Gooning Part 3: Harm Reduction

What Nobody Told Me: Harm Reduction for Gooning Spaces

*Part of the Practicing Woman series on gooning. Part 1: The Seeking| Part 2: The Opening | Part 3: Harm Reduction*

*This post is crossposted on Reddit as well as on the Practicing Woman Blog*

Before I get into this, a caveat: some of what I'm saying here may not reflect your experience of gooning, and that's fine. There are different parts of this community and I'm sharing what I see from where I am. If your experience is different, I genuinely want to hear it — the conversation this post is trying to start needs more voices, not fewer.

Why this needs to exist now

Harm reduction didn't start as a philosophy. It started as people watching other people die and deciding to do something practical about it.

It came out of the AIDS crisis — needle exchanges that kept people alive when abstinence messaging was killing them. It came from people who'd watched friends overdose and started sharing what they'd learned about what made the difference between a bad night and a fatal one. It came from dance floors where MDMA was everywhere and people were going down from overheating and dehydration because nobody had told them what to do. It came from psychedelic communities that developed careful protocols around set, setting, and integration because they'd seen what happened when people went in without preparation.

The principle underneath all of it is the same: people are going to do this whether or not we approve. So the question isn't how to stop them — it's how to make sure they come back. Harm reduction is pragmatic and non-judgmental by design because it accepts reality as it actually is rather than as we'd like it to be.

Gooning is new enough that we haven't built much of this yet — and what exists is scattered, informal, and not yet connected into anything coherent. And we need to change that.

I see people in gooning spaces struggling. I see people move from these spaces into porn addiction and hypersexuality communities, looking for help, often not finding it in a form that actually fits what they're dealing with. The mental health risks are real — I've personally struggled with suicidal ideation arising directly from what was happening with my gooning practice, and I know I'm not alone in that. There are real risks to our bodies, to our finances, to our relationships, to our capacity to function in daily life. These aren't hypothetical. They're already happening.

At the same time, gooning spaces are growing. The content is getting more sophisticated and more accessible. More people are going in without much in the way of collective knowledge about how to navigate it

There are things already happening that point toward what we need. I watched the Bambi community — a hypnosis space closely related to gooning — go through a visible cultural shift over several years. Early on, people were pushing each other toward deeper and deeper states, celebrating how far under they'd gone. Over time, as harm started becoming visible, the culture pulled back. Norms emerged. People started checking in on each other differently. I've had people in gooning spaces encourage me to step back when I've mentioned being in too deep. Individual practitioners are developing their own approaches, their own wisdom, their own ways of looking out for each other.

What we don't yet have is a way to connect all of that — to share it, build on it, and make it there for people before they need it. That's what this post is trying to contribute to.

One thing before we go further

For many of us, harm is part of the kink. The degradation, the loss of control, the sense of being consumed — that's not a side effect of gooning for a lot of people, it's the point. Being a disgusting gooner, letting yourself go, the kinkification of your own dissolution — that's real and it's valid and this post isn't trying to talk you out of it.

What harm reduction is actually asking is a narrower question: how do we engage with the harm we want without tipping over into damage we didn't consent to? How do we stay on the side of hot rather than genuinely destructive? And how do we make sure the consequences don't land on people around us who didn't sign up for any of this?

Those questions have different answers for different people. This post won't tell you where your line is. It'll try to give you some tools for finding it yourself.

What gooning actually is — and why people are here

Most people treat gooning like more intense porn. That's the wrong framework, especially for people who go deep with it.

At its core, gooning is sexual edging — deliberately extending arousal over time, staying at the edge rather than going over. What the best gooning content adds to that is a layered set of tools for shifting your mental state: looping audio and visuals, hypnotic language patterns, physiological triggers, sometimes substances. What it's doing, at its most effective, is using your own extended arousal as a doorway into states of consciousness that are genuinely altered — absorbed, open, less governed by your usual mental commentary. The thinking, evaluating, deciding part of your mind steps back. Something more animal and more present takes over.

For people who engage seriously with this practice, what they're actually doing is much closer to a tantric practice than to watching porn. I know that sounds like a stretch. But tantra uses the body and sexual energy as a vehicle for accessing expanded states of consciousness — and that's also what serious gooning does. Most practitioners don't have that framework and the culture is only just beginning to name it that way, but that's what's happening.

This matters for harm reduction because the risk profile is completely different from regular porn. Do this regularly enough and your nervous system will reorganise around it. That has consequences worth understanding before you're deep in it.

Here's why people are actually in these spaces: for a lot of us, life involves a constant background effort of managing how we present ourselves — containing how much we feel, how intensely we desire, how freely we can be ourselves. Trans people, queer people, neurodivergent people know this particularly well, but it's not only us. Many of us also genuinely struggle to find the kind of sexual and physical connection in person that we'd actually want if we could have it — the right people, the right dynamic, the right level of intensity. Gooning fills a gap that real life often doesn't.

The draw toward states where all of that requirement can finally be put down — where you can be fully yourself without managing anyone else's reaction to it — is real and it makes sense. It's not weakness or brokenness.

The physician and author Gabor Maté says you can't understand addiction by asking what's wrong with it — you have to ask what's right about it, what need it's meeting. Kate Bornstein, one of the foundational voices of trans culture, gave this permission to anyone struggling: do whatever it takes to make your life worth living — just don't be mean. For me that extends further: don't be mean to yourself, to the people around you, or to the world.

I want to offer that same permission here. If gooning is meeting a need you can't meet another way right now, that's okay. You don't need to justify it. The need is real. This post is about making sure the way you're meeting it doesn't cost you more than you want to pay.

If you haven't started yet — please read this first

If you're reading this before you've gone deep into gooning, there's one thing I want to say directly to you.

You might be thinking: I've had a healthy relationship with pornography. I know my own limits. I've never had a problem with this before. That reasoning isn't wrong about your history — but it doesn't tell you what you need to know about this. Gooning is not a more intense version of regular porn. The risk profile is categorically different, and the framework you've built for managing your relationship with one thing will not protect you from the other.

I had a genuinely healthy relationship with pornography across decades. High sex drive, real barriers to physical connection, porn as a reasonable pragmatic solution — and I'd navigated that fine. When gooning was being talked about in the same "porn addiction" language, I didn't register it as a meaningful escalation. I thought I knew what I was dealing with.

I didn't. And part of why I'm writing all of this is so that you have the information I didn't have before you decide how far to go.

A map of what can go wrong

Escalation. What gets you there today requires more intensity tomorrow. The baseline shifts. In gooning this shows up as needing more extreme content, longer sessions, stronger inductions to reach the states that used to be accessible more easily.

Displacement. The practice starts filling space that other things used to fill — connection, rest, pleasure that doesn't require a screen. Life outside it starts feeling thin or difficult by comparison.

Cost accumulation. The physical and mental cost of regularly accessing intense states isn't always immediately visible. It accumulates. Fatigue, difficulty concentrating, changes in mood, feeling depleted in ways that don't resolve with rest — these are often the first signs that something is costing more than it's giving back. Financial costs can accumulate too — subscription content, equipment, substances, all of it adds up, and it can happen gradually enough that you don't notice until it's a real problem.

Isolation. The practice becomes something you do alone, in secret, that nobody around you knows about. More on this below.

Spill. The effects start showing up in your life in ways that affect people who didn't consent to any of it. Your partner. Your family. Your work. The people around you aren't consenting to the consequences of your gooning, and at some point that matters.

Set and setting

Borrowed from psychedelic culture, and just as relevant here.

Set is your internal state going in. Are you going in because you genuinely want to, or because you're trying to escape something — a difficult day, loneliness, something you don't want to feel? Neither is automatically wrong, but they produce different experiences and carry different risks. Going in already depleted or distressed tends to produce experiences that cost more and give less.

Setting is your environment. Time, physical space, what you have access to, whether you might be interrupted.

Some people celebrate the full aesthetic of being a disgusting gooner — the not-showering, the complete surrender, the deliberate dissolution of any pretense of having your shit together. That's legitimate and celebrated in parts of these spaces. What harm reduction adds isn't a shower — it's that even that mode goes better when it's chosen intentionally rather than fallen into by accident. The difference between deciding to be a useless gooner tonight and just ending up there is real, even if both look the same from the outside.

It's okay to ritualize sessions. Having consistent things you do before you go in — whatever they are for you — is a way of making a deliberate choice about what you're about to do. That choice itself changes something about what follows.

Goon somatics — your body is in this too

This is the piece almost nobody talks about, and it matters.

The image most associated with gooning — sitting in a gaming chair, hunched over one or more monitors — is a recipe for cumulative physical damage that takes years to fully arrive. I want to be specific about why I'm saying this, because it's not just "I'm in my forties and things hurt." I spent decades sitting in chairs at desks — gaming, working office jobs, and yes, edging myself for hours while watching porn in positions that were not designed for extended sessions. My back is genuinely messed up from it. I'm telling you this because the damage happened slowly and invisibly and I didn't feel the full cost of it until much later. I don't want that to happen to you, and I especially don't want it to make it harder for you to keep doing what you love.

Prolonged sitting in poor posture does specific, predictable things. Core and back muscles weaken. Hip flexors shorten. The lumbar curve flattens. Forward head posture puts increasing load on the neck and upper spine. Disc compression accumulates. None of this announces itself dramatically — it builds quietly, over years, and by the time it's obvious it's structural.

The specific physicality of gooning adds to this. Extended sessions in unusual positions. Repetitive motion. Loss of physical self-awareness in deep states — when you're dissociated, your body's feedback signals aren't fully getting through. I've had sessions where I was so far under that I didn't notice physical discomfort I would normally have responded to immediately. That level of disconnection from your body's signals has real consequences.

The simplest change: lie down rather than sit. It's better for your spine, it reduces the posture damage, and honestly the states go better horizontal anyway. Take breaks. Stretch. Hydrate.

If changing your setup feels impossible right now because of the equipment you have, that's okay — it's something you can work toward over time. It's also something we can work toward collectively. Gooners are a big enough part of the market now that our money has real power. We can start asking manufacturers for what we actually need and expect to get it. And if that doesn't work, there are gooners out there who are absolute geniuses at this — the community will invent what it needs.

Substances

Weed is ubiquitous in these spaces and functionally integrated into the practice — there's something about THC specifically that opens you to these states in a way that's hard to replicate otherwise. Most people who engage seriously with gooning use it.

Poppers appear in some content, timed to specific moments in the edit. Considerations worth knowing: don't combine with erectile dysfunction medications — the blood pressure interaction can be fatal. Heavy chronic use has been associated with retinal damage, which isn't widely known. Practically: pour a small amount into a separate bottle and use a button-operated cap designed for the purpose. Spilling poppers on skin causes real chemical burns that can take months to resolve — I know this from personal experience, including a raised area on my chest that took six months to fully clear. In a deep trance state it's easy to spill — the cap design matters.

Some people use psychedelics — mushrooms, LSD, DMT, ketamine are all present in these spaces. Ketamine is shorter-acting, which some people find useful, but it's significantly more addictive than classic psychedelics and that risk is amplified in a context where compulsive patterns are already present. With classic psychedelics: set and setting matter enormously, and in a gooning context that means the content you're feeding into the state matters. Psychedelics amplify everything — not just pleasure but also fear and anything you'd normally be able to step back from. Don't use alone at high doses. Know how you respond to a substance independently before combining it with gooning.

There are also research chemicals and other substances circulating in these spaces. If you're going to use anything, know what it is and know what it combines with. TripSit's drug combination chart at combo.tripsit.me is the best freely available resource for checking what's safe to mix. Use it.

Methamphetamine is present in some gooning spaces and worth naming directly because the risk profile is severe. Meth specifically removes the fatigue signals that would otherwise interrupt a session — you can go for much longer than your body would normally allow, which amplifies every other risk. It also directly intensifies compulsivity and is highly addictive. The combination of meth and gooning is one of the more dangerous combinations in these spaces, and if you're using it, please take that seriously.

The general principle isn't abstinence — it's intentionality. Know what each substance is doing and why you're using it. Higher doses and combinations that strongly impair your judgment increase the risk that you end up somewhere you didn't choose and can't navigate back from.

Dissociation and its limits

A lot of people come to gooning specifically to get out of their head, out of their body, out of a life that's difficult to inhabit. That's a completely legitimate reason to be here.

What's worth knowing: when you're dissociated — when you've mentally left the building — you're less able to make active choices about what you're engaging with. Content you'd notice and skip past in a more present state might not register. Substances you'd usually moderate might not get moderated. The part of you that would normally say "this is enough" is offline.

If you're using dissociative states as your primary mode and noticing patterns you're not happy with — content you didn't mean to access, substance use that's harder to manage than you'd like, sessions that end badly — it's worth putting guardrails in place before you go under rather than during. Choose what content you'll have access to ahead of time. Set limits on substances before you start. Have a rough time limit. Make choices when you're capable of making them, so the version of you that's dissociated is a bit more protected.

The chasing problem — and why it's complicated

The standard addiction framing gets this wrong: the chasing often doesn't feel like chasing. Being pulled in, feeling the pull intensify, going deeper because the pull is pulling you — the feeling of being pulled is hot. A lot of us are in these spaces precisely because we long for somewhere we can genuinely give over control, and we've kinkified that pull. So "you're chasing, that's a warning sign" can land as completely missing what's actually going on.

Acknowledged. The pull is real and it's supposed to be real.

What's still worth asking, periodically and honestly, is whether the practice is making your life bigger or smaller. Not whether you feel in control — you might specifically not want to feel in control, and that's fine. But whether the shape of your life overall is one you'd choose. Whether the practice is something that adds to your existence or whether it's slowly becoming the whole of it in ways that weren't what you wanted.

If becoming an absolutely useless gooner is genuinely your life goal and it fulfills you, honestly, okay. But most of us who say that would actually prefer to be a useless gooner with other people around. The isolated version — alone, in secret, no community — tends to be the version that damages people. Not because of the gooning. Because of the isolation.

The witness problem and the isolation problem

When I say most people in these spaces are doing it alone and in secret, I mean specifically that they don't have in-person community around it. Online community is real and matters — the spaces we've built, the knowledge shared, the occasional person who checks in — that's not nothing. But there is something qualitatively different about having people in your actual physical life who know that you engage in this. Even if they aren't gooners themselves. Even if they don't fully understand it. The isolation that comes from only having online connections around this has a real impact — on how compulsive the practice gets, on how hard it is to step back when you need to, on how much shame accumulates.

There's no judgment if that's where you're at right now. Most of us are. The stigma is real, the misunderstanding is real, and most people in your life would respond badly if they knew. But individually and collectively, one of the most important things we can do for each other is work toward not being isolated with this. It doesn't require finding another gooner. It requires finding someone in your life you trust enough to say: this is something I do, and I want you to know.

A lot of us would also genuinely like to find each other in person — for community, for shared sessions, for whatever gooning mischief we want to get into together. That remains mostly fantasy because finding other gooners in person feels nearly impossible.

Part of what makes it hard isn't just stigma — it's that we're strangers to each other. Meeting someone from these spaces in person carries real risks when you have no way of knowing whether they're safe. We need to build cultural norms and practices that let us figure out whether we can trust each other before we meet up.

One thing that could help: developing ways to identify each other. Queer communities have done this for decades — rainbow flags, the way we dress, subcultural signals. The trans community used a Sylveon Pokémon as a low-key identifier for a while. Gooning is big enough now that we could just pick some things and try them. An emoji on dating apps. A specific way of flagging online. It doesn't have to be perfect from the start — the point is to have a go, see what sticks, and iterate. The queer communities that built these signals didn't get them right the first time either.

That gap between the fantasy of community and the reality of isolation is a real problem. It makes the practice more compulsive, not less. It makes the harm harder to manage.

For the most immediate practical step: find even one person who knows what you're doing. Not someone who has to understand it, just someone who knows you're there and who you trust enough to reach out to if something goes sideways. The witness doesn't have to be another gooner. It just has to be someone.

The interactive dimension — a gap in my knowledge

Some people goon interactively — one person curating and feeding content to another in real time, guiding the session. This is a meaningfully different practice from solo gooning and carries its own dynamics around power, consent, responsibility, and care.

I don't have much personal experience with this mode. What I will say is that the harm reduction questions here are real and haven't been seriously addressed anywhere I've found. What does good practice look like for the person feeding content? What are their responsibilities? What does consent look like when one person is increasingly under and the other is increasingly in control? What's the equivalent of aftercare?

These are questions the community needs to start asking out loud, and the people with experience on this side of the practice are the ones who can actually answer them.

If you need help — and why it's hard to find

The needs that gooning is meeting are real. They're also needs that most people find genuinely hard to meet other ways — the intensity, the surrender, the freedom to be completely yourself, the connection to something that can receive all of you. These aren't things you can just swap out for a gym membership and some therapy. Most mainstream addiction support frameworks don't yet have the sophistication to understand that — though some practitioners are doing genuinely thoughtful work in this space, particularly those who work with kink, altered states, or psychedelic integration. If you can find someone like that, they're worth seeking out. But for most people, the help they offer often doesn't actually reach the thing that needs addressing.

Some of the people in these spaces — queer people, trans people, neurodivergent people, people whose needs and desires don't fit mainstream templates — face additional barriers when seeking help. Safety in mainstream services isn't guaranteed. Having to explain and defend who you are while trying to get help for something else is exhausting and often means the help doesn't actually reach you.

What adequate support looks like is someone who can hold both things at once: the real needs being met by the practice alongside the real costs and harms that need addressing. That kind of support largely doesn't exist yet.

We may have to build it ourselves. Peer support within these spaces — people who've been deep and found ways through, available to people who are struggling — is probably the most realistic near-term option we have. If you've been deep in this and found your way to something more sustainable, your experience is genuinely valuable. Consider making yourself available to others.

If you are trying to get support from someone — a therapist, a friend, a doctor — and struggling to explain what gooning is and what it does, consider sending them this post. It won't answer every question but it might give them enough context to meet you better than they otherwise would.

One thing worth adding: integration matters. What you do in the time after an intense session — how you land, how you care for yourself, whether you give yourself time to process what came up — is as important as what happens during it. This is well understood in psychedelic harm reduction contexts and the same principle applies here. A practice without integration tends to just keep opening without consolidating, which is part of how the cost accumulates.

If you're in immediate crisis, there are phone lines you can call. Before I give you the numbers, I want to be honest about their limitations: none of these services are going to have any understanding of gooning. The person who answers will not know what you're talking about. They may pathologise what you're describing, respond in ways that aren't helpful, or simply have no framework for the situation you're in. That's a real limitation and it's worth knowing before you call.

With that said — if you're in genuine danger and you have no one else to reach out to, they exist and they're there. In Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14. In the US: 988. In the UK: Samaritans 116 123. Sometimes just having someone to talk to, even someone who doesn't fully understand, matters.

The broader point — and what we can do

Gooning spaces are going to keep growing. The content is getting more sophisticated and more accessible. Some of the people going into those spaces are queer, trans, or neurodivergent — navigating lives that already put them outside most mainstream support structures. Most are just ordinary people who found something that does something for them, without much in the way of collective knowledge about how to navigate it.

There's something else coming that the community needs to be thinking about: corporations are going to start producing gooning content at scale, if they haven't already. When that happens, the content will be optimised in ways that community-made content isn't — for engagement, for keeping you in the funnel, for extracting money. It may be more immediately effective and more deliberately addictive than anything currently out there. We're going to need to help each other navigate that.

What we currently have is fragments. Individual knowledge, informal norms, the occasional person who says "hey, maybe ease up." What we need is something more like what other harm reduction movements built — and that happened at multiple levels simultaneously. At the individual level: accumulated, shared, transmissible knowledge about how to be in these spaces and come back intact. At the community level: peer support networks, shared norms, ways of finding and looking out for each other. And at an institutional level: organisations that can hold knowledge over time, advocate for the community's interests, push back when content or platforms are doing harm, and provide some infrastructure when individuals or peer networks aren't enough. Harm reduction for other communities didn't stop at passing information between individuals — it built clinics, advocacy organisations, legal frameworks, and research programs. We're nowhere near that yet, but it's worth naming as the direction of travel.

This post is a start. It comes from one person's experience of going deep and finding a way through. It's not complete and it's not the last word.

So here's what I'm asking — and I mean this as a genuine call rather than a polite sign-off. Don't just use the comments to share tips, though tips are welcome. Let's start talking about the bigger questions too. How do we build better ways to find and connect with each other in person? What would it look like to actually have community rather than just shared content? How do we develop the cultural norms and practices that let us look after each other — that make gooning something we can all continue to engage with in the ways we want, without the consequences we don't want? What do we need to build, and who's willing to help build it?

The culture needs building. The only people who can build it are the people who are actually there. That's us.