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leonine -> RE: What's wrong with me? (7/2/2013 4:21:03 AM)
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I have been in something like this - twice. In my first marriage I was in charge until for other reasons she had a nervous breakdown. She came out of it fine, but I had lost all confidence to Dom her. Now I'm married to a chronic invalid, and our bedroom BDSM is limited only by her health, but we went into the marriage on the basis that I'd be her Master and I found I couldn't give her orders. Like you say, I can plan it out and be all fired up to do it, but when it comes to the moment I don't just freeze, I forget I ever meant to and ask what she wants to do.
In my case I've traced this back to my mother having fragile health, and I think my grandma drummed it into me from earliest years that if I upset her I'd make her ill. So now when I'm around someone I class as an invalid, I feel I have to defer to them. Something about my first wife's breakdown hit that trigger, and after that I felt helpless around her.
I've seen it happen the other way. I knew a pain-slut slave who married a vanilla guy, then told him what she needed, and he took it up happily and actually became a noted Dom at their local munch... and then she found she couldn't sub to him. She still loved him, and she was still an extreme sub, but if he tried to give her orders she just got angry. She was baffled, but I reckoned she'd been brought up in the sort of traditional British working class family where the man can be as tough as he likes outside, but when he comes home he takes his boots off and does what his wife says. So she could sub to any other man, but her childhood role models wouldn't allow her to be dominated by her husband, even as a game.
I find it useful look at it in terms of the Transactional Analysis model. BDSM roles can often be seen as the classic TA Parent and Child models: but if you're supposed to be in Parent (Dom) mode, and something evokes your Child mode instead, the interaction is going to go off the rails. That's what happens to me with invalids, and it sounds to me, from your description of your helpless feeling (helplessness is a typical Child response,) as if it's what's happening to you. Something in the situation puts you into Child mode, and (just as importantly) makes you approach your wife as Adult or Parent, and acting like a Dom in that situation is literally unthinkable.
These problems can be very tough (I'm still struggling with mine,) but I can suggest some approaches. Immediately, you could perhaps kluge round the problem by doing BDSM in Child-Child mode. You say your wife is analytical and verbal about it, which is a Parental pattern of behaviour. If she could find a way to be playful and un-intellectual about it for once (maybe by getting a bit drunk!) it wouldn't matter if you went into Child mode, if you could relate to her as another Child and play without feelings of responsibility.
For a longer term solution, try to find what it is about her behaviour or the situation that evokes your Child, then try to eliminate that from the situation. For example, if it's something in her tone of voice or use of words that hits the wrong button, try having her put on a gag before you approach her. Or if she looks too much like some key person from your childhood, try playing in the dark. You get the idea. If once you can have a few successful scenes, you may start to overwrite the program that's stopping you, and not need awkward workarounds to make it possible.
You say this feeling of helplessness is a recurrent problem in everyday life, so it sounds as if your Child is way too near the surface of your everyday consciousness. A TA-oriented therapist might be able to teach you ways to overcome that, which would benefit you in vanilla situations as well as helping with this.
Just my ideas, use what you can and leave the rest for the cleaners.
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