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Hello hello!
First of all, it has been an absolute joy to follow you on Instagram + Patreon. You’ve created such a safe and cozy corner of the BDSM related internet (which has proven to be pretty toxically masculine in my experience of it! Fetlife?? 😷)
I’m writing to reach out for advice. It’s kind of ~intense~ advice that I’m also working on with my therapist, but I am wondering if you would be comfortable adding any thoughts/input. If not- do let me know!!
I have a history of intensely people-pleasing and losing myself in relationships because I try to make myself into this “perfect” human (really in an effort to avoid abandonment - hello childhood trauma!). I’ve definitely been in unhealthy BDSM types of relationships, where the power dynamic really exacerbated my already unhealthy people pleasing behaviors - this led to me not setting firm boundaries, and often violating my own boundaries in order to do what I thought my partner wanted.
Ultimately, I was submitting in order to please my partner and make them stay, rather than for myself, and it really didn’t make me feel good. I took a break from all things BDSM for a bit to work through and unpack some of these emotions, buuuuuut I recently met this super hot (and experienced and emotionally in tune and not toxically masculine) Dom on Feeld and............... ooooof. But I’m a bit nervous to move into a new dynamic, even if it’s just virtual at the moment!
I’m wondering if you have any words of wisdom as to how I can navigate through these emotions. I’m always wondering how to better understand if I’m submitting for my sake, or if my “submission” is really just my trauma/fear creeping up. How to maximize the sexy power play and minimize the deeply ingrained coping mechanisms?? Sometimes it’s so hard to know!
Hello! I love this question so much and love your vulnerability in articulating it all. This is a variation of a question I get a lot, which is “how do I know my submission isn’t just an extension of my people-pleasing instincts?” Short answer? You just know. Keep reading for the long answer.
I’ve been doing a lot of personal work lately around codependence. It’s a buzzword you hear a lot nowadays, particularly on Therapy Instagram. It wasn’t until I started reading books about it that I could actually define what it is and how it manifests. “Codependent” is a term that originated after the field of addiction treatment cohered into Alcoholics Anonymous and its associated groups. When mental health professionals began to study alcoholics and addicts, they noticed that these people also had people in their lives with a cluster of traits that we now call codependency. The alcoholic was dependent on alcohol, and the codependent was a person who was dependent on the alcoholic. This was initially understood as an addiction itself, which is why Al Anon, the support group for people whose loved ones are alcoholics, encourages participants to work the 12 steps as well. The concept of “emotional addiction” is now considered problematic because of its victim-blaming tone, and since then we’ve come to understand codependency as living on a kind of spectrum of severity.
That is a very quick, bird’s eye summary of the history of the term and I’m oversimplifying, but I think it’s helpful to understand where the term comes from. In early writing on codependence, the example you’ll see is the alcoholic husband and the codependent wife. He needs to drink, and she needs his chaos and the constant thrill of trying to “fix” him. According to these sources, codependent people, before working on themselves, will often say things like “if it weren’t for other people I’d be happy.” The tragedy is that they, like everybody else, are the only ones who hold the keys to their own happiness! But they are so caught up in trying to control the people in their lives by any means necessary that they can’t see that they are part of the problem.
And one of the classic ways this exertion of control manifests isn’t as dominance (the bad kind), threats, or conflict — it’s through people-pleasing. This is linked to the fawn response. In nature, when there’s a threat, we had fight, flight, and freeze responses, which are each pretty self explanatory. You either fight the tiger that’s trying to eat you, run away from it, or play dead and hope it leaves you alone. The fawn response is to try to make the tiger like you. That doesn’t work particularly well on tigers but you know who it does work on? Chaotic parents or caretakers.
I imagine there are people-pleasers who did not have emotionally abusive childhoods or experience an abandonment trauma like you did. There are definitely people who come by their people-pleasing in a less severe or less dramatic way. But since you didn’t and neither did I, I’m gonna talk about childhood trauma for a sec. Whether you experienced parentification or an abandonment, as a child you felt the behavior of the adults in your life was not only about you, but somehow under your control. It’s like when parents get divorced and the kid thinks it’s their fault. Or, to harvest my own trauma for an example, my parent’s reliance on me for emotional support, and painful rejection when I didn’t fulfill that role, taught me that the security I needed (and all children need) hinged on my ability to make the people around me happy. My ability (or inability) to behave perfectly and people-please was directly linked with my safety and survival.
So we learn these patterns subconsciously and carry them into adulthood, repeating strategies that worked in our childhoods to secure outcomes we desire as adults. But — and brace yourself for some tough love here — those strategies didn’t work in our childhoods. By being perfect, people-pleasing children, we did not turn our parents into the loving, perfect caretakers we deserved. And if that happened to you? It’s because your parent(s) took responsibility for themselves and made a change. We don’t actually have control over other people’s behavior, no matter how good we are at people pleasing. As one counselor put it in the book Codependent No More, “codependency is a way of getting needs met that doesn’t get needs met.”
When we people please, we feel like we’re throwing endless effort down a hole. We want everyone to see and recognize us and often they fail to do so. It feels exhausting. It feels this way because what drives it is a desire to control other people, which, in actuality, we can’t do! Ideally, submission would provide a counterpoint to this. I mean, an explicit stipulation of our relationship format is that we cannot control our Doms… right?
Ultimately though, D/s relationships are relationships. They can get just as messy or unhealthy as vanilla relationship. Just like you described, submission can be an excellent cover for unhealthy people-pleasing. It sounds like you’re doing your own work on your codependent tendencies and that’s great. So far I've found that the tendencies never really “go away,” but you become more and more efficient at structuring your life and relationships so that they’re not running the show.
If leveraged thoughtfully, D/s dynamics can be an effective safe guard against enmeshment, and a place to practice a healthier way of relating. The roles are defined, expectations are clear, and each person is responsible for their own behavior. These things are the enemy of the kind of ambiguity in which people pleasing thrives. Further, we come up against this delineation of roles so often in D/s relationships that we are met constantly with challenges to show up differently. Let’s talk about a few ways this happens…
PAY ATTENTION TO HOW YOU FEEL
One of codependency's sneakiest tricks is making you think other people's feelings are your own. If someone you love is sad and you feel sad, and not just that but must fix their sadness to relieve yourself of the sadness you've taken on - that's no good! And especially no good as a sub. Because that kind of enmeshment defeats the purpose of having the clearly defined roles of Dom and sub. Your emotions are your own, your Dom's emotions are their own. All you can do is continually emphasize that separateness, and even use it as a boundary to prevent yourself from crossing that inappropriate line.
Empathy is one thing, but taking responsibility for your Dom's emotional life is definitely transgressing your role in the dynamic. You can work on this with basic mindfulness practices like breathing and body scans. These can also be practiced in scene whether your Dom tells you to or not! I like to repeat a mantra in my head during impact sometimes, affirming something I'm working on, such as "I'm responsible for me." Impact is a great metaphor for healthy separateness. The Dom inflicts sensations on your body, and as you feel them, you can say to yourself "these feelings are mine."
YOUR NO’S ARE NOT PRIZES
You, and no one else, get to say what is on the table for you. Thinking of your soft and hard limits as special prizes you’re going to make available as a means of pleasing your partner is disingenuous and frankly dangerous, because you’re violating your trust in yourself as a way of building an unstable connection with another person. Your yes/maybe/no list is not a map of beginner/intermediate/advanced stuff, and if you’ve made it into hard limits you’re more “real.” The joy of BDSM is it takes the idea of better/worse off the table. And any good Dom will agree with that. But you have to be sure you’re not pressuring yourself on their behalf. Which brings me to -
THE DOM IS THE DOM
Trying to over-anticipate what the Dom is thinking so you can do what they want before they tell you is topping from the bottom. And beyond that you’re running the risk that you’re going to do something you don’t enjoy just to please them, and they might not like it either! Moreover, safe Doms enjoy your enjoyment. They’re not evaluating you on a checklist of preferred types of enjoyment (although a clipboard and OSHA vest seem like great components of scene play), they just want you to do you. So relax into that. Tune into what they really want and who they really are. It’s all about being present.
LAY IT OUT
If you’re using submission to indulge a bad people-pleasing habit, it’s vital to give your Dom some level of informed consent in the matter. The Dom needs to know if what they’re asking of you is causing you harm. Only you know when you’re verging into unhealthy territory, so you have to learn how to snitch on yourself. If the people-pleasing is severe and happening often, you could even develop a color safe word around it - like when your Dom tells you to do something and it’s activating the people pleasing muscle, you could call “purple” (she was a one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people-pleaser).
COMMUNICATE ™
People with codependent traits famously avoid conflict because they're scared of rocking the boat. Keep a close eye on this tendency and make sure that any Dom you're playing with isn't exploiting this. They should welcome open communication, but you should also be sure to bring things to their attention as needed. In my opinion, holding on to grievances and hoping the Dom reads your mind is also a violation of informed consent. It takes a lot of vulnerability to Dom properly, and if you're secretly testing them with a hidden issue, they can't feel safe. The antidote to this? Bring things up before you get to the point that you're quietly hoping they magically read your mind. The same is true of your sexual desires! Ask politely for what you want and ye shall receive. Don't trick yourself into thinking that a "good sub" doesn't ask for anything.
USE SUBMISSION AS AN ARENA FOR INNER CHILD WORK
As you work more with the trauma or blend of experiences that precipitated your people-pleasing/codependent tendencies, you can start to use your submission as a space to communicate with the inner child that wants to run your life with her idea of good coping mechanisms. I find that the more experiences I have with submission that give me a taste of firm boundaries but also a sense of play, I demonstrate to my inner child that her world isn’t chaotic anymore, and no one is inappropriately relying on her to do emotional labor that isn’t hers. Casual play can communicate this too. Show your inner child that you are fiercely protective of her limits and boundaries. That her safety is non-negotiable. That you’ve got this. And more and more she’ll stop trying to run the show.
More Resources:
@sitwithwhit - Signs You're Healing From Codependence / Anatomy Of A Conscious Relationship
Codependent No More - one of the first books on codependence written by a recovering codependent who did her own research into the phenomenon
Codependent No More Audiobook - the narrator sounds like Holly Hunter so I've particularly been enjoying it
Conscious Loving - written by a couple about how to cultivate the opposite of codependence in a relationship, which they call "co-commitment"
Mating In Captivity - excellent content on the necessity of separation of roles in romantic relationships to cultivate eroticism (even has a pretty decent chapter on "submission fantasies")
Adult Children Of Emotionally Immature Parents - if the stuff about parentification, emotional abuse, or abandonment resonated with you I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Read it slowly. It's a lot. But very liberating at the same time.
Episode #237 & #238 of My Favorite Murder: hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark talk at length about the fawn response in the pre-episode chat in 237, then revisit the topic in 238 after receiving some listener feedback
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bound at the intersection of vulnerability and abject horniness
Thank you so much. The timing of receiving this email in my inbox is pretty wild. I had been having a pretty tough day grappling with being able to trust myself in a new relationship w/ a dynamic after having just got out of a relationship that was codependent and very enmeshed. I'm hyperaware (trying to relax into just being aware) of having codependent tendencies and everything I read has reassured me that I'm doing the right things moving forward in this new relationship. Now I'm just working on trusting myself. Thank you again for this!