Empathy and Puritans

We went away last night so I’m behind a post, but it was totally worth it!  Sir planned it without telling us, he just said on Saturday morning to pack a bag for overnight and we got in the car.  We stayed in a fancy hotel in the mountains, and we hot tubbed and we had an awesome night.  It was really nice.  And we came home today and got some chores done so all that I have to do tomorrow is some grocery shopping and… lesson plans, and we are going to K and J’s house for a barbecue tomorrow.  So… it’s been a good weekend.

Sir and I (and SB) have been playing a lot, too, like… three nights in a row… which is pretty crazy, we’re all usually too busy and tired for that level of frequency.  I’m sure we’re going to crash and be going to bed at 8 o’clock again tonight, but it’s been an intense and fun few days and I have plenty of play to write about…

Which makes me strange that I posted about a punishment.  It was not recent, BTW, it was something that happened a couple of months ago.  I’m not sure why I chose to write about it other than I was hitting a wall, trying to force myself to write SOMETHING besides a diary entry, and I was staring at my cell phone sitting on the computer desk.  The light reflecting off the back of the phone reminded me of that punishment when I’d set my phone on the table so it wouldn’t’ fall out of my jeans, and I had fixated on the way the light was hitting it instead of what was happening.  And so… that became what I was able to write.

Sir asked me about it, because, we had just played the night before and he wondered why I was writing about a pretty negative punishment… but it was really just about the stupid cell phone.

But it made me pretty anxious to post it… and I have remained anxious having it remain posted.  So I’ve been thinking about why.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we, or me, and I assume some other people, engage empathy.  When I know about something someone is going through or I learn about something that someone else enjoys that I don’t enjoy, or I hear a perspective on something by a person who inherently has a different view of the world than I have (another race, another culture, another religion, another sexuality), often it can seem initially foreign – their view or experience.  So I tend to, often without even thinking about it, seek some experience in my own life that might… approximate what I think they are feeling.  I try to find a substitute experience that I can slot in that I think gives me an equivalent emotional response, so that I can at least understand their feelings, even if I can’t understand that preference or view particularly since it isn’t my own.

So, for example, extroverts.  I’m not one.  I’ve never been one.  I can’t truly understand what it would feel like to be one, because it is something I can’t change about myself, I can’t be an extrovert for a day and have that memory to depend on.  I can do the same activities as an extrovert, I can even pretend (and I’m pretty good at it) extroverted behaviors.  But I can’t duplicate the energy that they get from being around other people.  For me, other people are a drain.  Often a happy drain that I enjoy, but… a drain that I need time by myself to recover from.

So, to really understand extroverts, I can’t imagine myself as an extrovert.  I have no life experience and can’t have life experience feeling what they feel among people.  So what I do is, I imagine how I feel spending an evening watching a movie, or curling up with a book, or going camping with my dog for three days alone…  Those experiences for me, are probably equivalent emotionally to being around people for an extrovert.  So to understand them, I just need to understand how I feel going camping alone, and I can be like, “Oh, yeah, I totally get you… you just feel that way from being with people, while I feel that way from being alone.  Cool beans!”

And for a lot of things, that’s a good way to engage empathy.  We can’t know everyone else’s experiences, we are too different from one another, but we can slot in things we do understand to allow us to approximate an understanding of them.  And that’s good, because it allows us empathy and tolerance of or even the ability to embrace differences.

And I feel that when I write about play… with Sir… BDSM, S/M, even our D/s interactions, I imagine that most people who do not have my sexual orientation, kind of group all of that under the category of “sex” and since they understand sex, even if their version of sex looks very different, they can still approximate and understanding of what I’m saying under their understanding of sex.  And, mostly, I’m okay with that.  I think it’s a very broad approximation, it doesn’t exactly fit in a lot of ways, but… most of the time it doesn’t change the meaning of what I’m talking about enough for me to worry about their interpretation…  Except sometimes the D/s part.  The D/s isn’t always sexual… but here’s where we get into a little harder territory…

D/s, as I said, when we are engaged in that aspect of our dynamic, when ownership becomes more visible, when dominance and submission become more visible but not as play, then it isn’t sexual.  And it isn’t really anything else that I know of in vanilla experience, either.  I can’t think of a comparison to help people approximate the dynamic or the feelings.  I can’t even name the emotions involved because I feel that my vanilla lexicon simply doesn’t have words for those feelings.  And that leads me to believe that there is no vanilla equivalent… because… if there were, there would be words for it.

And that is difficult.  It is difficult for me as a wordsmith, because, I hit a very frustrating place in my mind when I try to talk about this aspect of my life.  It can be frustrating having conversations, not even just with vanilla people, but even with kinky people who just don’t have this aspect as part of their identities…  There are heated arguments, even among dominants and among submissives about what the feelings are, how they experience it, and there are very widely differing types of dominants and submissives depending on their particular orientations and identities even under the dominant or submissive umbrella.  (And some people even identify as both!)

So… it’s a difficult place.

Explaining punishment takes even one more step into the difficulty realm.

A lot of people consider dominance and submission, even ownership to still be at least a bit under the sex umbrella.  They can kind of wrap their minds around it by still using sex as a framing…

But punishment, I think, loses that framing.  Or, they force it into that framing and I have to keep explaining that they’re wrong, and that’s disturbing, too.  I’ve had to explain to my therapist many times that punishment isn’t sexual… no… not even a little… no… it doesn’t “tie into” my sexuality… no…  Sigh…

And she’s a great therapist and listens and really tries.  I think it is simply very difficult to integrate something for which you have no framework in your own experience.

So when I post about play with Sir… I’m embarrassed and shy but mostly because of Puritan acculturation and “good girls don’t talk about sex, or have sex…” type of programming that, even though my family was not shaming… I still incorporated those messages from social and cultural teaching beyond the scope of my home.  So when I post about sexual interactions with Sir… I’m embarrassed and shy that people are reading them (even though I chose to share them).  I’m embarrassed in a way that I feel I am sharing something intimate and private and… yeah… non-mainstream.  But I know that other people can at least understand sexual interactions, even if mine are a bit off the beaten path.

But when I post about punishment, or the more… emotional/psychological not sexual aspects of our relationship dynamic, I am more than embarrassed.  I feel… vulnerable… and I feel… afraid.  I have to fight anxiety, even months after posting something… even years, when I remember that it is out there and available for people to read… I feel… a sense of threat and anxiety.

And you might wonder why in the hell I’d post anything that leaves me feeling that way.  And, honestly, I’m not sure I know why… other than… I need to exist.  I need to exist in the world beyond my own walls.  In so many ways I am forced to hide who I am…  This weekend I was going to post a picture of the hotel to Facebook and realized that would lead to so many questions I couldn’t answer, so… I didn’t.  I thought about posting pictures here, but someone might recognize the room, be able to infer my geographical location, even potentially be able to follow the paper trail to that particular hotel and identify names of me or my partners… I can’t… risk that.  And so, even this great experience remains inside my four walls.

My whole life has been secrets.

I loved my time with the guys.  And I will hold onto that memory forever.  And maybe it shouldn’t matter that it is only between us.  But somehow… because it isn’t my choice… because I am forced by threat of very real and dangerous consequences to all of us if we are revealed… somehow it doesn’t feel so much like “no big deal” to keep it to myself.  If I were simply a private person, and I simply chose to share or not share parts of my life based on my own preferences… that would be different.  Feeling like I live with a gun to my head dictating who I can be, and what I can say and do and let be known… makes me resist, I think, even when it is uncomfortable.  I think it is my form of rebellion to show the world who I am… even when it terrifies me.

And so I write about our moments of punishment, and ownership, and D/s…  the ones that I can’t excuse as “alternative sex” and just blush about.  The ones that make me truly far from others’ experiences.  The ones that I believe run the greatest risk of losing empathy even from people who want to be open-minded.

And that is scary.

And so I write about punishment.  And so I see the little flags pop up on my dashboard… the visitors who read that page… and I wonder… about each and every view.  I wonder what they think of me.  I wonder how much they can understand.  I wonder if they are horrified.  I wonder if they are worrying for me.  I wonder if they think less of me, think less of Sir, think less of Sub Brother… I wonder if they are judging, even if they wouldn’t say it out loud.  I wonder if they are confused.  I wonder if my words push a wedge of distance between them and me… a gulf that our individual understandings of the world can’t bridge.

I wonder how much more alone I make myself and whether I was better off letting people believe they knew the real me and only one of us knowing otherwise.

And I can’t blame them if that’s true.  I can’t blame anyone who can’t understand…  Because I can’t explain it.  I don’t have the words to make that connection for anyone.  I don’t have the frame to connect with their empathy.  I have no way of framing this beyond that it is.

Sir just suggested I might address this by doing a Q&A post about punishment, or one of the other harder to explain aspects.  I don’t know if I can even answer questions about it, but… maybe… Apparently he has some ideas.  Seems that will be coming soon to a blog near you!

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