If you’ve ever had an interest in exploring fear play but drawn a pretty LOUD damn blank when asked “what are you afraid of?”, you’re in very good company.
That is probably the most common question I got when I first started teaching my “Playing with Fear” class. And to be quite honest with you… I get why, because I didn’t know the answer to it either. I’m not sure I do even now.
That’s not because nothing scares me. I don’t have *phobias* per se, these days, but I’ve had plenty of experiences that leave me shaking, both in and out of kink. Trust me.
And I’ve also had plenty of scenes where what leaves me too terrified to meet the Love of my life’s eyes are the same sorts of words and touches as I encounter every day, just with something… else that’s added on top. But can I put I to words exactly what does it, what that something else *IS*?
Sometimes. Sure, in discrete moments. In general, though? …no, not really. Not in a solid reliable answer to “what are you afraid of?”
And not in a way that covers what a lot of us are really asking when we struggle with that question: “If what scares me is a sort of danger that I know for a fact this human who cares for me is never gonna put me in, given their desire to not kill me and/or end up traumatizing me and breaking our trust forever… Then what? How can I forget for long enough to feel actually threatened?”
(And no, the answer is not “get a top who can convince you they’ve lost it entirely” — mindfucks like that can be hot and fun and interesting for a lotta folks and are ONE possible solution to this whole thing, but they also can be a breach of the faith we put in our play partners and absolutely need to be negotiated for explicitly as not everyone is at all interested in having to ask those questions about their tops’ stability. Anyway, I’ll get off this soapbox FOR NOW, that’s another writing for another day, but boy am I tired of seeing mindfucks be treated as something everyone who likes fear play is automatically also interested in and consenting to!!!!)
Still, I do have one strategy that I’ve found really helpful. And it lies in realizing that the problem was never in the lack of answer.
“What scares you?” is a question that expects a noun. What I had—what lots of us have—in thinking about fear was a lot more about verbs. A flinch. A pull away. A sped-up breath. A shaking thigh.
Our threat systems aren’t built around things. They’re built around behaviors.
Fear, at its most primal, is a survival instinct. And in nature, knowing exactly what causes that fear really just… doesn’t matter all that much?
See, threat detection happens subcortically. Your amygdala fires, your defensive systems activate, your posture changes, all of this before the cortex has finished processing what the threat actually is. You’ve likely experienced this: the jolt when you’re startled before you know *what* startled you, the flinch or dread before you can say *why.* Your body already organizing a response while your conscious mind was still loading up, basically. Sometimes it never loads at all.
And the beautiful thing is it happens anyway. Your nervous system doesn’t wait for you to answer that question. It registers and prepares for danger regardless: increased vigilance, scanning, readiness-to-run, an uneasy sense of apprehension that doesn’t point anywhere specific but turns something analytic on in us, and so forth.
These things get easily dismissed as “intuition”and brushed aside as if they’re useless (which is in part a gendered thing that I’ll also avoid soapboxing on right now but JUST KNOW THAT SOAP BOX IS THERE, LIVIN’ IN MY HEAD), but that’s not useless. At all. That’s a whole damn survival instinct! Picking up on something being a danger, even without the ability to articulate what… that’s what keeps animals alive.
So when someone asks “what are you afraid of?” and you go blank, that blank isn’t as empty as it may seem. It’s full of information. It just isn’t information your verbal brain can always articulate.
That’s not to say it can’t be super useful in negotiation if you DO have a solid answer to that question, and if you do, by all means, use it! But the reality of what underlies fear is danger and how it registers in your nervous system. And the reality of danger is that it is often ambiguous.
Why else it can be so tough to answer this
There are several research-based reasons behind the “I don’t know what I’m scared of” problem, and they aren’t mutually exclusive, because real people are complex and nuanced. So in real people, these things often stack. This is hardly all-inclusive as is. But just for a few:
Fear generalizes. When we learn that something is dangerous, that learning doesn’t usually get to stay neatly contained in the fear folder in our brains. It can spread to similar cues, adjacent contexts, loosely related situations, etc. until the original trigger is buried under a broad wash of “this feels bad.” (Which is worth keeping in mind as far as the context of where you plan your fear scenes and what sensory elements might be involved, which is one part of what we talk about in the design portion of fear play class!) The further fear generalizes, the harder it is to point back to the source. Which means we are sometimes left with a lot of readiness and very little specificity.
Emotional granularity and detection skills vary too, especially in our modern lives, which often try and distract us from sitting and quietly feeling things in a way that makes all of us a little worse at ID-ing things with particular specificity. It’s why I made tools like the Emotional S/m Feeling Wheel, but the tool *existing* doesn’t make it easy for everyone to actually tell these words apart in their experience. Some people experience “feels bad, man” as one single undifferentiated signal; others can instantly parse it into fear, shame, grief, overwhelm, anger, disgust, etc.; most of us are somewhere in-between. Like most skills, it can be trained. But if you *don’t* intentionally work on that, it doesn’t just come naturally for everyone, and that’s okay!
Sometimes the “threat” really is entirely internal or nebulous. What I’ve been trying to get across is fear simply doesn’t require a clear external object all the time. Fear doesn’t require a noun. A body sensation (tight chest, nausea, sudden heat), a memory fragment, a meaning your nervous system assigned to something, these can all activate your threat system without a School House Rock person-place-or-thing to point to.
And even when you can, in most cases, it isn’t the whole story. You’re not reallu afraid of the dark *itself*. You’re not afraid of what you do logically know is just the Laundry Chair in the corner of your room (though you might be scared of the workload; fellow ADHD kinksters I see you, and lemme tell you, you’re never sitting in that chair again and as long as it’s there to toss stuff on, you will keep tossing the stuff there). You’re not afraid of the fact that when you flip the light switch, it does the same thing as every other person’s light switch.
You’re afraid of what you don’t know is there or not.
Or, put another way, your heart and breathing do something when the light goes out and in the end, we call that fear. The verb of what your body did. Not the noun of what isn’t there.
Not knowing the noun to answer “what are you scared of?” with doesn’t change that the fear is real. Not knowing the noun may sometimes even be the REASON that it’s real.
So the problem isn’t your lack of answer. The problem is that “what are you afraid of?” has always been the wrong question.
See, ethologists (researchers who study behavior in natural contexts) don’t study fear by asking animals what they’re afraid of. They study it by watching what animals prepare to DO.
And that’s because fear isn’t just an emotion. Fear is a motivational state. It functions to make us do *something* as a way to survive.
An animal has a “flight distance” (the point at which it runs) and a smaller “critical distance” (the point at which, if it can’t run, it turns and fights). These things can be studied. They might also freeze (decide they can’t run *or* fight and their best bet is to try and blend into the tall grass, so-to-speak), flop (not *quite* as common in humans but does exist; we can essentially think of this as fainting or going rag-doll to “play dead”), or fawn (a largely-human instinct to appease the threat instead of fight or avoid it). These can be studied too. We can’t ask the gazelle why it freezes in tall grass. But we have a pretty damn good guess, if a lion is nearby.
Regardless of what your actual personal fear responses tend toward (which is worth knowing also, especially because tops can use that to dial intensity up or down and because each response comes with risks of its own), my suggestion for those who struggle with this question is to focus on just how fear is studied in *any* animal: fear is a motivational state that gives rise to behaviors that serve as attempts to defend yourself, blend in, or escape the threat in some way.
And… that’s the reframe. That’s what it comes down to. “What scares you?” is always gonna be limited. But these are the questions that might unlock something slightly more useful, or simply provide another angle to thinking about it all:
What makes you want to defend yourself?
What makes you want to be small and unseen?
What makes you want to escape?
If you struggle to know what scares you, let go of the word “scared.” Point instead at the thing your body is already doing: the action tendency, not the label. The state you’re actually trying to evoke of fear is a motivational one—and so what causes that motivation is the answer, even if it’s not always what you can cleanly connect to words like “panic” or “dread” when you think about it logically.
Other ways of answering
If those reframe questions still draw a blank, that’s okay! Really, this stuff can be tough.
So here are a few other possible handles to hold on to to try and open this particular sticky drawer in your brain up:
- Track the action urge. This is a different approach to the same idea of reframing the “what scares you” question to asking what causes your body to want to DO something, just via actually taking notes over time as opposed to some innate self-knowing. Even if you can’t notice these signs internally yourself, you can track them with help: I outsourced noticing some of mine to watching a video we took of a scene, and I’ve seen some friends do cool stuff by pairing that idea with a Fitbit. Or you can ask for help from your play partner(s), or even just an observant voyeuristic friend. Can they help you notice what sorts of things cause you to step or turn away, or when your eyes flit toward the exits? These signal that desire for escape, even though most of us don’t run out of the room while we are playing. When do you brace yourself, ball your fists, or offer more physical resistance? That’s the defense urge. What about going more *still* than usual? Or wrapping your arms around yourself in a way that would cover your vital organs (which we nearly never consciously think of ourselves as doing when we cross our arms over our chest defiantly, but yet is what a LOT of folks do in times of fear)? These physical things may be trackable even when the “why” isn’t, and if you can take some notes each time, the patterns that come out of it will eventually give you/your play partner(s) something real to work with.
- Track the bodily sensation. A lot of fear is interoceptive, which means it lives in internally-detected sensation. Tight chest. Heat. Nausea. Buzzing. Chattering teeth. The heaviness in your limbs that you might mistake for tiredness. Interoception isn’t easy for everyone but if you ARE able to notice these things, you can track when those occur without having to alwaystry to explain them. The sensation *itself* is the data, and this still can be something that eventually leads to a usable pattern.
- Name the uncertainty itself as the fear. Sometimes the trigger of fear genuinely IS as simple as not knowing what’s coming. “Intolerance of uncertainty” is a pretty well-documented phenomenon: the difficulty of enduring missing information. If ambiguity itself is what activates your threat system, that’s not a dead end, and can actually be a pretty powerful tool for tops to utilize.
And those are just a few of the possible approaches. Don’t get me wrong, depending who you are, they may take some time to produce usable information. But if just one of those leads to any sort of answer for you repeatedly, even a single fuzzy one, now you’ve moved from “I don’t know what I’m scared of” to something more negotiable.
And FWIW, all of this can come out as titrated, choiceful exploration. Which isn’t to say you HAVE to go slow—it’s the safer option, but lord knows I didn’t, so it’d be pretty hypocritical for me to say you’ve gotta—only that being interested in fear play does NOT *have* to mean an interest in forced catharsis, nor “facing your demons,” nor that you need be able to produce insight on command. This is all something you can warm up to and build on over time. Ultimately, whatever the speed, the goal is building trackable patterns you can share with trusted partners, revisit over time, and adjust as you learn more.
Here’s what I want you to take from all this: the door to fear play isn’t locked behind some mysterious self-knowledge you personally are somehow missing out on. There is nothing you are lacking if you have no irrational phobias or can’t name what could scare you in this context.
You may be asking the wrong questions, however. So if this is a thing you, too, struggle with, try out some of the reframes instead. And if those other questions still give you nothing, then see if you or someone who is willing to help you out here can begin to notice what your body seems to want to DO—escape, defend, freeze, scan, appease—and start to take a few notes. Take a few more next time. Once you find a pattern, now you have a stronger starting point than you did in the past.
You don’t need to know what scares you or why to play with fear. And you don’t need a tidy narrative or a perfectly articulated fantasy with clear-cut boundaries. You just need something to start from. Add a bit of curiosity, someone you trust, and some willingness to iterate (which means understanding that scenes which don’t land perfectly are still data that can make future scenes better), and you’re already doing the work.
The rest is practice.
Go do something hot.
If you’re reading this and this tends to be the kind of play you’re into, I hope you’ll consider joining me on Zoom with @Praxium next week.
Playing with Fear: Empowered Navigation of Thrills and Risks is virtual on Tuesday, April 14 from 7:45 – 9:45 PM ET (4:45-6:45 PM PT).
Whether you’re topping or bottoming, whether you’re experienced here or just curious, and whether you can name what you or your person are scared of at all or not.
❤️ Be sure to save your seat and receive your Zoom link by getting your ticket HERE ❤️
