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StrangerThan -> RE: A delicate question (10/17/2008 6:19:48 AM)
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I like this question. I think the core of it goes back for a lot of people, not so much in terms of physical abuse, but mental as well. I think too that the definition of abuse isn't always accurate, pariticularly when it comes to things that are mental and emotional. From my own perspective, I grew up in an abusive household. Corporal punishment was a way of life. Probably where I varied from some of the rest is that I knew I wasn't the one wrong. The time was wrapped up in a weird maze of fundamentalist relgious beliefs, a father who was rarely there because of work and who worked you like a slave when he was, a mother who was strung out on prescription drugs. It wasn't the best mix for anything, much less raising children. The whippings, beatings if you want to call them that, encompassed every instrument from having your face slapped around the other side of your body to long sessions with wire coiling around your skin. By the time I was about 6, I quit crying. I refused to. I just stood and looked at them while they did it and as I grew older, began asking when they were tired, are you done yet? Of course, that brought more but what I wanted them to know was that there wasn't anything they could do in that respect to break the will. I doubt there are many here who have carried more wounds and bruises from play than I did as a kid simply from standing there and staring them in the face while they did it.
I suppose that should have made me a masochist. What it made me was one who absolutely depised abuse in any form. It also gave me a rather unique perspective on pain. Wry smile. Even more though, it let me separate the physical, mental and emotional types of pain and it gave a reference point to what they were. One of the driving aspects of D/s types of relationships is that pain in and of itself, also encompasses things that are emotional and mental. Over the years I've run across people who needed to feel humilated, needed heavy play where they had absolutely no control, some who simply needed to be taken out of the present and put in a place where they could just feel and do so with someone they could trust to respect their boundaries, other's who needed those boundaries pushed and pushed and pushed, some who needed absolute control. Many of those came from either households where they were abused in some form, or relationships where they had been abused. The question often put to me is why is there a sense of arousal from it?
And I guess the question that stuck with me about myself for a long time was, how can you come from that kind of background and enjoy, need, to do what you do when you're with a submissive? That answer is fairly simple for me, although it took a long time to get there. Pain is a vehicle, not a destination. I use it to put my submissive in the place I want her. If it's squirming across my lap when I spank her OTK, lying coma like in some hallucinatory, subspace induced vision, dangling limp wristed in suspension while a whip carresses her back and ass, or trembling in that excited, drippingly aroused place of "I don't know what he's going to do to me next, but I know I need it" kind of space... it's where I want her that day. What I don't want is the negativity of emotional and mental pain going with it. That's where the trust comes in, where she knows what I do to her is not just to her, but for her and for me. It's about building that relationship to the point where both recognize it as a need, not just as a want, not just as something kinky, but a need that exists in both AND doing it in a way that supports her, teaches her that submission isn't an excuse for abuse nor something she has to be ashamed of. I have a real problem with the "I love you too much to spank you" folks because that logic is completely backwards to me. Seems to me that if you did truly love someone and they did need it, you'd spend the time to provide for that need while you worked towards figuring it out.
I think people who come to BDSM from abusive backgrounds, particularly those who were in emotionally manipulative households or relationships have the most risk of running through domineering types rather than dominant types. They are different and while one can encompass the other, often they do not. The risk at that point is the need that lands someone here isn't.. discovered, but rather simply used in a way that is often just as abusive as where they started.
I think recognizing it in someone is important. I think often people who have migrated from abusive backgrounds often do not see themselves as worthy of much of anything. I think teaching them they are is important in respect to long term things that are healthy for both sides. And that takes time. It's not one of those domly commands one can issue where you insist the other spill out all the things that went before. Hell, it can take years and come at times during conversations where the mind-walk that led them back originated from something that had nothing really to do with anything abusive. Minds file things in drawers where the links to them aren't always apparent. Stumbling across those links can happen at any point. That doesn't mean there will be fallout, but there could be. It's something anyone who would control another should understand and should be prepared for.
People can analyze it anyway they want, but what I want with my submissive is for it never to be emotionally or mentally destructive. Nor do I want her to think she is somehow broken. I see in healing terms actually, in ways where both exist in a type of harmony where you feed off the other, where you can feel what your body tells you that you need to feel without guilt, without that sense of falling off a cliff you don't understand into a chasm that's deep, dark and fearful in emotional terms. I read threads here and other places all the time about discipline. To me the true discipline comes from knowing the other is disappointed, not in physically doing something to them.
I'm rambling now, but that's just my 2 cents.
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