressed that side until my mid-20s, but suddenly it popped up in my brain, all the more powerful and overwhelming for having been kept down. I knew there was no going back, and I accepted intellectually that it was OK to be kinky. But emotionally I was having a hard time shutting out all the social messages that kink is bad and disgusting and misogynist, and getting used to the parts of me which seemed to have changed shape and shifted around in the light of this new revelation.

I was doing a part-time degree, so the first counsellor I tried was at the college service. I had my doubts about whether she’d be up to the job, but let myself be assured by vanilla friends that people are informed about sexuality these days, especially psychological professionals. In any case, the college counselling service was free, which is always a powerful argument.

So I filled in the application form and wrote in the “any other information” section that I only wanted to see someone who understood what BDSM was and wouldn’t try to “cure” me of it. I was granted an appointment in six weeks’ time.

During that time, my mother went mental, partly over the issue of my sexuality. She told me I was disgusting, anti-feminist etc. So I was in bad shape by the time of my counselling appointment.

The appointment started with the counsellor squinting at my application form and asking me what “BD, um… CM, is it?” stood for.

From that glorious beginning we moved on to her telling me that I have a “sadomasochistic” relationship with my mother, which I had exacerbated in the past by behaving “submissively”. I was informed that “You are drawn to unequal relationships”, to which I patiently explained that in my case I was looking for a relationship that would be “normal” except in the context of play. I was told I seek a relationship in which I would be suffering, which just made me laugh, thinking of all the po-faced online debates I’ve seen about the Depth of Twu Submission, and how I feel like a total hedonist in comparison. In conclusion she revealed that I had come to see her because I wanted to “get past that”, i.e. my emotionally “sadomasochistic” relationship with my mother and my interest in kinky sex, which were, to her placid therapeutic gaze, clearly one and the same dysfunctional thing.

This happened over the course of two appointments. I went back for a second because I felt I should give her a fair chance, because she seemed to be a good person, and I think she was very competent – within the sphere of her knowledge. But she honestly had no idea that that sphere might not be all-encompassing, that she might be making a fool of herself and also that she might be doing a great deal of damage. It’s easy for me to assess her calmly one year on, but at the time I’d been spectacularly rejected by my closest family and was fighting a very difficult battle not to reject myself. And here’s this nice motherly woman being sympathetic and telling me a way out…

But the second session was as bad as the first, and the same friends who’d advised me to try the college counsellor in the first place now advised me to get the hell out.

Could I have avoided having such a dire experience? Not entirely, but I could have avoided some things that made the situation worse. I should have known better than to believe university counsellors would have a clue about BDSM. I suspect any free counselling service is much more likely to try to fit you to a stereotype than a private service would be, because they have less time and motivation to think about clients as individuals.

Also, I shouldn’t have written on the form that I only wanted to see someone who wasn’t hostile to BDSM. Whoever was in charge of allocating counsellors took no notice, and the counsellor herself assumed, in that lovely Freudian way, that if I said I didn’t want to be “cured” of something then that clearly meant I was crying out to be cured of it in spite of my quaint little tantrum. I should have brought the subject of BDSM up verbally in the first session, and as soon as it became clear I was going to get nothing but offensive ignorance, I should have shut that topic down, talked blandly about other issues and then never come back. In the sessions, I should have taken more care to present information dispassionately, and not appear defensive.

On the other hand, how could I have done? I was in a vulnerable state – the kind of state, of course, where you need counselling – and it was all I could do to sit there and silently tell myself that her hypotheses weren’t true. I was in no condition to produce passionate polemics on behalf of the Kink Nation.

So I cancelled my third appointment, and forgot about counselling while I dealt with the fallout from my mother’s rejection.

Then four months later I discovered that the Kink Aware Professionals list includes UK names. Not many as yet, but there were two in London. This time round I was willing and able to pay and undertook a series of sessions with Dermod Moore, who I would highly recommend, though he’s going on a year’s sabbatical from autumn 2005.

Dermod’s own experience of BDSM surely helps him deal with clients, but from my perspective the most important thing was being able to talk about how my kinks and hang-ups interacted, without fear that he was going to announce that the existence of such interaction meant that the kinks were caused by the hang-ups and needed to be cured. There must be vanilla therapists who nevertheless offer a similar non-judgemental approach – it’s a case of finding them, or possibly of educating them yourself.

If I could give one piece of advice to myself a year ago it would probably be this: try not to appear defensive. I don’t think the first counsellor was educable anyway, but I ensured she wasn’t by taking what I thought was a firm, matter-of-fact approach, only to find the poor silly woman interpreted it as evidence of my being in denial.

What I did do right was to recognise when the situation was hopeless and extricate myself from it. There are people who claim that therapy cured them of homosexuality, and no doubt there are also people who have let themselves be “cured” of BDSM desires under pressure from well-intentioned but misinformed relatives and therapists.

I’m not going to be one of them.