Wisdom Notes on Psychology

BDSM-1

Bondage, Domination, Submission and Masochism

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

2012 was a bad year for me, immersing me into intense physical and psychological pain when I broke the heel of my left foot, and this pain set the scene for my activities in the next few years. I interpreted the pain as a punishment from my higher self, and became engulfed in desolation.

A year later I joined a dating site for transvestites and was contacted by a member who was into BDSM. He classified himself as a Master, someone who had a dominant and authoritative personality. He was looking for submissive transvestites to serve him as his slaves. I knew nothing about BDSM but my curiosity was piqued. Unexpectedly I was amazed that I found it to be an intriguing prospect, becoming a slave to a Master. 

We corresponded for a short time and I found the whole topic very exciting, sexually arousing, and unusual. I agreed to be his trainee slave. Now I classified myself as a submissive transvestite. We continued to have an unusual correspondence. However, he lived too far away from me and so we would not be able to meet regularly. Eventually we parted in a friendly way.

How did I see the master–slave relationship?  In 2013 there was no sense of excitement in my life – it was just dull and depressing. It was a grim time for me. I had become a complete failure at living a reasonable life. In my phantasies at that time it was so easy to see myself as an impersonal object to be used by the owner of the object. I didn’t want to see myself as a person. As an impersonal object I could reject my previous identity and have no responsibilities, no cares; all I needed to do was to do as I was told.

What baffled me was why I found the prospect of becoming a bdsm slave to be so sexually arousing. This started my interest in what dominance meant, and what being submissive meant. I began studying BDSM and soon embarked on a profound journey into the nature of domination and submission. What I realised is that dominance and submission are a complementary pair, so when one of these is highlighted in a person’s conscious mind, the other one is highlighted in the subconscious mind. This leads to two possibilities.

a). In my case, my mind swung between the two issues, so that sometimes I consciously felt dominant, and at other times I consciously felt submissive. This was often quite confusing.

b). The other possibility is that a person is always dominant to some people and always submissive to someone else. This prevents the mind swinging between the two issues, so that the person does not appear to be confused. We often see this in a political group or a religious sect, where the group is always submissive to the leader, and the senior members are dominant to the junior members.

The domination/submission relationship between two people is a BDSM variation of the more usual authoritarian leader and follower relationship. The topic of dominance and submission has enabled me to approach some difficult psychological issues from an unusual and different perspective. The usefulness of the BDSM setting is that on such dating sites many of the members are open about their feelings on submission and what submission means to them. It brings into the open issues like punishment and humiliation, change of identity, and how they relate to sexual interests. These issues are dealt with in exciting ways. From my psychological point of view, I can see that many of these issues are the products of difficult childhoods. That is, BDSM is an adult way of learning to explore the difficulties, in a person’s relationships, that were created in childhood. The ideas that I have developed apply not just to BDSM, but to all kinds of relationships, whether political, religious, sexual or social ones.

This is how I learned about the strange mindset, or state of mind, that is caused by reversing one’s values. The reversal enables a person to get some happiness from all his failures and miseries. It took me around 10 years to emerge from this mindset. Interestingly, as I was emerging from it, I was propelled by my higher self into the exploration of high levels of the spiritual mindset (the Buddhist Jhanas) – so I went from one extreme of consciousness to the other [²].

Catharsis and Reversed Values

If as a child or an adult we had experiences of degradation and humiliation, then these can eventually lead us into the colourful world of BDSM.  The advantage of the BDSM scene is that it becomes socially acceptable within that milieu to play out one’s unusual sexual passions in a non-judgemental atmosphere.

Bondage, domination, submission and masochism have always been a part of social cultures. Nowadays they have become part of some life-styles. Why is this?  The reason for the emergence of these activities into the mainstream of culture is due to the reversal of values. People, who for a time feel themselves to be passive participants in the conventional social worlds, and can be called the submissives and the outcastes, may reverse their feelings of degradation and humiliation so that these negative states of mind become exciting for them. The initial plunge into this world probably occurs during a period of catharsis that highlights the person’s subconscious feelings of degradation and humiliation. Catharsis makes it exciting to feel degraded and humiliated. Being amazed that such negative states can now be exciting, he can now get some positive enjoyments from his social distress by immersing himself in this world.

As a child, he bonded in a faulty way to a parent who crushed him or humiliated him. Now, under the impetus of his reversed values, he seeks to bond to a similar personality. The bond of the submissive person to his Master or Mistress reflects, though in an exaggerated fashion, his bond to the parent who caused his childhood distress. He feels that he was not valued by the parent; now he feels valued by his Master or Mistress.

My view of the person most likely to reverse values in suitable circumstances is that he/she had a passive and gentle nature as a child, but was crushed by trauma. Trauma turns them from a gentle child into a weakling. Whether the child, once it is an adult, will be submissive or follow the path to becoming a bdsm slave depends on how he wants his boundaries set. A submissive person sets his own boundaries, whilst a slave has his boundaries set by his Master or Mistress.

So the dominant type which subconsciously appeals to a slave is one who can take him to his darkest despairs. That is, whatever the level of despair experienced by a person in his past, he seeks a Master or Mistress who can take him back to that level. Now he can re-experience his darkest despair but under different circumstances and so he can finally find a meaningful use for despair, or even perhaps to re-interpret it.

In the world of normality, a person seeks to bond consciously with someone who is similar to his good parent (this choice indicates that the person likes his parent). The man seeks a wife who has similar positive virtues to his mother. Whereas in the world of reversed values, when the person dislikes a parent, the person seeks to bond subconsciously with someone who is like the bad parent. The man seeks a Mistress who has similar negative vices to his mother, or a Master who has similar negative vices to his father.

To understand the attraction of BDSM, the reader needs to understand that the conscious mind of a person makes him dislike degradation and humiliation, but his subconscious mind says he deserves it. BDSM is akin to some religious practices, as when a religious seeker wears a hair vest (to continually irritate his skin) and flogs himself, all in the name of doing penance for imaginary sins. The difference is that the religious seeker does not get the enjoyment from his practices that the BDSM submissive person gets.

When self-pity is mixed with the fear – excitement binary, then reverse values are intensified. When self-pity by itself is influential, then I drift through the day: it becomes an effort just to do the ordinary daily tasks. By reversing values, self-pity can change to jealousy (mode of self-pity) and this makes degradation and denigration sexy and exciting. The excitement revives and invigorates me and gives me energy. The person delights in being subjected to humiliation and degradation. When self-pity changes to guilt (self-pity mode), the person now relishes the thought of being punished as well as humiliated. As a child he was frightened of being punished by the parent. Now, as an adult, he loves being punished by his Master or Mistress. Life has become exciting for once. The reversal of values is a stimulating way of handling self-pity modes; attitudes to life that are based on self-pity can now become arousing instead of being depressing.

BDSM Relationships

It took me a long time to establish what mood underlies submissiveness. It relates to the different effects that guilt and jealousy produce. Eventually I realised that guilt (in self-hate mode) produces the desire to be punished, whilst jealousy (in self-pity mode) helps to induce submissiveness. For comparison, fear and guilt (in self-hate mode) together make a person passive.

Childhood trauma can easily make a person passive or submissive. In the world of BDSM a person may want to be submissive to a dominant Mistress. When I was a child, my mother never praised me, and only gave me criticisms. She delighted in finding fault with me. So in the world of BDSM, I became excited by the prospect of being verbally humiliated by a dominant Mistress. 

Feeling humiliation is a response to a moderate level of stress. What happens if the person has experienced a much greater level of stress? Now the strangeness of BDSM really comes into play. Now submissiveness and passivity intertwine together. During periods in his life when self-pity is a powerful influence on him, the adult may decide to seek the protection of a powerful man or woman. He may even desire to abandon his identity, which means abandoning his personal name, and become a submissive and obedient slave to a dominant BDSM Master or Mistress. As a slave, he seeks security and freedom from responsibilities; he abandons his rights in return for security. The Master possesses the slave and looks after him. When a person has been crushed, he will bond to someone who can look after him, take charge of him, support him. He will submit to someone who is “strong” and assertive. During my 60s and early 70s, when I explored the world of BDSM, it felt extremely exciting to think of myself as a slave with no identity except that of being the possession of a dominant Master.

The point to understand is that the more severe the childhood trauma was, the more extreme will be the child’s responses to it once it has become an adult. When it feels that its present identity is excessively burdened by negative feelings then at some point in its adult’s life it will be receptive to the idea of giving up its identity and adopting a new one. There is little or nothing of value in its present identity. This is a familiar theme in accepted practices such as emigration to a new country where the person embarks on a new life that offers freedom from the shackles of the past. It is also relevant in some religious practices where the aspirant is given a new name (and hence a new identity) by his teacher. However, this theme is taken to greater lengths in the world of BDSM. In this world, the person may give up any form of personal identity – he may simply not want one. Instead he accepts his place as the impersonal property of a Master or Mistress; the slave feels valued, perhaps for the first time in his life. This is why the slave feels good about being a slave.

Slave Relationships

One function of envy is to reject the sense of having a personal identity, so that the person devalues having a sense of ego. For that person, his ego has become the repository of everything that is nasty about his life. By rejecting the ego (which means abandoning the personal name he was given by his parents), he can let go of any attachments to such nastiness. However, not all slaves go this extreme, so that there is a gradation in intensity of envy as the submissive seeks to become a slave.

The slave is likely to be afraid of personal relationships. If so, this difficulty is resolved for him by regarding himself as an impersonal piece of property, to be used in any way the Master desires.

The root of domination is more intense in a slave than a submissive, whilst the roots of denigration and degradation are more intense in a submissive than a slave. The degradation manifests in the kinds of fetishes that the submissive likes.

The desire to be a slave is not an indication that the person is an undesirable and uneducated kind of person. In fact he is more likely to be of above-average intelligence in order to be able to have the freedom of mind to accept the strange ideas within the BDSM milieu. The important point to understand is the influence of powerful subconscious ideas caused by the distress that the person has gone through, and is perhaps still going through.

A person may experience trauma as a child, but by the time he grows into adulthood his will power may be strong enough to repress, and keep repressed, the negative influences from his subconscious mind. He gives the air of being a self-confident person. Then something intensely negative happens to him: he experiences some form of tragedy and feels crushed. Perhaps he loses all his personal wealth in a financial crash, or he finds himself with a long-term serious illness, or he suffers severe social opprobrium, or he starts suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Suddenly his sense of self-worth collapses. Now he can no longer keep repressed the negative influences in his subconscious mind, and so they flower into full consciousness. He feels worthless and life has lost its meaning for him. He finds that he has become submissive, even passive.

If something calls his attention to the world of BDSM, he will now find that he becomes strangely attracted to it, with his role being that of a submissive participant. The stronger his will power once was, so the more likely he will become attracted to being a slave of a Master who can look after him. He now finds that becoming a slave gives new meaning to his life.

So while at a conscious level of mind a person may have no desire to seek a Master, yet at the subconscious level his mind is driving him to seek a hard Master or Mistress. His tragedy has produced the subconscious feeling that he deserves punishment. Then if he gets into a situation where his values get reversed, he will find that getting severely punished will generate a lot of excitement in him.

What he finds attractive in BDSM depends on the intensity of his negative feelings. If such feelings are only moderate, then he is likely to be content with being submissive and having a lot of choice over what he does. He puts boundaries on what forms of relationships he makes. However, if the feelings are intense, his boundaries may disappear. Then choice becomes an illusion. So he will be drawn to someone who can look after him, and he travels down the road to BDSM slavery in some form or other.

• The Submissive and the Slave

I note some core moods :
The submissive person seeks someone to take care of him = jealousy (self-pity mode).
The slave seeks someone to take charge of him = self-pity plus envy.
When either the submissive or the slave seeks punishment = guilt (self-hate mode).

Being Valued

The person travels the road to BDSM relationships because his values have reversed. What causes the switch to reverse values? The initial condition is a lack of self-worth; the person feels worthless and devalued as a member of society. Hence he usually has a long-standing general negative outlook on life.

Then the person comes into contact with a dominant Master. What happens if that Master values the person? The person becomes immediately attracted to him, even to the point of feeling overwhelmed by happiness. The person feels valued, perhaps for the first time in ages, and perhaps even for the first time in his life. The Master sees the person as a potential slave and so values the person. Hence the person is easily persuaded to see himself as being valuable. The Master annuls the person’s sense of being rejected. Then that person will usually absorb the Master’s values and agree to be his slave. 

In general, the person’s feelings of degradation, denigration and rejection are valued by the Master. Hence he gives the person value even when that person is subdued, submissive and full of self-pity. Therefore that person receives social validation from the Master so long as the person fulfils the role of slave. In BDSM terminology, the Master owns the slave, who is now his property.

The idea of ownership is not so strange as it may appear. There are a variety of ways to look at ownership. The Negro slave is owned by the plantation proprietor. The feudal peasant is owned by his king. The BDSM submissive convert is owned by his master. The religious seeker is owned by his guru. The mystic is owned by God. The world of BDSM can teach the thinker to approach traditional problems from a very different angle to his usual mindset, and hence develop new ideas about the basis of relationships.

Depersonalisation-2

What crushes a person is intense fear or self-pity. The person can surmount the fear by going over-the-top in his efforts to assert himself in a way that can bring meaning into his life. Or he can surmount the self-pity by becoming a “born-again” religious person, having faith in a loving God. However, the convert never understands the causes of his distress. To understand causes, serious issues have to be experienced and then analysed. Psychic and psychological issues cannot be fully grasped by someone who just observes other people facing these issues. My understanding of the domination/submission relationship in life was not possible till my heel was broken in 2012. I became enmeshed in intense self-pity and guilt (mode of self-hate). Then, instead of consciously searching for a loving saviour, I subconsciously sought for a hard BDSM Master.

Sometimes the intensity of guilt (mode of self-hate) becomes very severe. If this guilt increases the intensity of an already-intense self-pity then depersonalisation begins. Depersonalisation is the absence of a meaningful sense of ego or “I ”. The “I ” has been crushed, by which I mean the core values that the ego is based on have become completely devalued. In this situation the depersonalised person finds it easy to desire being a slave. A BDSM Master is a kind of reversed-values saviour to the slave. The Master enables the slave to handle his emotions much better than he otherwise could, thereby giving meaning to the slave’s existence.

My road to depersonalisation began a year after breaking my foot. I temporarily escaped from the trance towards depersonalisation at the end of 2015 when my subconscious fear was effectively decreased in intensity. Several years earlier I had become a transgender person. The desire that brought meaning into my life was the desire to flaunt myself sexually in lingerie in the company of transvestite friends. My mood of vanity seemed to explode through the barrier of my inhibitions and enabled me to overcome the fear. My reaction was over-the-top, because my effort had to be “all or nothing” in order to surmount the barrier of fear. Fear always magnifies the difficulties of any problem. Or, to look at it the other way, when background fear decreases in its intensity, then the intensities of all other negative emotions running in the subconscious mind will decrease in intensity as well.

My sexual identity began flowering once fear faded in intensity. Prior to 2015, as a transgender person I was timid. Sexual identity gave a new meaning to my life and I became much more out-going. Presumably this new state was the reverse value to my previous trait of puritanism, of hating sexuality. Puritanism is a bad method of handling the difficulties of sexuality. My self-confidence began growing, though in a spasmodic fashion, over the next few years. Finding a way to increase one’s level of self-confidence is the way out of severe psychological difficulties. When my self-confidence increased, the attraction of depersonalisation faded in its intensity; and when my self-confidence faded for a time, then depersonalisation became more desirable. It took many years before the attractions of depersonalisation finally faded away.

Punishment

Punishment is a central theme of degradation. As a straight person, I have been a rebel all my life. In my BDSM phantasies it was stimulating to imagine myself being servile and getting punished for not obeying the Master or Mistress, or anyone who takes the role of being a Dominant person. The excitement carried me into spanking and flogging sessions with friends. Being spanked and flogged was a very exciting experience for me. The strangeness of the subconscious mind cannot be understood until it is experienced.

Consider a person who has realised that he is submissive. He decides to explore this trait within the world of BDSM. He becomes excited by the idea of receiving punishment. What kind of punishment will arouse a lot of passion in him?  In my view, the kind of punishment that will appeal to him is one that symbolises or relates to his punishment as a child. So the way that the parent punished him will be the style that will excite him the most.

The reversal of values is the reason that he now enjoys being treated the same way he was treated as a child. What upset him as a child, he now enjoys as an adult. Of course, a child may be punished in several different ways. However, one style will excite him the most. Suppose that as a child he was punished by being spanked on his bottom and slapped around his face. If childhood trauma was not caused by being spanked on his bottom, then when he is a submissive adult, being spanked by another adult will produce only a mild excitement and only a mild sense of submissiveness. However, if childhood trauma was caused by being slapped around the face, then when he is an adult he will become most submissive in the world of BDSM by being slapped around the face by a Dominant. He most easily becomes submissive when his kind of punishment resonates with his subconscious childhood trauma.

We can apply this idea to adult mannerisms in ordinary life. If a submissive person makes a mistake and wants to punish himself (as an automatic subconscious response), what does he do?  If he slaps himself around the face, then this is the style of punishment that most likely caused trauma in his childhood, by which I mean that in childhood the boy was slapped around the face. The person develops in himself subconscious mannerisms so that he does to himself what the parent did to him. There is room for innovation here. A variation on slapping oneself on the face is that of banging one’s head on the wall. The overall result is the same.

There is also a learning aspect to punishment. Suppose a submissive adult does not initially like being spanked. Then he meets a dominant person who he becomes very attracted to and aroused by. Suppose the Dominant likes spanking submissive adults. Then that submissive adult will soon learn to like being spanked by the Dominant. Learning to like being spanked is a feature of learning to please the Dominant.

There can also be a progression to punishment and/or degradation. Suppose an adult likes to be punished to some level of pain. If he subsequently experiences a severe emotional crisis, he will blame himself for the psychological pain he is engulfed in. His sense of self-worth gets even lower and he feels he deserves even more punishment. Then his degree of submissiveness will increase, making him desire to experience deeper levels of punishment and/or degradation that previously he was not interested in.

In general, how harsh the slave likes the Master to be when giving punishments represents how harsh he felt that he was treated in childhood by the parent, or how harsh he was treated in some adult situation or relationship. The dominant underlying influences here are fear and guilt. The person has a background fear of aggressive or dominant people; then when he reverses values he feels excited about being under the control of such people. The harsher he was punished, either as a child or as an adult, the harsher he desires the Master to punish him. If the slave stays with the harsh Master, it is because that Master is giving the slave what he deeply needs. The abuse mirrors the slave’s subconscious experience of childhood: his guilt makes him feel that he deserves the abuse. He does not see the Master as being abusive or aggressive; instead, he sees him as being assertive and dominant. If given a role in looking after other slaves, he will be aggressive too but only see it as being assertive. The slave has equated assertiveness with aggressiveness.

Desiring punishment by practices such as spanking and flogging arises as a way of assuaging a sense of guilt. When the desire is only moderate, and more likely represents a sense of fun, this indicates guilt (mode of self-pity). When the desire is more extreme, this indicates guilt (mode of self-hate). In reverse values, punishment is often good for the submissive person. After he has had a hard spanking and flogging, he is likely to feel good about himself on the following day – the punishment has temporarily assuaged the guilt about his “sins”.

There is a fascinating side play to the theme of domination. When a submissive person has a lot of background fear in him, he seeks a Dominant person to take control of him. If, under some circumstance, his fear evaporates then suddenly he becomes very excited about being able to be a Dominant himself and so have submissive playmates to control. The removal of fear enables him to switch roles. The general effect of removing fear from his relationships is that for a time, until he adjusts to a new normality, his reactions are usually over-the-top. Degradation and humiliation are linked in a particular way within the mind. Suppose a person is subjected to humiliating treatment over time. He accepts the humiliation and becomes submissive, and perhaps even servile if fear is significant. If he goes further and internalises the humiliation, it turns into degradation. When a Master or a Mistress calls me a slut, that is denigration. When I call myself a slut, that is degradation.

Degradation is the internalisation of humiliation.

[¹]. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [1]

[²]. My exploration of the Jhanas is recounted in my book Landmarks of Spirituality. Clicking the link with take you to the Table of Contents. [2]

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