So my cousin sometimes asks me for parenting advice on her daughters since I have more experience with mental health issues. I know what “play piercing” is, but most of the pictures I’ve seen are a bunch of hypodermic needles just under the skin arranged in pretty patterns.
Cousin’s oldest daughter would always be getting piercing, and eventually got a piercing gun and a box of sterile piercing needles and would do more herself. She kept enough of them that I’m surprised she didn’t set of metal detectors, but more often she’d just take them out after a day only to redo them later. I guess “play piercing” is traditionally a BDSM type thing, but for her it was more a form of self-harm / self-punishment and for the adrenaline rush. “I’m a horrible person so I need to suffer and it makes me feel good for hours afterwords”.
I told my cousin not to try to take her toys away because it’s not like sharp stuff was hard to get, that they needed to address the underlying issues. (Eventually she was offered and accepted a two week stay in a psychiatric hospital where they sorted out her meds and taught her better coping skills as well as forcibly breaking the addiction cycle)
She never got an infection; was she just lucky or are most body piercing infections from leaving the jewelry in for an extended period of time rather than the initial needle poke? She was pretty obsessive about cleanliness and would never reuse “toys”, if she was going to cut herself she’d wipe down the area and the tool with alcohol first.
So, out of curiosity:
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Is it a common thing to “play pierce” normal piercing locations with normal piercing equipment? (If so I assume we don’t see pictures on the internet because a needle through a tongue or nose isn’t as photogenic as a bunch of them arranged in pretty patterns)
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Is it still “play piercing” if the motivations are not sexual?
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Was she just lucky about never getting infections, or are most of them from using dirty equipment or not taking care of a healing piercing rather than the initial poke with clean needles or studs?
I’m not a doctor, not a psychiatrist, just someone with a history of using that sort of thing as a coping mechanism myself, and knew a whole lot of other stressed and over-clocked people who also did it.
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In my experience if the marks are in obvious places where a cut or scab or a piercing hole might draw attention then it’s more a case of a “cry for help” plea for attention for someone to notice and help, as opposed to people who cut/scar/pierce in extremely hidden and unlikely places just for the sake of the pain/andrenaline high/internally-focused coping mechanism. A second possibility exists that she’s trying to “cover” her therapeutic piercing needs by her interest and professionalism in a bid to claim that she’s considering it as a career and needs to practice. A stretch, but it doesn’t mean that she’s NOT interested in it as a career and is interested in how the piercings work in traditional places.
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Yep. There are a lot of BDSM and roleplay and body-modification activities that are OFTEN, but not ALWAYS sexual. That’s a pretty common one. I will say that using it as a coping therapy makes the later use of it in straight play scenarios somewhat complex, so she’d have to be willing to do a lot of mental/emotional work to make sure she’s coming at the play from a safe and healthy place.
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In my opinion, fears of really horrible infections (due to piercings, cutting, tattoos) are often overblown as an attempt to scare people into not doing the undesired activities. (this doesn’t work - if your coping mechanism is cutting or piercing patterns into your own flesh, I really fail to see how people think that invoking infection will make us magically not want to do that).
I will say that piercings (especially repeated piercings in visible places) can easily lead to a build-up of scar tissue, or cases where the cartilage freaks out (imagine a boxer’s cauliflower ear on your nose) AND that piercings are more likely to get infected than straight cutting, because it’s an enclosed hole rather than an open straight cut.
If, however, like you say, she uses medical grade equipment, sanitizes and sterilizes her tools, and is cautious about her piercing repeatedly in the same places, then she should be ok (in the larger sense of not getting sepsis and dying).
I think you have some kind of misunderstanding of terms here. A lot of people (probably the majority, though I don’t know of any survey) do ‘BDSM type things’ for the adrenaline rush and because they feel good after it. A lot of people do BDSM type things without involving anything that would qualify as ‘sex’ by the normal definition.
She was pretty frank in her motivations- when she was in her tweens and young teens she got her earlobes shot several times, and then her septum and tongue done. I think the process was something like this
- Oww. That fricking hurts!!!
- Hey, but I felt good afterwords.
Later on the thought occurred to her that she needed to feel pain and suffer and punish herself to atone for being a “bad person”, as well as being unable to feel good any other way, and repeating the process seemed like a good way to do it. Having conquered her demons she’s in engineering school now. Her parents were really ignorant about the whole thing, so she was the one really pushing them to let her see a therapist and get on medications and she’s gone several years now without harming herself.
Of course their second daughter (currently 14) is still having issues, refuses to go to therapy or cooperate in any way, dresses like it’s Halloween every day and has toxic friends that bully her and egg her on and teach her stuff that they shouldn’t be. She went on a cutting binge on her arms the night before her annual checkup and then still screamed bloody murder when it was time to draw her blood… Her doctor prescribe Zoloft that her parents made her take, but I told them she really needs to see a psychiatrist, my own experience is anti-depressants just made me agitated and I really needed Seroquel to settle down my emotions.