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Fear and Guilt

18 Jun

In all the excitement of my life, i missed the Special Interest Groups discussion yesterday.  i realized it was the third Sunday about half an hour too late to go to the discussion.

Greedy girl that i am, i really wanted to do that too.  Visit my grandbaby, help Sir get moved, AND go to the discussions all in one lovely Sunday.  But it was really just too late.  Even if i drove really fast.

Sigh…  and it was on one of my favorite topics:  Fear and Guilt.

Here are the questions, from the Fetlife Event Page:

How do guilt and fear fit into D/s relationships?
• When are guilt and fear unhealthy and harmful, when are they good?
• Is it ethical to use guilt and fear within relationships and if so, how and when?
• What good benefits might guilt and fear bring?
• Is guilt more pervasive in one orientation than another?
• Does guilt serve a useful purpose?
• Are there ways to use guilt effectively and ethically to manage behavior?
• What, if anything, do you feel guilty about your own desires in terms of S&M and D/s relationships?
• Which do you find to be more crippling, guilt or fear?
• What’s the first thing you remember feeling guilty about in terms of S&M and D/s desires?
• Do you believe that we as a community allow fear and guilt to dictate our actions? How valid is that fear and guilt in the larger sense?
• How do you feel guilt can be handled within a spiritual or religious framework?
• What’s the biggest fear you have about your own orientation?
• What do you think is the biggest fear other orientations have?
• Is it ethical to use fear in scenes?
• Is fear always something that should be overcome?
• Are there instances you can think of wherein guilt or fear made an otherwise good relationship unworkable?

Lots of questions…  Ms. Constance always looks at Jackie, who leads the submissives’ discussion,and says, “And you know, you don’t have to answer all the questions.”  Which is a good thing, cause we usually don’t.

  • When are guilt and fear unhealthy and harmful, when are they good?
• What good benefits might guilt and fear bring?
• Does guilt serve a useful purpose?   Is fear always something that should be overcome?

So i’m going to talk about these four questions, cause in my mind, they go together.  My answer would have been:

Fear and guilt are feelings, so of course they serve a purpose.  Guilt lets us know that we’ve done something wrong, and maybe that we need to make amends.  Fear is our alarm system ~ it lets us know when we sense danger or a threat of some kind.  

Feelings aren’t good or bad.  They just are.

The trick is to sort out when feelings are fact based and when they’re strictly emotional mind, or a false alarm.  Just because you feel something, doesn’t make it true.

So i can feel guilty as ~ guilty as sin ~ but that doesn’t necessarily mean i’ve done something wrong.  i can feel tremendous fear, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that i’m in real danger.

It does mean i need to pay attention, right?

Feelings motivate behavior.  So if i’m afraid of spiders, and that motivates me to jump on a chair when i see one, there’s probably a safety reason built into that.  From the safety of a chair, i can assess whether it’s a poisonous spider, and how best to get rid of it.

But if i have to stay up on the chair the rest of the day, and i can’t sleep that night, or the next night, because i’m afraid there will be more spiders, fear is no longer serving a purpose.

On the other hand, if i’m afraid of jumping off a cliff, that’s probably not a fear i need to overcome.  Yes, the divers in Mexico do it, but i probably don’t need to face and challenge that fear.  That would be a real danger for me.

Same thing with guilt.  When we’ve done something wrong, guilt sends us that message.  It motivates us to try to remedy the wrong.

But lots of times, we carry around other people’s values and feel guilty about not doing what other people think we should do.

For real, guilt needs to be about our own values, and being true to what we believe in.  “Healthy” guilt goes away once we’ve made amends as best we can for whatever we did wrong.

In the lifestyle, of course, fear takes on new meaning.  Riding a roller coaster stimulates all the physical indicators of fear ~ but many people love doing it.

In the same way, BDSM takes us to the dark, scary places of the psyche ~ and many of us thrive on that.   And here it gets more complex.

Rope suspension can be an adrenaline rush like a roller coaster.  But so is confessing you like to be spanked.  Having to say it.

There’s no real danger in either situation, at least neither one will kill you, but facing and overcoming some of the fears associated with it can be powerful.

Gotta go now – gotta be at work early, time to shower and get on with the day.  What do youall think about guilt and fear?

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Negotiation Discussion, Part II

23 May

My favorite part of the Sunday afternoon discussion this time was when the Dominants and switches came back together.  We report back on the discussion we’ve had, and this is a chance to find out what the Dominants think about the topic.

Submissives may think that “saying no,” or “not pleasing my Sir” is the hardest part of negotiation.  Some Doms think that not being given an honest answer and being sure they know how we really feel is the hardest part.  One of the Doms was saying that he really wants to know if his submissive doesn’t like something or doesn’t want to do something.  That feedback is super important to him.

i appreciated his perspective, and shared the story of the time i didn’t tell Sir how i react to violent movies, and how poorly that worked out for me.   Ms. Constance wanted to know if i thought that was something worthy of punishment, and i said, “Of course!” because really, i think it was.  Of course, watching that awful, awful movie was punishment itself.

But anyhow.

Some other people said some things, mostly about how important it is for Doms to know how we really feel.  For us to say what we really want.  

It was nice.  i was starting to feel warm and fuzzy, like negotiations are designed to make sure i’m having a good time.  To make sure i really want to do the things He asks of me.

But it was an odd moment.  There were some other feelings there, i’m not sure what they were.

Then Ms. Constance busted that whole “make sure the submissive feels good” delusion pretty quickly ~ and i’m so glad she did.

Ms. Constance doesn’t really care if Drew feels like getting out of bed, turning up the heat, and fixing her tea.  That’s what he agreed to do and really, he just needs to do it.

As she talked, i felt a sense of relief.  

Her perspective is the mirror image of my own.  

My submission isn’t about finding the right kinky scene to satisfy my submissive self.  Kinky scenes, ropes and bondage, nipple clamps and spanking are great.  But they’re not what my submission is about.

i want to please Him.

And, as Ms. Constance says, if i don’t ever have to do things that i don’t much want to do, then what’s the point?  Ok, not things that would be harmful, not things that violate my hard limits.   But if there’s something that pleases my Sir, it’s ok for me to do it even if i don’t much feel like it right that minute.

Isn’t that the point of being a slave?  To please Him, to provide what He wants?  Even if it’s hard.

Especially if it’s hard.

And that’s where the real dance of negotiation comes in, for me.  If i promise more than i can deliver, i will disappoint us both.

i wanted to watch the god-awful violent movie from hell with Sir.  i’m not able to do that without freaking out.  i wanted to.  i thought i could.  i really couldn’t.

My first husband worked second shift for a while.  i used to go to bed with the kids, then get up when he came home to spend some time with him, then go back to bed and sleep a few more hours til I had to get up and go to work myself. 

That wasn’t something he asked of me, but he had talked about missing spending time with me, and i wanted to spend time with him too.

i did it for a while, but eventually all the broken sleep was just too hard.  i couldn’t maintain that schedule five nights a week.

If he had been a Dom, we could have negotiated around that ~ how many nights a week i could do it, or something like that.  Of course, if he’d been a Dom, he might have recognized that this wasn’t a realistic sleep plan for anyone long term.  He might have come up with a compromise plan before i failed in my effort.

So the negotiation is important.  The things i agree to need to be things i’m able to do, and i’m not always the best judge of that.

The desire to give overwhelms me sometimes, and i know {thank goodness for blogs} that it does youall too, sometimes.   It seems to me that the hard part for the Dom is figuring out how to help us contain that desire and channel it where they want it.

Does that make sense?  What do you think?

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Negotiations

22 May

The discussion topic on Sunday afternoon was negotiations.  There was {as always} a long list of questions:

–  What are the differences in negotiating a scene versus negotiating a relationship?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of using a third party in negotiation?
• How do you assure that you are using the same definitions when negotiating?
• What’s the best way to approach a negotiation with another person?
• Do all parties have equal importance in the negotiation, regardless of power orientation?
• What’s the hardest part of negotiation for a dominant?
• What’s the hardest part of negotiation for a submissive?
• What’s the hardest part of negotiation for a dominant?
• Is it important to put parts of negotiation in writing?
• How do you negotiate changes over time in a relationship?
• Does every relationship require negotiation?
• Do different power relationships have different starting points in a negotiation or do all parties begin equally?

Lots of interesting questions.  In the submissives group, we tend to try to answer all the questions.  So, for example, we could agree quickly that the hardest thing for a submissive in negotiations is saying “no,” and risking not pleasing the person we most want to please.  We didn’t go into a lot of depth around the answers.

We did spend a long time talking about the first point ~ the difference in negotiating a scene and a relationship.  Some of the differences there are pretty obvious – a scene is short-term, a relationship long-term.  For me, the biggest difference is that if i were negotiating a scene with someone i wasn’t in a relationship with, it would be because the scene was something i wanted and not because i was trying to please him.  That might be interesting.

i’ve never “negotiated” the way some of the other submissive have for a particular scene or to experience a type of play, much less used a third party to negotiate.  My first “play scenes” were with Sir D, who pretty much just told me what he was going to do.  i trusted him not to harm me, and he was careful with me.  

Sir D took responsibility for checking in with me and encouraging me to say what i was feeling.  He taught me the importance of communicating what my experience was ~ what i was feeling ~ as best i could in that moment, and more clearly in giving him feedback afterwards.  It was a wonderful experience, but not an exercise in negotiating.

Anyhow.

i do think all relationships involve negotiations, and Sir and i are negotiating our relationship in a rather organic way.  Not so formal, but very real.  

During dinner at Donna and Bill’s, He was telling them what He had told me early on in our relationship.  He had said, “Don’t have expectations about what kind of Dom I’m going to be.  I’m not doing this out of some book, so I may not do things the way someone else thinks they should be done, and I’m probably not going to change that.”

That has certainly been true, and if i sometimes think that i would like a more “by-the-book” Dom, i have traded that for a very real man who has great integrity and strength of character.   {Not saying that some of you don’t have all of those qualities in your Dom,  just saying that it’s an acceptable trade-off for me.}

At the discussion on Sunday, it was fun when one woman realized how the whole idea of negotiations in a relationship was a new experience for her and countered her history of either having to give in without question or having to strongly hold one stance without flexibility.  Just the idea of negotiating and having her right to do so  acknowledged and accepted was exciting for her.

It was also lots of fun when the groups came back together to hear Ms. Constance’s ideas on negotiations and what other Doms thought.    i had planned to write about that today, but will save it for tomorrow.

Am wondering too, what are your thoughts on negotiations?  As you look at the questions, are there any of those that you have strong thoughts on?  Leave a comment about it, or blog about it and link back here if you want to.

On a whole different note, i was reading Faerie’s blog this morning.  This was her 100th post, so CONGRATULATIONS on that.  But i noticed today ~

~ she says that she has to get her chores done before she even gets on the computer.   i thought, “what a great idea!  If i did that, i’d get so much more done!!”

But then i wouldn’t be doing this right now.  i never get done with everything i need to do anyhow…  so i probably won’t start that kind of rule.   But it seemed like a good idea for the moment! 

 

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Punishment!

19 Mar

The questions started with:

• Are there kinds of punishment that are appropriate for public and/or vanilla punishment?
• What’s the difference between punishment and a mind fuck? Is it ever all right to use punishment as a mind fuck?
• What’s the difference between punishment and play?
• What makes a punishment effective? What makes it ineffective? Is ineffective punishment worse than none at all?
• What kind of punishment is most effective, physical or emotional?
• Does punishment always have to be fair? Is harsh punishment for minor infractions acceptable?

and ended with:

• How do you get out of a punishment that has become more than you can handle?
• What makes good punishment?
• When should you punish and when should you let it go?
• What if you feel like you have gone too far? Made a mistake?
• Does the age, sex, or experience level play a role in how and/or when you punish?
• Should punishment cause physical and / or emotional pain?
• What is the difference between punishment and discipline?
• How do you let go or get over something you have done wrong?
• Do you use punishment to change behaviors?
• Does there have to be a reason for punishment?

Needless to say, we didn’t cover all of them.  But it was a great discussion.

We break up into groups ~ Doms take one corner, switches have their own area, and submissives are grouped in the center of the room.  There are probably twice as many of us.  

We had a lot of fun.

This morning i’m still pondering some of the questions ~ and answers.  The line between punishment and abuse is pretty fine, and we struggled to find that distinction.  

At the other end of that spectrum is the difference between punishment and “funishment.”  i guess it looks like this:

Funishment ~~~~~~~~~~Punishment~~~~~~~~~~~~Abuse 

We agreed that before punishment, there needed to be a relationship, and a structure for discipline.  Lots of discussion, and the Dom needed to know the submissive well enough to recognize triggers.

We were against being ignored as a punishment, and generally agreed that if it went on too long, we’d leave.  

We talked about the cathartic value of punishment.

The on-line dictionary provides this definition of catharsis:

a : purification or purgation of the emotions (as pity and fear) primarily through art
b : a purification or purgation that brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension

Punishment allows us to purge our emotions and let go of the rumination about what we’ve done wrong ~ that “beating ourselves up” that can be so damaging.

i don’t have a bunch of experience with punishment, but for me the value is in the acknowledgment that i did something wrong, being able to pay the price for it, and knowing that it’s over.  That i’ve been forgiven. 

That made me wonder, do Doms need some kind of forgiveness, something to close that loop for them?

Mr. Michael said yes.  He said he likes to be thanked after he’s punished someone.

That caused a little consternation among the submissives at my end of the table, and even an, “i don’t think i could!  Not right away!”

But, Mr. Michael said, it was to acknowledge that he’d taken the time and made the effort to provide punishment.  And  i think i get that.  That makes sense.

A “thank you” acknowledges that i recognize i did something that earned punishment, and that i appreciate you following through with enforcing the limit, backing up the rule.  It acknowledges the attention and the caring that goes into it.

Beyond the “ONE, thank you, Sir ~ TWO, thank you, Sir~” it is a sincere acknowledgement that we recognize the value of punishment, and appreciate the provider.

You know, i can’t imagine Sir X punishing me.  It’s not like we have a bunch of rules and protocols, and He is the most reasonable of men.

And after all, i’m a good girl ~ i am!

But if he ever does, i’m sure i will have deserved it, and will try to remember to appreciate it.  To thank Him afterwards.

And i wonder, just a little bit, why that idea actually turns me on. 

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Updates and Check-Ins

19 Dec

i went to the Special Interest Group discussion yesterday.  The topic was “the funniest thing you’ve seen in a dungeon or at a play party.”  That opened it up for some pretty great stories.  They’re not mine to tell though, so i won’t.

The funniest thing i’ve seen in a dungeon was at COPE, and i might have already told the story.  There was a woman being whipped with a single-tail, her hands were fastened to the St. Andrews cross, but she was dancing in time to the music and smiling.  

Drew and i were watching her, and it went on for the longest time.  We’d look away, watch something else, and then look back and there she’d be, still smiling and dancing while her Top whaled on her with a single-tail.

Ok, maybe it was odd-funny, not ha ha funny….  anyhow.

i got to the restaurant late ~ not using my GPS  turned out to be a mistake.  i ended up on an expressway when i shouldn’t have been and had to drive halfway round the world to get back to where i needed to be.  But other than that, i had a good time.

i sat across from Caile, who commented on a post recently, and Kenny, who’s the switch who was presented with “earned leather” last month at the munch, and some other people i hadn’t met before.  Some interesting conversation.  A lovely Greek salad.  And good stories.  Life doesn’t get much better.

One of the things we talked about was communication, which leads me back here to Greengirl’s recent post about her reaction when her husband/Dom asks how her day was.  It’s a short post, but provocative, you can read it here.

She was surprised, and i was too when i thought about it, how many of us don’t believe that people who ask, “How are you?” or “How was your day?” really want to know.   

i went back to look at comments on her post ~ there are lots of them ~ and found one by Mamacrow, who says she does enjoy sharing the little events of the day with her “Him.”  She adds :  

“It’s a bit like two children emptying their pockets and sharing the treasures they’ve found that day… a shell, some string, etc!”

i love that image ~ somehow, i picture them on a summer day, sitting on a bridge, dangling their feet off the side.   And i thought, “i want that.”

i sent the quote and the little bit of explanation to Sir X, to open a conversation around that.  i think a big part of making that true is up to me ~ i need to trust that He does want to hear when He asks.  But i also think it’s the kind of thing it’s good to talk about.  Since He’s not actually a mind reader.

{And does it not frigging amaze you how insecure i can be when i get sooooo much affirmation from other people?  i think there’s a lesson there somewhere…}

On a whole different note, on the way home from the discussion, i stopped at Target to get Xmas cards, and bought some new boots.  

Yeah, i know, that’s a little self-indulgent.  But they’re super cute ~ black, of course ~  slouch boots.  Knee high.  If Mick does his boot picture thing this year, i’ll show you.

Every week, i’ve been setting little goals for myself.  This week:

i’ll finish getting ready for Christmas, and enjoy doing it.

i’ll keep eating healthy food.  i’ve done pretty well, although last night i scarfed down 5 of Ms. Constance’s cookies in about 5 minutes.  But they were small cookies, and extraordinarily delicious.  And i stopped at 5 ~ i didn’t keep going!

Besides, my heart feels so light, i think i must have lost some weight already.  🙂

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