IvyMorgan
Posts: 729
Joined: 7/5/2007 From: Midlands, UK Status: offline
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I'm fairly boring. Really. I don't do exciting things, go to exciting places, meet interesting people (with a few exceptions...) I don't even drink, and when given red tins of coke go hyper like children with ADHD on old fashioned blue smarties. Perhaps I should remove the "fairly" from that opening statement. I'm also pretty "Middle England". I make cakes from first principles, have a litany of baking disaster stories for telling over home cooked dinners, go to church, sing in the choir, went to a "good" school, forgot to play truant, drive at 30, and were I to read a paper, it would probably be The Times. Being boring, and pretty typically "middle england" in many of my characteristics, I'm not used to being out of sync culturally speaking. Certainly, I have been to places where I was culturally different. Arabia being an example. But, these are a minority of occasions, and I have usually had a pretty decent grasp of the culture I should be fitting in with. So, I'm not particularly ready for knowing how to go about explaining (and educating?) the cultural differences between me and the rest of the people in group. An issue came up on Friday. I said I would be going to a club, would explain my head space to my friends who would be there, and they would help take responsibility for my safety whilst I was in the club, so I was not forced into situations where I was doing things to upset/hurt/harm me. One resident commented, immediatly, that she was unsure as to why I was letting other people take responsibility for my safety, and why I was choosing to do that rather than taking that responsibility myself. She felt it unhealthy that I be delegating responsibility in this way. To me, the answer as to the "why" of doing it was really hard to find. That I would be looked out for in a club by friends is second nature. This is before we get to the idea of my choosing to put my safety in the hands of a top, and that person being not-just-anyone but someone with whom I have a trusting relationship, and backed up by the public environment giving extra security to my well-being. Why do I let other people take responsibility for my safety? Because I'm submissive, its as natural to me as breathing. Because that is just the way that this community works. Because its not just anyone who is taking that responsibility. A million and one reasons that I can see now, that I couldn't see then, and that I have no idea how to explain across a cultural divide that stresses empowerment, autonomy, self agency and all those other good therapy "buzz words". This is not the first time this issue has come up. When talking about interpersonal relationships, I have a growing feeling that myself and the group are singing from different song sheets, they perceive problems where I see "natural kink behaviour", they misrepresent probelems, inflate problems, and, on the flip side, I have problems that I can't effectivly communicate with them, things that are issues for me but that are not perceived that way. I am not sure how to go about dealing with this. I have been very clear that I am in therapy to deal with issues, and that I am more than just my kink. As a group we have already fallen into the trap of talking about my kink, because that is interesting and exciting, and ignoring other things, like, the fact that I have been raped. I don't want, therefore, to sit in a meeting and have to use the "oh, that's just a D/s cultural quirk" or "that's the way the kink community functions" as a way to explain all the differences. Equally, I'm not sure what the point of writing this is. Normally by now, I've had some kind of idea as to a possible resolution. Or some kind of clarity of thought. Or *something*. What I am left with, right now, though, is just the question that I still can't answer. How do I explain the cultural differences so that I can continue to work productivly with the group, without having the whole focus of my work revolve around those cultural differences and the critique thereof? Answers on a post-card, oh many people who read these things *smiles*
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