Noah
Posts: 1660
Joined: 7/5/2005
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ORIGINAL: yaqeta
You've got me there, Noah - and I did think right after I posted it perhaps I should have toned that down a little, instead of letting it sound so generalised.... but by then I was already caught up in RL and figured I'd have to just deal with whatever response someone gave me when I returned. Nice to see that it was you with a thoughtful, considered comment instead of someone raving with abuse....
You're welcome.
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I have one question though: "once again"? I really didn't think I did this on a regular basis. You've got me wondering now...
I had thanked you after the first paragraph. I was thanking you once again here.
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Other people can selectively inhabit a given moment in a special way quite different from the usual. They can imaginatively inhabit fiction, for instance
This sounds like role-play to me, but I'm not sure that is all of what you are referring to. (And I know I cut-and-pasted a bit referring to your movie-watching analogy, I just couldn't find anything quite so consise after you moved on to talking about humiliation.) You seem to be talking either about role-play or about something bordering very close on it - perhaps not as explicit as "I'll pretend........." but people taking on temporary roles nonetheless, so that anything said "in the moment" is understood as not connected to reality. If you meant something else, please elaborate...?
Well you were getting warm until you said "not connected to reality." What I am talking about is connected to reality (if I'm guessing right about what you mean to say there,) in very deep ways.
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My answer wasn't intended to include this experience. Why? I just don't see this as *quite* the same as the type of humiliation I understood this discussion as being about. People are talking about "supporting the main structure" and such, and the risks involved in humiliation, so I understood the topic to be about humiliating by really exerting influcence over a person's actual inner psychological makeup. The kind that really does change how you look at yourself. It was silly of me, but I hadn't really considered that people could also be talking about something else.
I'm afraid I see some question-begging baggage snuck in here. I was with you till you said: "The kind that really changes the way you look at yourself.
Of course in a very small but maybe sometimes un-trivial ways, each moment of our life has a chance of influencing the way we look at ourselves, whether for better or worse; neither better nor worse but just differently; looking more or less often at ourselves; etc. But I think that having noted that we can set it to the side.
As for either "exerting influence over one's internal psychological makeup", or "really changing the way you look at yourself" well again the terms are less than precise--which is fine since we're in an area where sometimes precision can only be approached and it often takes a few times back and forth in a discussion to even get a little mutual understanding. But assuming that I have at least a fair grasp on the sense you have in mind I question the implication that "soemthing like role-playing" or even role playing plain and simple couldn't do these very things.
Mental health professionals employ role-play therapeutically. I presume they do because there is clinical evidence that is can "influence one's internal psychological makeup," and affect one's self-image.
So this impliled dichotomy that holds instances of humiliation which meet these criteria in one category and instances of humiliation which might occur in role play or something similar in another category, well I just don't think it holds up.
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How could you be frightened by that movie? You knew full well that you were sitting in your living room watching a made-up story on DVD."
<snip> but half an hour ago you said this and now you're saying that so I logically conclude....
Lol.... Just for the record, that kind of rigid, intellectual thinking is not what I meant when I was talking about a need for congruence. I was referring to something deeper, where in certain situations, or with certain people perhaps, things that you hear really can have a stronger than normal influence on you, whether or not you would otherwise believe them in other situations. If some random says to me "you are worthless" I'll likely wonder wtf is up with them for a second and then continue on my way, not even think about it. If someone I care about says the same thing, I am likely to feel a little hurt, but not necessarily believe it, and if they apologise later and take it back, chances are theres no harm done. But if my Master says it in one of those intense moments during play in order to humiliate me, I take it inside of me as truth, and accept it as completely real. Its now there, as part of me. It doesn't mean that I ultimately believe I am worthless - if that was the case, I could no longer function as a human being. But at the same time a part of me sees it as a very real truth. For good. No taking it back.
And it is just fine that you process that sort of experience that way. One of my points was that other people have other ways of processing that sort of experience. I tried to make conceptual room for the "other" way by making an analogy to the movie-watching bit. I didn't mean to suggest that I suspect that you we incapable appreciating movies that way.
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Its not like watching a movie and saying "but its only a movie, how can you be scared?" (I'd see your "imagination" people as closer to this than what I'm describing, because they can leave the movie behind as fiction after its finished.) Its more like someone watching a movie, being scared, and afterwards, as much as they know in their head that it was only a movie, some part of them truly believes that the boogeyman is out there. The director of the movie can show up and explain that it was all fiction, but s/he is not going to touch that part of them, the part that believes. And that part of them is likely to wonder "What the fk is this guy trying to pull?"
Well as for me, the person who couldn't sort out impressions and emotions gained in one context (such a watching a movie) from those gained in the more general context of life is a person with a significant deficiency. I'm not dissing this hypothetical person. If you came to adulthood with no experience of movies, say, and then saw a thriller, well sure it might mess with your head. And lots of more moderate, in-between cases might obtain too.
But I really think the person who will not even take the directors word for the special nature of the movie impressions has an issue that had better be dealt with. And not to press your director analogy (an extension of my movie analogy) too hard, but I think that it is not in the least uncommon to view the dom/top as "the director" in a wide range of BDSM situations.
Sticking with the movie analogy for a moment, even those of us (you and me and 'most everybody) who can process movie experiences in the usual way can also on special occasions walk away from a movie a changed person. We can be shown something about ourselves or about another or about the human condition which genuinely alters us--hopefully not for the worse.
And I don't mean "we can be shown" in the sense of "we can see something on the screen" because it is all much larger than that. The showing can be a function of our emotional reaction to what happens on the screen, for instance. The movie may offer us no "new information" but it may give us an experience which qualifies as an epiphany in that we learn about some submerged or otherwise undetected corner of our own identity or psyche by having a certain combined intellectual/emotional experience. Similarly we may have an experience which allows us for the first time to relate to another particular person in a way we never could before. And this can all happen in the aisle seat of row sixteen.
To reconnect the analogy to BDSM humiliation, well, I think there is nothing to stop it from working in perfectly analogous ways to the way I just described. In fact one epiphany (among zillions) I can imagine a submissive having would involve transcending this very limitation you and others speak of, the one which pervents her from re-processing certain events in retrospect differently than you did in the moment. I'm not saying that this is needful, just that it might be possible.
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Do you really want to hold that this is a "should never"? If someone's emotional kink is rejection and this person finds a consenting adult partner with whom to explore this kink, do you deem this person morally deficient? Ill or insane? I'm not putting words in your mouth. Those words are mine, appearing in the context of questions to you. I'm asking in particular just what your "... should never..." is intended to mean.
Umm I think I "should never" have written this sentence, lol....
Now that I go back over it, what I actually meant by it is barely related to what I wrote at all. LMAO. There is a reason for that, though....
When I read Celeste's post and she mentioned her Master saying something and then retracting it, but her being unable to believe the retraction, my thought was "Of course not, because....[fill in all the stuff I said above]". I didn't really mean that all people think or respond that way, I meant that I respond that way, and it sounded to me as though she responds that way. I wanted to say something about why I thought what she was describing wouldn't work for her. But I didn't want to be disrespectful by saying "Your Master is doing it wrong." And I didn't want to compare me and mine, to her and hers (because of another exchange between us, a while ago, in another topic). So I generalised it to sound more like a general statement, so that Celeste would hopefully not feel I was having a go at her. Trouble is, I generalised it way too much, and it came out sounding like a prescription for everyone. Oops. Sorry.
Well fine then. And I had hoped and suspected that the broad generalization wasn't what you were trying to get across.
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edited to add: My revised statement - For some people, there is a line between humiliation and rejection that is best not crossed.
I'll second this and even amplify it. I think this is true for a large proportion of the community. I think that for many of them it is even more serious than a mere "best not." It is well into "DANGER WILL ROBINSON" territory.
And the fact that it happens to be true for someone as apparently calm and thoughtful as you is reason enough to dispel any claim someone might make to the effect that there's something wrong with people who can't handle rejection in humiliation "play." It is a whole different order of experience than getig confused about the reality of movie scenes.
My sense, yaqeta, is that your questions were intended to go a little deeper at a couple of points than the depth at with I halted in my responses. I'd be willing to go on if there is any interest. This post is long already, though. I thought that if we couldn't get to some mutual appreciation of viewpoints (if not agreement) at this depth there wasn't a point in going deeper.
Thanks for your nice response.
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RE: Humiliation...for and against. - 
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