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Padriag -> RE: Managing Fears (12/18/2005 1:00:39 AM)
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ORIGINAL: kyraofMists
I have a deep-seated fear of rejection and intimacy. To go from being completely independent to interdependent with not one, but two other people has caused this fear to be overwhelming at times.
Those fears are fairly common and normal. Add to that going through a major lifestyle change and the resultant feelings of apprehension and uncertainty are a natural reaction. Often a fear of intimacy is a combination of a fear of rejection and a fear of failure. Both come from uncertainty, that is you are not certain of being accepted if you are not "good enough" and you are not certain you can be "good enough". Dealing with these kinds of fears involves boosting your confidence level.
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I have struggled with this of late and it causes me to hold back and take things very slowly in my relationships. Being the perfectionist that I am, I tend to beat myself up over the “appearance” of not doing it fast enough. It is my time-table that I have in my head and not my Lord’s that I think I am not meeting.
Again, this comes down to not feeling that you are or can be "good enough." You've set very high standards for yourself and are pursuing those. The problem with that is that you are trying to achieve the goals you set, rather than the goals KoM set for you. Two areas you can work on in this are A) for KoM to make sure he's been very clear in his goals for you, including smaller goal steps towards each larger goal so that you know exactly what is expected of you; and B) for you to work on refocusing yourself onto those goals and let go of the private goals you've set for yourself.
To phrase this another way, you're trying to be the slave you think you should be instead of focusing on being the slave he wants you to be. You're afraid of not being able to succeed at his goals, so you've set your own set of goals as a way of coping. Part of that is being a perfectionist, you want to do better than expected and tend to be an over achiever (I've met a lot of submissives over the years that were over achievers). But it may also be partly that by setting sugh high goals you've given yourself a private excuse if you do fail (and you have certain unconscious expectation that you will)... you can say to yourself the goals were impossible anyway, so it wasn't really your fault.
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I can hear some of the advice now; I need to talk with my Lord. *s* We discuss this often.
True, but its also important to know what to talk about, to get to the root of things. You can talk something to death an still not get anywhere if you don't know what areas to focus on, how to identify the private logic that may be involved, how to identify subconscious goals, etc.
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I find it impossible sometimes to wrap my brain around the fact that I am owned. There are times that I find myself taking a mental step back and saying to my self “What the hell are you doing?” This life that I am living is so far from anything that I ever imagined. I never imagined that I could be completely possessed by another person and be healthy.
I guess that is the key, that this could happen and I would be healthier and happier because of it. The fear of intimacy is raging against this; it’s as if it knows it is losing and it doing anything it can to keep me. I have never been so open and vulnerable to another person in my life and I am so afraid of losing it, to be this close to perfection and have it taken away.
I am afraid of going forward and of going back. I am stuck in this one spot right now. Fear seems to be a constant companion of late, most times I manage it well, but other times I am controlled by it. I keep trying to find the courage to just let go and trust my Lord more, but something keeps holding me back and I have no idea what it is.
Okay, you've mixed two fears here. I'll deal with each in turn.
The first you identified was a lack of confidence about your choice, about the lifestyle you are now living. Dealing with this can be done by raising your confidence level regarding that lifestyle, your choice and the effect it has had on your life. Spending some time writing in your journal can be helpful, work on listing all the positive ways this choice of lifestyle has impacted your life. List some concrete ways it has improve the quality of your life. List some ways it has been beneficial to you as a person. Another technique is to remind yourself, or be reminded, in various situations in your day to day life where things have improved. For example, suppose a slave had a problem with compulsive spending, got herself into huge debt because she couldn't control that impulse. While shopping, she still has the compulsion but its now managed as part of the relationship, she can't act on the impulse any longer and is no longer getting into debt while her old debt is also being paid off. That's a concrete benefice of being a slave for her, being made more consciously aware of it gives her a tangible example of how her life has been improved as a slave.
The second fear you identified was again the fear of intimacy. More specifically you indicated there is a part of yourself fighting against opening up, trusting, surrendering. It is a natural reaction when we are unsure of ourselves, of what we are doing, of a choice, to hesitate and question. Its a natural reaction to want to pull away, to avoid, to delay, etc. However, as your confidence level in what you are doing rises, that defensive reaction abates. From your description it sounds as if you have reached an important turning point in your relationship. You've become aware of what you are doing, the full impact of it on your life, to a degree you truly understand at this point what you have gotten yourself into and what it will mean for your future. But you still lack sufficient confidence in that choice. These two conditions combined have brought your fears to the surface and intensified them. Essentially, on some level you are aware you have made a very serious commitment to something you are not fully confident of. So again, this stresses the importance of raising your confidence level about your choice and the lifestyle you have chosen.
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ORIGINAL: LuckyAlbatross
Going through crappy experiences. Simply put, going through it is the best way to know you can go through it. Shared experiences and time together, focused attention on key issues and at least trusting THEM to know they have your best interest is how you reach simply being together.
There is so much truth to this because what this is really about is increasing confidence. Sometimes the best way to increase confidence is by doing. If you do something and succeed you affirm your ability to succeed in a very tangible way. The one draw back is that if you fail badly you end up more afraid than you were to begin with. Lots of positive reinforcement from others here, setting up controlled situations (where the risk of failure is controlled and kept to a manageable level, as well as the degree of failure), setting realistic goals so that you aren't over challenged are all helpful.
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ORIGINAL: IrishMist
When I first married, my biggest fear was not that he would not love me, but rather...if I give up myself completely, I lose myself in the process...I was terrified of giving him that control...so terrified of letting myself become that exposed and vunerable...it took me two years to learn that by holding back, I was in fact retaining control... used all the classic excuses...I am afraid of intimacy, I am afraid of losing my independence, etc......when in reality, it was nothing more than me trying to retain some small part of control.
I can't count the number of times I've heard that fear expressed, that they would lose themselves. There are actually two things at work in that. One is the loss of control, but the other is the loss of self, and both are closely intertwined. Each and every one of us has a self image of who we are made up of our own perceptions of our self taken from what we have learned from all the various experiences of our life, this makes up our self identity. It is literally who we imagine we are. Most of us also imagine this self identity is pretty fixed, that is, we're pretty certain we know who we are and that that is a reliable assumption. We also, most of us, believe we are in control of that self identity... we believe we alone decide who we are and no one else can change this. We are mostly wrong. But given that belief that most have, its not too hard to understand someone being a little (or a lot) freaked out when they wake up one morning and realize that not only is that self image, that self identity changing... but that someone else is in control of those changes. And that gets expressed as a fear that who you are is going to be lost.
Here's a bit of truth, and it may freak a lot of people out. First of all, who you are is not only changeable... its constantly changing. Our self identities are never a fixed thing, they are constantly changing in various ways as we go through life. Every new experience we have, every day of our lives, changes us... changes how we perceive ourselves and who we think we are. Sometimes those changes are so subtle we don't notice at all, sometimes they're more dramatic. For example, suppose you had never done pottery in your life... and one day you go to a craft fair and try making a pot at a pottery demonstration. Suppose you do well, not perfect, but pretty good and the instructor comments you did very well for a beginner... that you have natural talent. Presto... your self image just changed from someone you thought could not do pottery (because you had never had any experience to cause you to believe you could) to someone who can do pottery and might be good at it (because you just had an experience that indicated that). Your self identity just changed. Happens to all of us all the time. The truth is our self image, our self identity is made up of what we learned from all the experiences of our lives. We are what we have learned to be.
And we are not entirely in control of that self identity either. I don't care if you're Mr Domly Dom Master and think you control it all... you don't, none of us does. While we can exert some conscious control over things with choices we make... there is so much more that affects us that we do not control. While we can control our choices, how we choose to react to thing... much of what we believe about the world around us and ourselves comes from experience over which we had no control. For example... you can't control how someone else will treat you, but their treatment of you can affect your self image. If someone is nice to you, seems to have confidence in you, seems to think you can succeed; you tend to begin to believe that about yourself. Their treatment of you affects your self image, but you don't control how they treat you and you can only control that affect through a conscious effort. Victims of rape often suffer a traumatic change in their self image and have difficulty coping with this and restoring their previous self image (or something close to it)... this is another example of how events and experience affect us in ways beyond our control, and change who we think we are. Not only do our experience change us, but once changed, there is no going back... you can never be that person you were again because you can't erase the experience. Or as the Chinese put it, you can't step in the same river twice (because the water you stepped in will never be there again).
It doesn't help any that we are taught to be in control of ourselves, to be independant, to believe in self determination from the cradle on. We are taught that we can be and should be fully in control of ourselves. Never mind that same society also teaches us to do just the opposite when it instructs us to submit to authority in the form of government, laws, etc. The truth is somewhere in the middle... we have some control over ourselves, we can control the decisions we make, and we are responsbile for ourselves. But, we also learn to give up some control to others, by obeying laws, working in a job for someone else, etc. None of us is ever fully in control of who we are, though all of us have some control over it.
For a slave then, its a question of relinquishing that last bit of control, of fully submitting to the control of others over who you are. But even in this the slave still has a small amount of control. You control who you choose to give that control too, who you submit to. If you fear losing yourself, what are you really afraid of? Is it becoming someone you wouldn't want to be, someone you wouldn't like? Then choose wisely, choose someone you know will change you into the person you hoped to be, whoever or whatever that might be.
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