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Noah -> RE: Trainers for submissives (6/24/2007 9:02:09 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SimplyMichael
Training as a general concept is a wonderful thing, I have learned much in life through training and I teach as well and get a great deal out of that as well. Training as it relates to the WIIWD has its place as well. Attending seminars/classes are a great way to learn a technical skill or to get a glimpse of how others do things. Desiring to learn a specific skill and searching out someone gifted and experienced to teach you is a wise thing to do.
Where I part ways with training is dominants training submissives. I part ways with it not because it is an impossible accomplishment, we see quite a few posts from people who look back fondly on such a training experience. I part ways with it because the skills a submissive lacks and needs training for are often the very ones needed to pick a good partner and because the pool of people who offer to train is pretty dismal, those two things combined together make the chances of a successful experience very low, the benefits often minimal if any, and that there are other paths with far better chances of success with much less risk.
So, when people ask me, should I seek out a trainer, I tell them "no, trainers are a bad idea, better to watch and learn on your own, ask questions, and when you find a real partner, learn and grow with them" Are there other paths, of course! Bill Gates didn't go to college but it isn't a path I would recommend to high school kids. I feel the same way about training and especially about trainers in the BDSM world, it isn't that it never works, it just almost never works.
Thanks for a thoughtful and temperate presentation of your opinions.
I'd like to focus some comments on thoughts presented in your second paragraph, hoping that I can do so without unfairly decontextualizing them from the post as a whole
When you say:
quote:
I part ways with it because the skills a submissive lacks and needs training for are often the very ones needed to pick a good partner ...
Let's consider these cases in which the submissive interested in training has indeed been having problems in choosing partners.
It can be a big and surely an important enterprise to connect with someone suitable to be your significant other, kinky or not. It is common enough advice for people not to lurch from a failed relationship into another realtionship attempt without some time to recuperate and maybe somehow gain some understanding of self and relationships arising from the failure.
I think that the muddle a person can find him or heself in, which sometimes leads to doomed "rebound" relationships, can be in some ways usefully compared to the muddle some submissive people find themselves in as illustrated in another thread active here now, the one about "purging".
In that thread, some submissives I respect have offered:
quote:
kyraofMists
quote:
ORIGINAL: ToServemyMs
Does this 'purging' hit submissives as well? Do you ever experience guilt for who you are or just get so frustrated in your search that you try to 'purge' yourself of your submissive desires?
Once I actively acknowledged who I was and what I thought would make me happy within a relationship, no I have not done this.
However before I accepted that part of me, I worked really hard at changing my behaviors so that they were more in-line with mainstream society and to keep me from being taken advantage of. I am a recovering people pleaser and I learned to say no and learned to do things that would make me happy and not because they would make someone else happy.
and
quote:
akisha
While I was still fighting with the acceptance of the fact I was submissive I'd get rid of everything occasionally because how i was raised it was weak to want to be dominanted by a man so I figured I was wrong or something was wrong with me that I felt I needed to do so.
After finally embracing myself for who and what I am. I've not had the desire to "purge" my submissive existance. I find i'm more embracing and even willing to be open about it with others. Even my family knows now, up to a point.
Now I suspect that while a person with submissive tendencies is wrestling with her (or his) submission as a sort of foreign body to be purged or a bad trait to be erased or submerged, that person might tend to have a hard time successfully choosing partners.
Some friends of mine have had this experience and I have read about similar cases here at collarme, even in this very thread, I think.
For many lucky people, the resolution comes when they are fortunate enough to meet a person who will help them carve out a safe place and time in which to confront and eventually accept and even celebrate their submissive tendencies. In many of these cases it happens in the context of a "significant other relationship", and that's great.
The point I'd like to make is that some people's luck is different, but not worse. Their choices may be different, too. They may deem that their own internal conflict is part of the reason they have been unable to hook up in a healthy, stable way with a suitable partner. They may want to bifurcate the case, as the lawyers say. "Let me spend some time coming to terms with this tendency of mine, try to achieve closure in regard to this, and only then concern myself with that other big, important enterprise of forming a marriage-like partnership," they might say.
Some of these people may succeed just by giving it time (or as Domiguy might have it, some of them might just suck seed.) Other may choose to read books and attend seminars. Others may choose to socialize with other kinky people. Still others may decide that reading and talking and sharing ideas is not enough. They may decide that for them it must be experiencial. To come to terms with the idea is not enough, that they want to have the experience of feeling surrender to another person, let's say, and to come out the other end without guilt and confusion but with self-acceptance and a degree of fulfillment.
They might say that only after the experience of submitting to someone and and owning it as a positive thing, integral to their self-image, will they want to or even be prepared to seek and select among candidates for a life-partner.
They might attempt to do this with someone who has succeded in this before with other submissives and who finds it meaningful for himself on his own terms.
It might, in short, be one of those "trainer" deals.
For these people--whether they are few or many doesn't invalidate them or their needs as I think we will agree--for these people, active, experiencial training or mentoring may be precisely what they need to get to a place in which good partner choices can happen.
And so I'm presenting for your consideration a counterexample to the idea that a negative about training is that what potential trainees may need most is improved ability to choose partners.
My assertion is that for some people (including some individuals I have known and trained) active, experiential training (mentoring, whatever... the words don't bother me as much as they do others here) was just what the doctor ordered to free them up to make better relationship decisions.
And I'm suggesting that while this may not be the most typical case, it may be common enough that ot should be taken into account when a respected, experienced scenester is handing out advice on some very important matters.
Improved ability to choose a partner can be primary product of a submissives training. This not in the sense that the trainer gives them some perfect rules of partner divination. Rather, with the trainer they may find their first opportunity to come to terms with a thing which had been vexing their partner choice (and their self-acceptance) for a long time.
In the rest of that paragraph, Michael, you go on to say:
quote:
and because the pool of people who offer to train is pretty dismal, those two things combined together make the chances of a successful experience very low, the benefits often minimal if any, and that there are other paths with far better chances of success with much less risk.
You and others here have been generalizing across what I think must be a population of at least thousands of people around the world. I find that interesting. On what are these sweeping generalizations based?
As for your claim that there are other paths with far better chances of success and less risk, I'll offer a comment and a question that I would very much like for you to address directly, as I feel it speaks to a weakness at the center of your (now temperately qualified, thank you) complaint against training.
First, the comment: for some people, minimizing risk is not a primary value. For some people, carefully dialing the risk up above the minimal level is a structural part of their approach to kink. In fact, I can only think of a small class of exceptions.
Second, my question to you: if the very thing a person wants to succeed at is to explore her own relationship with her submissiveness in an active experiential way, outside the confines and demands of a romantic relationship, what are these more-likely-to-be-successful and less risky "paths" to which you refer?
Finally, in my opinion, the fact that a given thing is difficult or even rare is a weak basis on which to eschew it as a pursuit, or recommend against others pursuing it generally. That said I respect anyone's right to restrict the scope of his or her life to include only things which which are commonly, safely, or easily attained.
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