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Hello. I found your Instagram a few months back after my husband of 5 years and father of my 3 small children left me for another (younger) woman and I started to explore the idea of submissiveness that, I think, has always floated around my head but never really been acted on.
By chance through a dating app I met someone at around the same time and we had an immediately very sexual response to each other. Neither of us initially mentioned kink but as time has gone on and we’ve now been able to meet up, we’ve not only fallen very much in love but have also opened up our true sexual desires to each other, which includes a lot of kink, and a sub/Dom dynamic is transpiring.
I guess my question is about shame. This is new (and wonderful) to both of us but we’ve talked about whether we’re actually bad for each other and should we be suppressing these desires or embracing them? Both our gut feelings are embrace them.
We recently spent a weekend together and it was very, very intense. Afterwards I had a lot of feelings; shame, guilt, sadness, loneliness. Google let me to sub drop which I’d never heard of but really helped. When I told him how I was feeling he also started feeling a lot of guilt about how I was feeling and about the things he’d done to me (very very consensually!) over the weekend.
I’m so unbelievably excited but also terrified to have randomly found exactly what I was looking for and in such a beautiful human being whom I love.
Maybe I just need to be told this is ok.
Thanks for listening!
First of all - go you!! You picked yourself up after a seismic change in your life, and it led you right to a new sexual breakthrough. Spoiler alert: this is ok. But I have more for you than that.
As you said, the urge towards submission was present in your mind before your breakup, so although acting on your kinky desires is new to you, you already have a long personal history with kink. And my guess is that in tandem with that, you also have a long personal history of shoving your desires down. Your interior monologue could be any number of things — but I’m a strong woman! But I’m a mother! But I grew up in [x, y, z] religious tradition!
So by the time you finally arrive at enacting your desires, they’re all tied up in shame. And the culture has helped you along in this, saturating your inner landscape with slut shame, ideas about mothers and sexuality (rarely kind or helpful) and general Puritanical nonsense about prioritizing your own desires.
Then if you try to select yourself out of the mainstream and listen to the overwhelming majority of sex-positive messaging, you tend to find the ideal woman isn’t far off from the one portrayed in your average Y2K-era Cosmo issue. She has MULTIPLE ORGASMS, she’s ON TOP, she knows how to make EVERY VIBRATOR work for her, and she’s often portrayed as taking the lead sexually as an expression of her self-assuredness and acceptance of herself and her body. But this image can also be damaging to subs. What if we want to be vulnerable, be held, receive? What if we don’t want to make every single decision ourselves? What if we’re so tapped out with decision fatigue after a long week in our late-capitalist hellscape that the thought of making one more choice is enough to make us strip all our clothes off and go running down the street screaming?
So many subs come to me with a version of your story. It goes a lot like this:
The sub always wanted submission, but thought they could live without it because they were already with a partner who wasn’t interested.
Next, either the couple breaks up for other reasons, leaving the sub ready to start exploring (like you!) or the sub can’t take feeling like there’s something wrong with them anymore and they explode the relationship they’re in (like me years ago)
Sub finds somebody to explore with, and it’s AMAZING. But the shame kicks in. And they don’t understand how something they’ve always wanted could be making them feel bad.
They conclude that their urge to suppress their desires was right all along.
But what if there could be an alternative to step 4?
I’ve heard in many places throughout the mental health and sexuality worlds that shame is a learned emotion, and so we can unlearn it too. I even wrote that in the first version of this article that I published in 2020. But apparently, this is not the case. Apparently shame is in fact innate. According to one study, even babies experience shame and humiliation when they expect to meet their mothers’ gaze and she doesn’t look at them as expected. So we come into this world with expectations of “correct” outcomes and behavior, and feel it in our bodies when things don’t align.
I think this is freeing. I think this means that your shame, my shame, isn’t come by because of a weakness of character, or susceptibility to cultural messaging. It’s part of us. And the work is not to eradicate it, or to run from it, but to acknowledge it and make space for processing.
Here is my best toolkit for handling & dismantling shame:
Rely On Verbal Aftercare: Every scene must be followed by good aftercare. As a part of that aftercare, talk! I think verbal processing is especially important for undoing shame. Practice saying “I thought [insert kinky act] would be really bad, but actually it felt like [how it felt]” Making these direct parallels will be very useful in rewiring how you really feel about things that are new to you.
Make A Shame Plan: If shame strikes during a scene, what will you do? I’d recommend creating a shame-specific safe word and correlating aftercare plan you can shift into without the need to talk or strategize in the moment. Sometimes talking about it helps, sometimes you just need to be held. Just make sure your partner knows what’s going on, so they don’t feel blindsided or go into a state of drop themselves when you pause.
Make Space For Structured Solo Processing: Keeping a journal where you process feelings post-scene can help with post-scene drop and allow you to maintain perspective about the extreme feelings that come with beginning your journey. You’ll also see repeating themes in your shame, and start to get sick of them. “Ugh I the shame crops up every time I do a WAM scene? Enough already.”
Interrogate The Shame: Here’s the thing about shame… it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t hold up to any kind of questioning. So when the shame arrives, try asking it “who am I hurting?” The real answer is no one, but the best answer it ever comes up with is “You’re hurting YOURSELF and you don’t even KNOW IT.” Ok, Shame. That’s the best you got? Because I’m pretty clearly enjoying myself until you show up. But seriously, just keep asking it questions. You’ll notice the answers are pretty circular. Here’s a link to something I wrote on this topic as a guest in Dan Savage’s column.
Just Because It Doesn’t Make Sense Doesn’t Mean It Doesn’t Hurt: Even if you have all the tools and perspective in the world, shame can still feel bad when it shows up. But resisting it will only make it bigger. Experiment with giving it enough space to pass through you.
I don’t think we can ever attain a perfectly shame-free existence, because we’ve been steeped in it since birth and will continue to steep in sexual shame our whole lives. But if you can make a habit of not attaching meaning and importance to the shame when it arrives, I think you can make enough peace with it to move forward with exactly the sex life you deserve.
At the beginning of my own kink journey, I was desperate to “overcome” shame. I would have taken a list like the above and applied each step each day until every little bit of shame was chased out of my life thank you very much!! But now, years on down the road, I’m starting to develop an appreciation for that shame reflex. No, not the kind of shame that shuts down your fun and leaves you in a crying heap, but the kind of shame that makes your kink feel like a fun, dirty secret. Like you’re getting away with something. Zachary Zane and I discussed this when he came on the podcast to talk about bisexuality, and he shared that older queer people sometimes write into his advice column expressing that they actually miss some of the shame that inflected their early exploration. A soupçon of shame can turn an ordinary interaction into an adventure. It can fill it with vibration, purpose, color.
And that’s another reason why it’s pretty good news that we can’t unlearn shame with a tidy listicle of steps. Because eroticism thrives alongside danger. So how, in a longterm relationship, or longterm relationship to our own sexuality, can we want that which we already have? Esther Perel says it’s not about solving this problem, but instead managing the paradox it presents. Here’s Perel:
I believe that separateness is a precondition for connection; if love is about having, desire is about wanting. It is stoked by mystery, distance, and the realization that we never own our partner. They are forever elusive, even while we claim to know them inside out.
Sexuality and eroticism are far from the same and erotic intelligence stretches far beyond sex education and the blatant sexuality we are constantly exposed to in our consumer culture.
It is an intelligence that celebrates ritual and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden, illicit, and suggestive.
In other words, the moment we try to make our desire function exactly the same way as love, it begins to die. Love should be free of shame and danger. Love accompanied by these things can create that kind of trauma bond that makes love breathlessly addictive and painful. But desire? Desire is a different beast entirely. And sprinkling it with shades of shame, as well as the infinite exploration offered by kink, can actually stoke the fire over time.
So yes, make space for your shame, process your shame, journal and talk and make plans. But also? Know it’s fundamental to your experience as a human being and as a sexual creature. And remember that you might just miss it when it’s gone.