The therapeutic benefits of a weighted blanket

I had never heard of a weighted blanket before.  But when a budding young dominatrix and exotic dancer began a correspondence with me on the topics of love and submission and personal growth, one of her early suggestions to me was that I buy a weighted blanket. Just one of the many ways that one discovers that a domme can be nurturing and caring. Even the “cruellest” ones often are.

Since I love to try things, I did.  Not long after, a 25lbs bed cover was delivered to my door.  Why I bought the heaviest one I am not sure, but it was pretty cool to feel its weight.  Slipping underneath it is a bit like being gently crushed, held.

Knowing that the essence of my submission is to be held in a container, knowing that the essence of my ADD is a need for that container, it makes sense that it would work.  And you know what?  It did.

And for many months, I slept under one.  But then I moved, and it lay forgotten somewhere in a shipping container and then in my basement, until last night.

I confessed a few days ago to my two therapists, separately, that I was lonely.  The antidote to loneliness is to make plans.  To organise to see people.  This is something I have never really done, trusting to chance to make things happen for me.  And in truth, I don’t know anybody who meets more people randomly than I do.  People just come up to me.  And oddly enough, it seems to happen more and more.  After all, everybody wants to know a ballerina giraffe.  There aren’t so many of us you know.

I also realise that I am insecure.  That I “need” the valuation of others.  Quote marks placed by both therapists.  I get tired of the idea that “everything I need is within myself” which is a common thought.  What if it isn’t?

When I had a wife, it was enough to know she existed.  No matter what I felt about her or saw in her, or how little we saw each other, her simple existence, knowing that there was some who took interest in my soap opera, well, there was real value in that.  Now that it is gone, it leaves a hole that is being picked up in part by a growing group of friends.  That’s good.

It is also picked up here, on this blog.  I get to tell a story that I couldn’t really tell my wife, and all of you beautiful people write back.  It is a welcome and delicious relationship.  Thank you.

Well, after a few difficult days, weeks, punctuated by moments of joy, I remembered that blanket, and last night I went and got it and remade my bed.  And you know what?  I slept better than I have in quite a while.  It is colossally comforting to sleep under that weight.

And that leads me to the therapist’s challenge.  How do we actually learn to meet our needs?  How do we learn to be whole?  How do we learn to get all of the affirmation we need from within?

You can’t just say to yourself, be secure.  You can’t just say, don’t be lonely.  If anything, working at those things directly only makes them worse.  Understanding the root cause doesn’t seem to make things better.

I never had a father.  I barely saw him growing up.  When I did, he was angry, stern, gruff, not at all loving, or present.  I was nuisance.  A frequent target of wrath.  I didn’t live with him until I was 16, and that was an age where he felt okay to be verbally violent, and to threaten physical violence…and as big as I am, was, he was bigger.

The other men in my life who might have qualified as the father figure, were mainly my mother’s relatively frequently changing boyfriends.  Apart from not liking most of them, my mother’s disrespect for their masculinity, ‘not man enough’, sent a chill through me.  Especially when the only man she dated, and nearly married, was one I grew very affectionate towards, and who I saw cruelly tossed aside.  He was a sweet man, talented, fun, and in our lives for many years.  When she tossed him aside, it scared the heck out of me.  Because I identified as gentle and kind, and we all know that a child learns the ropes of loving relationships from its parents.

These are not auspicious starting points.  I needed my mother desperately, maybe made worse by not having access to her—and I mean in fundamental ways.  She was emotionally unavailable.  I was born an inconvenience.  That was the birth of my diaper loving ways.  It was the only way to get back towards something like mother-baby bonding…and required of me to negate all of my agency, all of my choice, and to just be passive and submissive, just like a baby.

In the end, I couldn’t do it, even though she was the one who cultivated it.  Perhaps it was born of her own guilt?  As I grew up, I began to rebel.  I rebelled against everything.  I rebelled against being dressed in girls clothes as a child and at nursery school.  I rebelled against being treated like a baby.  I just wanted to grow up, to get away, to not have someone try to control me.  And the pattern that emerged was that I pushed her away, wanting to know that she would still be there I suppose.  You tell me if that’s a winning strategy.

In the end, my own philosophy emerged…you don’t owe anyone your love, no matter who they are.  It is a cold philosophy, one born of a lot of emotional damage.  One born out of a need to survive.  So, I don’t let anyone in.

When my mother died I cried a lot.  Not because I missed her, or even cared about her passing.  More because with her death came the need to recognise that I never really had a mother.  My father is next.  Somehow I don’t think I will mourn his passing at all.  I have affection for him.  But he is a stranger to me.  He was such an asshole to me growing up, to all of us.  An abusive, tyrannical asshole.  It is too late to fix that.

Forgiveness is fine.  It means I am not angry.  But it doesn’t change a life without the emotional bonds we should love to have with our parents.  Friends and partners have filled the gaps.  At least a bit.

But as my love languages, the real ones, have emerged from the muck of self-protection, I find myself more raw and exposed than ever.  And the only way I can think of navigating the rest of this life and this world, is to be as nice as possible to the people I come across.  Because being nice most usually means people are nice back.  And to be honest, I don’t think I can take anything else.

I don’t want to convey a sense that I am weak or that I am afraid of conflict, or that I am a pushover…if anything, I am so afraid of being or embodying those things that everything about me is about constructing an edifice of cheer and optimism on top of what might be shaky foundations.  And there is truth to the thought that what you put out is what you create in others.  We reap as we sow.

On this backdrop it is no wonder that my kinks are as they are, that my submission is real.  I also know that one cannot rely on others for anything.  And that is my knowledge, and bless those of you who have the courage and strength to live otherwise.  My only hope is that by conducting myself positively, by investing in the people around me, the ones who are worth keeping will self-select their way into my life…and the others, like Star Child, will serve a purpose and then disappear.

I used to want things from people.  I don’t anymore.  Now, whatever will be, will be.