- Aug 30, 2017
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What this particular sub wanted and needed (and FWIW, it's a pretty common want/need among subs) was a total emotional release. All the steps to get there...restraints, caging, humiliation, various types of painful impact play, edging, denial, etc....were things she enjoyed or didn't, depending on their exact nature and who else was involved. But it was the point where, after minutes/hours/days of those things, she finally couldn't hold herself together anymore and had something that would have looked, to someone not involved in the scene or in getting her to that point, like a complete emotional breakdown. Hysterical sobbing, drool, orgasms, snot...you know, imagine your own visuals here...but it was the point where any semblance of control, even over her own body and mind, was not only fading, but gone. At that exact moment, all the stuff she was holding on to or trying to manage — problems at work, problems with her boyfriend, problems with her parents or her sister, problems with her car, whatever — came flooding out at the very same time, because she no longer possessed the ability to control them or herself. She would never, ever cry or show weakness in front of a boss or a coworker. She would patiently work to find any compromise that would placate her mom and keep their relationship as happy as possible. But there, at the end of a BDSM scene that was all about someone else taking any semblance of control or autonomy away from her...not just external, but (and more important) internal...she could let it all go.
(Obviously, she had safe words and thus ultimate autonomy should she not be feeling right about something.)
And then, after it was all over and the proper aftercare and so forth was provided, she was not only incredibly happy, but a much, much more emotionally balanced, stable, and strong person than she'd been before the d/s scene started.
Analogies are hard, because while these are fairly common needs BDSM/kink is a very specific and focused way of exploring them, but think about a time when you were unmanageably sad. Maybe someone close to you died unexpectedly, but you felt like you had to be strong for a friend, or a family member, and spent some amount of time focusing on caring for them. And then, one night, alone in a room, you just broke down and started crying...something you'd wanted and needed to do all along, but "couldn't" because you were being strong for someone else. So you cried, you let it all out, you allowed yourself to stop being strong, and after it was over you felt a sense of relief that you didn't have to hold that grief in anymore. That's, at least a little bit, the same sort of thing.
I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote. No, I'm saying the complete opposite. A dominant enjoys experiences a lot more if they're in control. True dominants need to exert control, and in fact (though I don't have a survey to point to), it's my experience that true dominants have more difficulty "turning it off" in everyday life than true submissives, who can often compartmentalize that need. A true dominant is confident and prefers to exert control pretty much 24/7, and as a group they're outwardly very confident people; expressing doubts isn't something that interests most doms unless they're in a deep, trusting relationship with a sub, in which case it might happen there. But only in private, and never within the context of a power exchange situation (sexual or otherwise). Expressing doubts to a sub in the context of inhabiting their respective roles is a good way to damage a sub's trust in the dom, which is more or less the foundation of their relationship.
There are, of course, some "doms" who are as you describe, and they're not only not really dominant, they're the kind that end up making mistakes that can hurt people. "Hey, look at me, I'm using a flogger!" is only a little bit about flogging someone, but a lot about an ongoing wordless conversation between the wielder and the recipient in which "softer/harder/more/stop" has to be communicated by the recipient and read/heard by the wielder from visual and audible clues that would be opaque to someone who can only feel the leather in their hand and see the reddened flesh in front of them. Without that wordless communication, there's probably no power exchange going on, and so it's not dominance/submission, it's just flogging for the sake of flogging. There's nothing wrong with that, but trying to "play at" dominance and submission in such situations is often asking for trouble.
I think you might be confusing people who need to be in their roles 24/7 with people for whom the contrast is the thing they crave. One of my recent partners is a very, very powerful executive for a major tech company. She's a brilliant speaker, holds the attention of any room, and extremely successful. She's bossy, argumentative, critical, and stubborn (I mostly mean those as compliments, BTW). But in bed, she's a natural submissive...something she didn't know until I started exploring it with her. There are a lot of people exactly like her, and they come in all genders; any professional dominatrix could tell you that the majority of her clients are lawyers, politicians, doctors, and high-powered executives.
The friend that I was describing above is a very strong woman in everyday life, and very difficult to push around. Submission, for her, was partly a reaction to that; if she was with people she knew she could trust to prioritize her wellbeing, she would explore the submission and release with them that she wouldn't allow herself to experience outside those trusted relationships. For myself, as a non-24/7 dominant who prefers to restrict that role to the bedroom (metaphorically, I mean), there's great appeal in someone like that. Folks in a master/slave or 24/7 relationship want and need someone to be making all the decisions, all the time. That works for them, but it bores me to tears. But having someone who's at least my equal in all other situations submit to me in specific (emotional/sexual) moments is something I've learned that I really, really enjoy.
