Does Your Relationship with Your Parents Influence Your Sexual Fantasies?

Monday, November 10, 2025. This is for Brian & Liz.

In America, sex is both our national pastime and sometimes, our private shame.

We sell it in every advertisement, moralize it in every sermon, and sanitize it in every therapy session.

So when researchers ask whether our childhood relationships with our parents shape the fantasies that later flicker in our adult bedrooms, it exposes the one subject Americans never quite domesticated—desire itself.

Attachment theory, the backbone of modern relationship science, argues that our first caregivers teach us how safe intimacy feels—a script we keep rehearsing for the rest of our lives.

A 2025 study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, led by Ellen Zakreski and colleagues, found that adults who reported poorer relationships with their parents were more likely to endorse violent sexual fantasies—those involving coercion, humiliation, or control.

This link was mediated by insecure attachment styles, particularly preoccupied and fearful-avoidant.

In plain English: people who learned early that love was unpredictable or unsafe may eroticize that tension later, turning fear itself into arousal.

But it’s not a straight line of causation.

The study is correlational, not causal, and those associations—while statistically solid—are moderate. Still, the message is clear: childhood patterns echo in the most intimate corners of adult life.

From Sin to Symptom

John Bowlby believed our earliest attachments shape whether we expect love to be safe or punishing.

Decades later, John Gottman reframed that insight for couples: trust is built moment by moment, and betrayal begins in small acts of neglect.

Yet in American therapy, we’ve medicalized what used to be moral vocabulary. We no longer discuss the un-wisdom of lust, pride, or envy—we mostly talk about attachment injuries.

When we medicalized morality, we also medicalized desire—as if libido itself could be treated like cholesterol.

The risk is that “value-free” therapy flattens the moral dimension of longing. What used to be a spiritual drama has become a diagnostic code.

Attachment, Fantasy, and the Gender Divide

Research on insecure attachment and paraphilic interests shows that fantasy often mirrors early emotional strategy.

In Beyond the Borders of Reality, psychologist Gurit Birnbaum found that people high in attachment anxiety fantasize more about reassurance and surrender, while those high in avoidance prefer emotionally detached, impersonal scenarios.

Gender tends to sharpen these differences.

Men, on average, report fantasies emphasizing dominance or control; women, fantasies about surrender or safety. But both are negotiating the same question: How do I feel safe enough to want?

As Schachner and Shaver (2004) found, anxiously attached partners often use sex to secure closeness—“If I give myself, maybe I’ll be loved.”

Avoidantly attached folks, by contrast, use sex to maintain control—“If I take you, you can’t reach me.”

The American man learns to want without needing; the American woman learns to need without wanting. Both end up eroticizing the very imbalance they were taught in their family of origin.

When Early Wounds Shape Desire

A 2025 study in Behaviors found that childhood sexual abuse predicted adult paraphilic interests primarily through attachment insecurity and emotion dysregulation.

In other words, trauma doesn’t implant specific fantasies—it alters how safety and control feel in the body.

But not all atypical sexual interests arise from insecurity.

A 2023 study in the Archive of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy found no link between attachment and consensual fetishistic or exhibitionist play among online daters.

The distinction matters: coercive fantasies often trace back to fear and anxiety; consensual ones do not. Desire becomes pathology only when power replaces trust.

From Case to Mirror: What Therapy Can Learn

In my office, a client once described a recurring fantasy of control—his partner bound, compliant, unresisting. “It’s not that I want to hurt her,” he said. “I just want to know she won’t leave.”

He didn’t need to be cured of his fantasy; he needed to understand why safety had always looked like control.

As Brassard et al. (2007) showed, people with attachment insecurity report more sexual coercion and pressure in relationships. The therapist’s task isn’t to extinguish fantasy but to help interpret it—to assist clients in finding the story beneath the script.

FAQ

Is it normal to have violent or control-based fantasies?
Absolutely. Most sexual fantasies explore power or safety. They become problematic only when they distress you, impair functioning, or cross consent.

Do bad parent–child relationships “cause” deviant fantasies?
No. They can shape emotional themes of desire but don’t dictate its form or morality.

What if my fantasies make me uncomfortable?
Discomfort is information. A sex-positive therapist can help you unpack symbolic meaning without shame.

What’s the difference between paraphilic interest and disorder?
Paraphilic interests are atypical but harmless when consensual and non-distressing. They become disorders only when they cause suffering or involve non-consent.

Final Thoughts

We don’t choose what arouses us any more than we chose our first caregivers.

Both are accidents of our emotional history—patterns we inherit before we ever understand them. But we can choose what we make of them.

Your sexual fantasies are part of your attachment story, not its indictment.

They often replay what safety once felt like, or what danger or intensity once promised to resolve.

When power, surrender, or control show up in fantasy, they’re usually doing the same job they did in childhood: keeping the self intact when intimacy feels uncertain.

Therapy’s task isn’t to moralize sexual fantasy or bleach it clean—it’s to interpret its grammar. To see that arousal and fear sometimes share the same nervous system, that tenderness, vulnerability, and control can often emerge from the same wound.

Healing begins when we stop asking whether our fantasies are normal and start asking whether they’re honest.

That process starts with being curious. What are your fantasies trying to keep safe? And what part of you is asking to be heard once more?

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Birnbaum, G. E. (2018). Beyond the borders of reality: Attachment orientations and sexual fantasies [Manuscript]. ResearchGate.

Brassard, A., Lussier, Y., Sabourin, S., Lussier, P., & Wright, J. (2007). Attachment, sexual experience, and sexual pressure in romantic relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 24(5), 771–791. UC Davis Adult Attachment Lab.

Schachner, D. A., & Shaver, P. R. (2004). Attachment dimensions and sexual motives. Personal Relationships, 11(2), 179–195. Scott Barry Kaufman Archives.

Selič, M., et al. (2025). Childhood sexual abuse, adult attachment styles, and paraphilic interests and behaviors[Manuscript]. Behaviors. MDPI.

Zakreski, E., Jahnke, S., Androvičová, R., Bártová, K., Chronos, A., Krejčová, L., Martinec Nováková, L., & Klapilová, K. (2025). Preoccupied and fearful-avoidant attachment styles may mediate the relationship between poor parental relationship quality and sexual interests in violence. Archives of Sexual Behavior. SpringerLink.