Sexual Assault Awareness Month 2026
Every organization has an origin story. Mine begins with a circle of Black women sitting together refusing to heal alone.
Before the nonprofit, the research, clinical frameworks, certifications and the journal, there was a group. A brave space I created because I understood from the inside what it felt like to carry sexual trauma in a body that had long learned to keep pushing despite the pain, or maybe because of it.
Heal On Purpose began as exactly that. A group healing program for Black women with a history of sexual trauma, built on a single conviction: healing in isolation reproduces the silence that allowed the wound to go unaddressed in the first place. No More Silos was a philosophy rooted in the understanding that community is a clinical intervention.
That circle shifted and became a collection of classes. Trauma and Triggers. My Body My Image. Breathwork. Esteem. Each one built from what I was watching people need in real time. The classes became a nonprofit, the nonprofit became a research initiative, and the research initiative became a platform for generating data centered the lived expereince of people who we often overlooked, namely Black folks with sexual trauma and then, kink folks looking for understanding, recognition, and reclamation. And so a new thread was woven.
The second thread was even more personal.
I have my own history of sexual trauma. Remembered and not fully remembered. Carried in my body in ways that clinical training named but did not always reach. I was looking for something. Something that could help me reroute the rage that felt stuck, creating resistance and recognition, empathy and emptiness, purpose propped up by pain.
I found a clue in a San Francisco dungeon.
I was there as part of my kink conscious certification training. What I witnessed resonated in my marrow, a rememberance of something ancient. familiar but disconnected. Energy moving through bodies that had been holding it. Catharsis happening in real time in a container built for exactly that kind of movement. I watched and I thought: what if this could be used intentionally, clinically, ethically, by someone like me, for someone like me?
That question became Therapeutic BDSM.
Therapeutic BDSM is a structured, trauma-informed healing modality that uses the principles of BDSM, consent, power exchange, somatic awareness, and intentional containment, as tools for body-based healing. It is housed within Self-Reconciliation Therapy, a framework I developed to help people reestablish a relationship with their bodies after trauma. It is the clinical answer to what I witnessed that day and what I had been living for years before I had language for it.
Building that framework meant building the infrastructure to hold it ethically. That became the Kink Professional Standards Alliance. KPSA exists because kink professionals across every role, clinicians, educators, pro practitioners, dungeon owners, coaches, and community leaders, deserve a standards body that was built from the inside out, from community knowledge and clinical rigor, centered in intersectionality, and accountable to the people most impacted by stigma and harm.
Heal On Purpose and KPSA are two organizations. They are one mission.
The mission is this: the people most harmed by silence around sexuality and trauma deserve frameworks, resources, and professionals who were built to serve them. Black people. Kink-identified people. People whose bodies have been sites of violation and also sites of profound resilience. People who found healing in unexpected places and needed someone to take that seriously enough to build something around it.
This is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. I am a survivor. I am also a clinical sexologist, a researcher, a framework developer, a journal editor, a nonprofit founder, and a standards builder. Every single one of those identities grew from the same root.
The wound pointed the way.
I followed it on purpose.
~Doc~
Heal On Purpose Inc. 