“In the pain there is healing”

“Emotionally shattered on the inside instead of being physically battered on the outside.”

That’s a quote from DL’s toy’s blog post. The subject is emotional sadism, something that intrigues me, and her, but not something there seems to be a lot of talk about.

People are much more willing to share stories of physical sadism, even approving the fact that a sadist will often push a masochist beyond her “good pain” point, through to tears and snot and quivering panic over pain. That all seems part and parcel to the sadist/masochist dance.

Even if the girl claims to not be a pain-seeking masochist, there’s an atmosphere of “well, that’s what you signed up for!” that surrounds it. Unless SHE herself claimed that she was being beaten against her will and said that she felt abused, most of us fellow bdsm’ers butt out.

Not so much when you start diving into the emotional side of it. Even mild emotional sadism gets the stink eye. Start referring to your submissive as “Fat Ass”, “Worthless Bitch”, “Stupid Fuck” – and watch how quickly the protests fly. To me, name calling is mild, even such personal attacks as those.

Though even with name calling, there does seem to be an acceptance to it if the person on the receiving end of it clearly enjoys it. There is one girl I know whose ‘name’, given to her by her Dom, is Worthless Pig. I know a lot of people might cringe at such a mean cognomen, but for her, it’s a term of endearment. Her obvious affection for the nickname soothes the bristled fur of those who hear it.

But I want to go past the names to harsher instances of emotional sadism. I want to ask about those who don’t like it, and, for whatever reason… do it anyway.

For the purposes of clearer discussion (should there be any and I hope there is!), let’s leave out the notion of leaving the relationship. Use any reason that makes sense to you for why leaving is not an option, because what I’m really trying to get to is *how* to deal with the emotions and aftermath without having “Run away!” be one of those suggestions. What we are seeking is the thought process and the intensity of the emotions that follow such events from those who engage in it, as well as the thoughts from those who fantasize about it or wonder about it.

Scenario 1: The girl sees her Dom fairly infrequently. He’s legitimately busy, as the infrequent visits are not part of the emotional sadism. For her, the visits have become cherished, special events. She anticipates each visit with a child-like glee.

He knows how much she values this precious time and, because he’s a sadist, sometimes uses it to hurt her. Perhaps he comes for the visit and rather than interact with her, he locks her in a cage or in another room for the entirety of his time there, barely laying eyes on her, let alone speaking to her. Maybe he keeps her where she can see him, maybe he puts her away where she can only hear him. Whatever, the point is to to not give her that which she’s come to treasure- His attention.

It is not a punishment, it is not meant for any purpose other than for his amusement. To see the longing in her eyes, to know how much she’s suffering in the other room, alone and lonely, while he blithely watches the television.

Scenario 2: He shows up with another girl in tow when they, as a couple, have never discussed seeing other people. What they HAVE discussed is that he can do whatever he wants, the specifics of which hadn’t been clarified. He ties his sub to a chair next to the bed, and proceeds to play with and fuck the other girl in front of her. It is the sight of his sub sitting there, heart shattering, silent tears of hurt dripping down her cheeks that fuels him on as he uses the other woman.

Scenario 3: He tells his sub to find him another for a night. He specifies what she is to look like, taking all of his sub’s imagined or real body flaws and requesting that the new girl look better. As in, “Your tits are too small so make sure she has nice big ones. I want her to have a smaller ass than your fat one. And be sure she can suck dick better than you.”

To twist the knife even further, he places her in the next room and forces her to listen to his moans and grunts of pleasure as he fucks his “perfect” girl, while she, the “imperfect” one, is completely left out.

Scenario 4: Same circumstance as number 3, only the sub is forced to stand and watch as he points out the other girl’s more appealing attributes. “See? This is what boobs are supposed to look like.” or “Why can’t you deepthroat like she does?” Then he forces you to engage in belittling yourself by agreeing with, or repeating the same sentiments. “Yes, Master, my tits are hideous and her’s are beautiful.” etc. etc.

Scenario 5: [Insert your own personal hell here]

I’m curious to what any of you think is the purpose of such emotional sadism. Is there one at all, beyond that it might make his dick hard?

One thought I had, and that was echoed by toy on her blog, was that she’d lose some sense of self. While toy mentioned that as a less than desirable outcome (if I understood that correctly. Correct me if not, toy, please), it occured to me that losing some of her sense of self IS the point. One of them anyway.

I mean, it seems to me that to get a submissive to the point where they can handle such obviously soul shattering episodes, being able to suspend, if not shut off, your sense of self would seem of paramount importance. Perhaps then, the trick is in just how much to destroy and how dangerous would that be?

One of the comments over there, by Doll, said: “The problem with emotional sadism is that it could insidiously alter self belief until all confience is gone. It blurs the boundaries between being a submissive or becoming a doormat that just takes the shit off the boots of the sadist.”

And while I agree with that, somewhat, one has to wonder if being that kind of “doormat submissive” isn’t the goal of it all.

I realize that doormat is tossed around as an insult and submissive’s tend to fall all over themselves denying that they could ever be that dominated.. but me?

Honestly, I think it’s hot.

I find that kind of blind, thoughtless submission to BE the goal. A goal that I may or may not ever reach (I certainly don’t seem to be wired for it, but too, neither have we been able to engage in such practices that would completely obliterate my sense of self.)

I understand that in doing so, should we ever get to that place, it would open the door for him to be and do almost anything to me. At this point in time he is still maintaining my sense of self, still encouraging free thought, and, rebellion actually. I don’t expect that to always be the case, nor do I particularly enjoy this time period. I much preferred what we had before when we just dabbled in more extreme methods of control and personality/mental adjusments. I, for one, look forward to the obliteration of *me*.

As toy said in a reply: “it could also take the submission to a whole new level, positively speaking, right? There’s more possibilities of one hurting from it but all that aside, it could just be a new level of humility, subordination, objectification, and submission.”

As with anything else, if you want the possibility of great success, you have to be prepared for the possibility of great failure. But you’ll have neither one if you never try.

Maybe it will be just a coin toss on which way it will go, maybe success relies on the talents of the Dom or the inherent strength of the submissive. Who knows?

So I guess I’m hoping to hear from other’s who have been there or who will be there. There are people I know who are facing this and it’s difficult for them. Unfortunately, I seem to come at this from a different angle in that even just writing about it has gotten me all hot and bothered. I am eagerly anticipating scenarios such as those above, ready to dive headfirst into the pain and misery such things will surely spark in me, and damned be the after effects!

While some of the same insecurities and what-ifs roll around in my head, I’m soothed by a deeper sense of security. I know that *no matter what*, my time spent bound and broken on the floor is temporary, that no matter how low he will make me feel, I remain held in a higher place in his heart. The fear that I feel toward it is not one of abandonment. I’m not sure if perhaps that is the one tiny piece that changes it from not-okay to very-okay. Perhaps so.

However it all will work out for me, I am not in a position to personally offer words beyond what I have here, which is little help for them now I’m sure. Whenever I’m in a place where I need words that I don’t have, I turn to you fine people, as your experiences, thoughts and wisdom for outshine mine most days.

Input? Please? I will beg.

~cunt

What say you?

“slaves cannot meaningfully consent since they have no veto.”

(yanked from a TSR thread, in a comment by Tanos.)

That line keeps rolling around in my head, like there is something of great importance attached to it.

If one doesn’t have the power to refuse, then they also never had the power to accept.

This seems to blow the whole concept of “consent” right out of the water.

My brain has siezed. Any thoughts?

Perfect Victim

I’ve just about finished my second read of the book Perfect Victim. Master recently bought me a copy for my very own because I often refer to it as my “bible”.

I realize that there are two sides to every story, and that probably the book leaves a lot of the truth out. I once had some information about this story sent to me but my computer crashed before I could read it and I haven’t bothered trying to get it again. Because, in all honesty, it doesn’t change my basic attraction to the book. Not really.

It doesn’t matter if it was consensual or not, at least not to me. I’m sure it mattered a great deal to the man on trial! But however it actually happened between the parties, none of it changes the methods and details. And that’s where my interest lies.

One part of the book lists the steps, or techniques most often used to “break” or coerce a person into a desired behavior pattern and giving up any overt resistance. I have an extreme interest in this sort of brainwashing. Consensual slavery, or willfully giving up resistance, is NOT the same thing, in my opinion.

Within the dynamics of choosing not to resist, choosing to obey, choosing to submit, we have what I’ll call “slavery-lite”. When you delve into the process of coersion, or brainwashing, the choice to submit is erased. There is no choice because there is no other conceivable alternative but to submit.

In certain circles it’s referred to as Internal Enslavement. Which is possibly a nicer way of saying brainwashed.

Brainwashed is defined as “Intensive, forcible indoctrination, [...] aimed at destroying a person’s basic convictions and attitudes and replacing them with an alternative set of fixed beliefs.” So it’s not, to me, a matter of choice. It’s not that I would choose to obey because I’m a consensual slave, but that I would choose to obey because it would cease occuring to me not to. Whether born out of fear, which seems to be one of the most oft-used methods of brainwashing and coersion, the outcome is pretty intense.

The techniques, or steps, to brainwashing are listed as follows, defined by the expert psychologist hired for the case:

1. Sudden, unexpected abduction, followed by isolation. Refuse to answer questions, place them in a cell-like environment, remove their clothes and begin the process of humiliation and degradation.

2. Physically and sexually abuse the person to expose the level of their vulnerability.

3. Remove normal daylight patterns. Keep them in an all-dark or all-light environment. Removing that normal sequence is very disorienting.

4. Destroy the person’s sense of privacy. Be present during urination, defecation, menstruation. Control the when and how.

5. Control and reduce food and water. Foster extreme dependence. Enforce a sense of gratitude from the person for the food and water by random bouts of extreme denial (let them believe they would die without your mercy).

6. Punish with no apparent rhyme or reason.

7. Require that the person ask for permission for anything or any behavior.

8. Establish a pattern of sexual and physical abuse. This cements to the person that this is they way things will be from now on.

9. Continued and extreme isolation. Reduce the person’s world to one source of any information. You become their only point of contact.

10. Present a model or goal of future behavior of how to please you.

11. Threaten the person’s loved ones with a similar fate should the person fail to comply.

12. Threaten to sell the person to someone even worse than yourself.

13. Continue to beat and torture at irregular intervals.

14. Irrelevent leniancy. Allow small privileges for no reason, creating confusion and making the person plaint.

15. Get it in writing. Create contracts and confessions that the person must sign.

16. Make yourself seem omnipresent. Incorportate new behavior goals with tiny steps of freedom, but appear “out of nowhere” to eliminate any lingering sense of not being watched, or of ever being alone. Make the person believe you are everywhere and nowhere and that no place is safe from you.

And that’s it in a nutshell. 16 easy steps to ownership.

Obviously, if attempting to apply those to myself, several of them are impossible. Along with wanting to experience the levels of internal enslavement, also comes a desire not to be in jail on Master’s part. So there will be no abductions, there will be no threats made to my loved ones. And until the kids are firmly established as independent adults, a lot of that list is impossible anyway. But having the basic steps allows for modification. And my extreme interest and cooperaton will, I think, make it even easier, rendering a lot of those steps as unnecessary anyway.

More and more often I come to the conclusion that I am not a submissive. I have never wanted to submit.

I am a masochist. I want to be conquered. As I find myself unable to relate to submissives in many ways, and unable to understand the submissive desires, I’m beginning to accept that I’m a square peg trying to fit in a round hole. I don’t know that I have a submissive bone in my body. I don’t “get” the spiritual posts that I read from other submissives. They baffle me, to be honest. Well, they bore me actually. Mean as that may sound, it’s the truth.

I’m not about spiritual submission I guess. I’m about being beaten. Mentally and physically.

Masochism: The condition in which sexual gratification depends on suffering, physical pain, and humiliation.
Gratification gained from pain, deprivation, degradation, etc., inflicted or imposed on oneself, either as a result of one’s own actions or the actions of others, esp. the tendency to seek this form of gratification.

I’m not seeing any spirituality in that definition. Nor can I combine methods of pain used to reach spiritual pinnacles with that definition.

I dunno. I’m way, way out of time anyway and I’m not sure where I’m headed with the rest of this. Maybe I can pick it back up later.

~cunt

Scary stuff.

(Compiled from a few different articles about torture with slight manipulations for the words Master and slave.)

There is one place in which one’s privacy, intimacy, integrity and inviolability are guaranteed – one’s body, a unique temple and a familiar territory of sensa and personal history. The Master invades this shrine. He does so publicly, deliberately, repeatedly and, often, sadistically and sexually, with undisguised pleasure. Hence the all-pervasive, long-lasting, and, frequently, irreversible effects and outcomes of torture.

In a way, the tortured slave’s own body is rendered her worse enemy. It is corporeal agony that compels the slave to mutate, her identity to fragment, her ideals and principles to crumble. The body becomes an accomplice of the Master, an uninterruptible channel of communication, a treasonous, poisoned territory.

It fosters a humiliating dependency of the slave on the Master. Bodily needs denied – sleep, toilet, food, water – are wrongly perceived by the slave as the direct causes of her degradation and dehumanization. As she sees it, she is rendered bestial not by the sadistic bullies around her but by her own flesh.

The concept of “body” can easily be extended to “home”. This intends to disrupt the continuity of “surroundings, habits, appearance, relations with others. A sense of cohesive self-identity depends crucially on the familiar and the continuous. By attacking both one’s biological body and one’s “social body”, the slave’s psyche is strained to the point of dissociation.

“As the gap between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ deepens, dissociation and alienation increase. The slave that, under torture, was forced into the position of pure object has lost his or her sense of interiority, intimacy, and privacy. Time is experienced now, in the present only, and perspective – that which allows for a sense of relativity – is foreclosed. Thoughts and dreams attack the mind and invade the body as if the protective skin that normally contains our thoughts, gives us space to breathe in between the thought and the thing being thought about, and separates between inside and outside, past and present, me and you, was lost.”

Torture robs the slave of the most basic modes of relating to reality and, thus, is the equivalent of cognitive death. Space and time are warped by sleep deprivation. The self (“I”) is shattered. The tortured have nothing familiar to hold on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones, language, name. Gradually, they lose their mental resilience and sense of freedom. They feel alien – unable to communicate, relate, attach, or empathize with others.

Torture splinters early childhood grandiose narcissistic fantasies of uniqueness, omnipotence, invulnerability, and impenetrability. But it enhances the fantasy of merger with an idealized and omnipotent (though not benign) other – the inflicter of agony. The twin processes of individuation and separation are reversed.

Torture is the ultimate act of perverted intimacy. The Master invades the slave’s body, pervades her psyche, and possesses her mind. Deprived of contact with others and starved for human interactions, the slave bonds with the Master. “Traumatic bonding”, akin to the Stockholm syndrome, is about hope and the search for meaning in the brutal and indifferent and nightmarish universe of the torture cell.

The Master becomes the black hole at the center of the slave’s surrealistic galaxy, sucking in the slave’s universal need for solace. The slave tries to “control” her Master by becoming one with him (introjecting him) and by appealing to the master’s presumably dormant humanity and empathy. This bonding is especially strong when the Master and the slave form a dyad and “collaborate” in the rituals and acts of torture (for instance, when the slave is coerced into selecting the torture implements and the types of torment to be inflicted, or to choose between two evils).

Obsessed by endless ruminations, demented by pain and a continuum of sleeplessness – the slave regresses, shedding all but the most primitive defense mechanisms: splitting, narcissism, dissociation, projective identification, introjection, and cognitive dissonance. The slave constructs an alternative world, often suffering from depersonalization and derealization.

Sometimes the slave comes to crave pain – very much as self-mutilators do – because it is a proof and a reminder of her individuated existence otherwise blurred by the incessant torture. Pain shields the slave from disintegration and capitulation. It preserves the veracity of her unthinkable and unspeakable experiences.

This dual process of the slave’s alienation and addiction to anguish complements the Master’s view of his quarry as “inhuman”, or “subhuman”. The Master assumes the position of the sole authority, the exclusive fount of meaning and interpretation, the source of both evil and good.

Torture is about reprogramming the slave to succumb to an alternative exegesis of the world, proffered by the Master. It is an act of deep, indelible, traumatic indoctrination. Torture has no cut-off date. The sounds, the voices, the smells, the sensations reverberate long after the episode has ended – both in dreams and in waking moments. The slave’s ability to trust other people – i.e., to assume that their motives are at least rational, if not necessarily benign – has been irrevocably undermined. They feel anxious because the Master’s behavior is seemingly arbitrary and unpredictable – or mechanically and inhumanly regular.

“The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the slave by bringing a superior outside force to bear on her will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioral level. As the slave regresses, her learned personality traits fall away in reverse chronological order. She begins to lose the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations, or to cope with stressful interpersonal relationships or repeated frustrations.”

Inevitably, in the aftermath of torture, slaves feel helpless and powerless. This loss of control over one’s life and body is manifested physically. This is often exacerbated by the disbelief many slaves encounter, especially if they are unable to produce scars, or other “objective” proof of their ordeal. Language cannot communicate such an intensely private experience as pain.

“Pain is also unsharable in that it is resistant to language … All our interior states of consciousness: emotional, perceptual, cognitive and somatic can be described as having an object in the external world … This affirms our capacity to move beyond the boundaries of our body into the external, sharable world. This is the space in which we interact and communicate with our environment. But when we explore the interior state of physical pain we find that there is no object ‘out there’ – no external, referential content. Pain is not of, or for, anything. Pain is. And it draws us away from the space of interaction, the sharable world, inwards. It draws us into the boundaries of our body.”

Okay. So it’s shocking, scary, unbelievable. And makes me twitch and drool. That’s what I want. That’s what I almost had. That’s what I’ll have again.

Mark my words.

I’m a determined little cunt.

And to whoever left that last deleted snarky comment? Fuck off. I’m done playing with you people. Don’t like me? Hit the X. Don’t agree with me? Hit the X.

I’m done explaining things. I’m done coddling the lightweights. You want education, go to wikipedia. You want happy shit, go to Disney world.

This is what I do. This is what I write. Don’t want to read it? X on out of here, bitch.

kaya