When we need to be needed. How manipulative is that?

It’s nice to be appreciated.  It is nice to have friends.  It is even nicer to have a partner.  We all seem to “need” it.  At least, we all seem to seek it.

The therapists all say that we need to meet our needs ourselves.  They are right.  At least in theory.  The practice is difficult, though.  Impossible for some.  But this does not change the degree to which we all seek relationships.  We want to be loved.  It completes us.

And how we are satisfied by this feeling, sated, must vary from person to person.  There is something very gratifying to be “there” for someone.

I wrote about how someone I had just met said she wanted to “hold space for me.”  Yuck.  It made me want to vomit.  “Honey, we just met, you don’t want to hold space for me…you want me to need you so you feel good about yourself.”

But before I rush to judgement, too late, right, I look to whether this feeling exists in me.  And yes, I find that it does.  It reminds me a bit of the parental admonition before administering a spanking, “this will hurt me more than it hurts you.”  Well, in my child’s mind, that never added up.  Ahh, the wisdom of children.  And unfortunately, I had plenty of opportunities to experience this feeling as my mother’s preferred method of punishment was a bare-bottomed spanking with a hairbrush.

I am guilty.  I want to feel needed.  Is this how everyone feels?  I realise that this is true of my submission too.  I cannot liberate myself from the feeling that my submission should have value.  This is complicated.  For one, it is essential to me that submission be a spur to greater personal growth.  In a very real way, when I submit, I ask outright that the person help me to grow in ways that will make them proud of me.  What does that mean?  For one, it means that the person I choose has to be someone who cares.  Second, it has to be someone I respect.  Third, trust is essential…and these are all combined…that I trust the person will have my welfare in mind, a good outcome for me in mind, when they take on this sacred charge.  Fourth, that this person is connected enough to me, and wishes to be connected enough to me, for this to stick and to have meaning.

Is this an impossibility within the realm of a Pro-client relationship?  I don’t know if it is always thus.  It was certainly what I hoped and aimed for with ex-Mistress.  That I failed does not prove the case one way or another.  But right now I am gradually sliding into a relationship in my vanilla life which contains these elements, and yes, there is also a professional with whom I explore these dynamics.

The existence of the Pro-client dynamic in D/s is perhaps a rescue from shame.  We go to them because they release us from judgement, help us to escape shame.  As my therapist says, “she cracked you open.”  There was no way in my mind to do this with a civvie.

On a deeper level, and going forward, there is potentially something about holding space for the unhealthy elements of ourselves that a Pro can access that might be toxic within the confines of a vanilla relationship.  Or, it may be a way to reduce the risk.

I am mortally afraid, or at least have been, of losing the respect of the person I submit to through my submission.  This is a holdover of reading Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s cataclysmic novella on submission.  In that book, the power scales are tipped and once done, she disregards him, teases him, debases him.  Is this the narcissists hyper-sensitivity to humiliation?  I don’t know if they are one and the same, but I have certainly always had it—I don’t like to be put down or humiliated.

I don’t like to think of myself as touchy, one to take offense easily, and I am not.  Hyper-sensitivity in my world (the world of ADD) is not one of haste to take umbrage, but rather an ability to feel the faint signals around me.  Why are ADD people also so often tone deaf?  It’s a bit like wearing headphones so you can hear everything really sharply and then someone turns up the volume…it is an overload.  Being tone deaf is a way of coping.  We tune out, turn off, so that we can survive without being in a constant state of overload.

But in relation to humiliation, the teasing ways of a beautiful woman, there are times when it is really hot, beautiful, sexy, but if tinged with humiliating energy, rubs directly onto a wound.  I don’t know what this wound is, or where it comes from, but it is there.  And I feel that it is related to my gender dysphoria.  It can only come to me from a woman I find attractive.  It has only ever come to me in a sexual context.  And it has to do with privilege.  A frustration that she can do this to me, has the power to do this to me, and sadness and frustration that she has this power.  Resentment even that she does.  The resentment stems from the feeling that I don’t have that power, or did not, as I equate this power with a form of merciful beauty that belongs to the loving divine female.

My therapists are both asking me to sit Ayahuasca again with a very specific intention not related to my gender transition.  Exploring the mystery that is laid out in the paragraph above is one aspect, as there is a core wound there somewhere.  There is something else too.

One of the most surprising aspects of gender transition, and more explicitly being hepped up on oestrogen, is that I feel as if I am growing up for the first time in my life.  Maybe it is because oestrogen leaves me more emotionally equipped—there is definitely an aspect of fluency in feeling that has grown substantially since switching over to a house governed by oestrogen instead of one governed by testosterone.  When I discovered that “female brain” was one of the first gifts of this process at about 6 weeks into formal GAHT (gender-affirming-hormone therapy), this was one of the things I noticed as different.  So, it might be simply that I feel as if I have more tools at my disposal.

But there may also be that this process of gender transition makes some things seem much smaller than they used to seem—issues, fears, whatever, and that makes them more accessible.  The fears are no longer some great monolith that looms like a mountain shadow over me, at times so large that one scarcely knows it exists.

There is a big one left, and that has to do with slavery, and the unspoken core of this post.  Submission can be an abdication of responsibility.  At its essence, that is what is a turn on about it.  Letting go.  But this abdication is also its danger.  For the self, yes.  But also for the other person.  This core fear I have about loss of respect is tied to this.  How can you respect someone who abdicates responsibility?  I see that in myself, that I would find it difficult to hold respect for someone who becomes dependent or weak in that way.  How could I therefore expect it for myself as the submissive party?  It is possible to approach submission without dependency and without weakness?

With ex-Mistress I most explicitly set out with this goal in mind.  I failed in this regard, that’s true.  In this sense I blame my own abdication of responsibility.  My excuse is itself and abdication of responsibility: I relied on her and her experience to provide this…and thought it would be okay.  I also chafed at the overtly sexual content of our dynamic—that everything be couched in my arousal.  That may be something that the Pro-client dynamic requires, at least in that case, the sense of providing a service.  And this certainly fits the pattern of that particular dynamic, where straying outside of the core sexual energy of session play was desired by me, but was explicitly not desired by ex-Mistress—there is no longer a road map.

But as badly as I wanted that to happen, I have come to understand that it is not desirable for my wellness and growth and was the root cause of why we became unstuck.  We learn these lessons we hope so as to not repeat, and with new Mistress, I am very conscious of this mistake.  Not to say that I don’t make others.  The risk of this particular world without a road map is that it has to be more intimate…and where there is greater intimacy, there must also be less risk and greater trust.  Those things take time, but they also take a purity of intent, and that is something core to my goals for myself.  How to be worthy of the trust, how to reduce the risk for the other person to engage with me.

We all have a need to connect with others.  It is too much to ask that a Pro connect with me in the same way that a vanilla person might do.  It is not realistic of me to expect.  No.  But to desire?  Yes.  And that means that just like in any love relationship, and just look at the world of personals and dating apps to know that this is hard, the Pro-client dynamic is just as complex and likely to lead to unfulfillment.  In other words, we must still bring our best selves.  No, perhaps the requirement is even greater to bring our best selves.  That is perhaps what makes it “safer” but also makes failure more likely…but when it is safe to fail, we can also learn more.  In a way, that is what therapy does for us too…in this case, the parallel with Sex Work is instructive.

Over the dinner the other day with an Empress—I need to find a name for her—all of these thoughts came home to roost.  She is aware of me as slave.  She is aware of me as me.  We discussed a topic that I have yet to discuss with anyone other than my therapists…that being a slave is perhaps not conducive to my well-being.  My ability to protect myself.  My holding of boundaries for myself.  Something I have always struggled with.

She asked me to commit to her, to myself, that I would henceforth maintain the boundary of confining slavery to my sexual sphere.  It was a struggle for me to say it.  She even said, “in this way, you shall be my slave.”  When I love someone, I want to experience total surrender.  And that is wrong.  Apart from not being able to ask that of someone, it is not safe to do so.  And it is true to think that when one does this, one opens oneself up to abuse, becomes too vulnerable, and quite possibly, is no longer worthy of respect.  In other words, if I can’t hold my boundaries, I cannot hold self-respect.  If I cannot hold my boundaries, I cannot hold myself.  And if I cannot hold myself, I cannot do what I wish to fervently do and be—a solid anchor for the people I love most.

And in this regard, submission is not strength.

It is a fine line we walk, then.  How do we know that when we surrender, we are doing so from a position of strength, in order to grow, to move forward, to challenge the self, to develop the self?  Why should that please the self?  Is it not that which pleases us so often sexually a portal to the shadow side?  Yes, love, on its own, can take us there, but is that not inherently incomplete?  How do we make that which is our shadow, our weakness, our innate perversity into a source of communion with others, a source of strength.

What am I asking?  Is it that the shadow side of ourselves is so powerful that it overwhelms us, particularly if we don’t let it out in a masterful and healthy way?  I cannot imagine that self-control in this sense is healthy because it may lead to self-repression.  No.  I think instead that free expression, open and honest expression, letting it go, letting it out, is what health is.  And maybe that is what has been truly going on over here with my dabblings in the world of BDSM.  Am I simply engaging support from someone else to help release and bring out these things and by doing so stepping away from the need to repress it?  Does her presence, her complicity, free me from shame?

Yes.  But it does not free us from responsibility.  Doing the work is the point of life.  No matter where we start from, doing the work is the whole point.

As a transgender human, I have wondered at why I have been put on this planet in a male body.  My favourite therapist has turned that around, “why did your soul choose to manifest in this way?”

“I’ve always felt it was to punish me for something.  To teach me a lesson.”  And in my explorations of these feelings, I have come to realise it is to embody grace.  Every day seems to offer me new chances.  How?  Because 99% of the world is not trans.  And many among that 99% are very uncomfortable about trans people, compelled to judge us, compelled to throw food at us, compelled to be violent towards us.  In the face of hate and judgement, we are able to rise above, not in a lofty way, and not in a Christian turn-the-other-cheek way, but to simply grow.

I could not handle more than one BDSM relationship.  As a curious explorer, I am curious and like to explore.  But that isn’t the same as being committed.  Of course, a commitment takes someone else, someone who wishes to receive that commitment.  My wife has turned to the church, to daily prayer and sermons.  Her God will perhaps receive her commitment.  Perhaps she will receive grace.  I could not abdicate what I feel to something outside myself.  I know that all I face can be resolved with all I feel.  When people sully me with their judgement or worse, I am purified by it.

While it is nice to commit to one person and to imagine that such a person is there for the journey, and for some, this path comes true, for others, well, we move on.  The things we need may change, what we want may change. Perhaps it is sad, perhaps not.  It is a shame that my wife feels the need to burn down the house as she exits the stage, still not fully realising that the hurt she casts at me sullies her too…and I find that in truth, it strengthens me, and I can see it diminish her before my eyes.  The cold shoulder, the lies, the judgement, the nastiness has begun to give my physical joy…not in a sadistic sense, but rather in a sense that her active debasement of me achieves its opposite, and I can see it in the eyes of those around me.

And what of the need to be needed?  

The danger of what ex-Mistress described as “no quid pro quo” was too easily interpreted as self-serving—ie. ‘don’t expect anything back from me’.  That made it hard to digest.  How can we trust purity of motive in someone that is reticent, hidden?  And nobody likes to give to an empty pit.  We all need and want to be appreciated.  When that isn’t there, our giving is truly unwelcome, even if it is not said to be.  For giving to someone who does not appreciate the gifts, or even the effort that goes into them, is wrong because it also cultivates a sense in the giver that there is something given, and those gifts are not given in a vacuum.  It is wrong to expect something in return, she is right.  But give and take, giving to each other, must still happen in a fashion that is equity balanced, and in the end, that is a quid pro quo, even if one act is not attached to another.

In other words, two people must nourish each other in positive ways.  That is the kind of giving and receiving which is healthy.  And you know it is there when someone relies on you.  When they lean on you.  When you are there for them.  And here is the hard part.  Setting out to be relied upon doesn’t work.  If you need to be needed, you have motive, and that motive is not clean.  And yet, we all need this.  It is the foundation of human connection, and it is also the foundation of successful relationships, and the deepest betrayals.

My wife, for example, needed me.  Perhaps too much.  That need began to suffocate me.  She said, “I think you hate me,” but I did not.  Now that I have cause to, I still don’t.  I feel pity.  I feel an enormous sense of relief to be able to walk away from someone without guilt.  Her performance serves the purpose of my liberation.  I would not have had the courage, or power, to break my marital commitment to her…a vow is sacred.  But here I am with broken vows, but they have been broken in the only way that makes it possible for me to feel free, to move forward without remorse.

And the new people who are coming into my life are all people who I would like to “be there” for.  But one cannot set out with that as a goal.  But it is the essence of community.  In community we are there for one another.

Miss Kim has said to me, “don’t look for community, build it,” and she is right.  She is someone who does this.  So does my Queen.  In wonderful ways.  Community built is all around me.  And somehow it becomes more and more solid with every passing day.  In community we are no longer apart.

And after a lifetime of being disembodied, literally, I am very much in my body.  And through settling into this body, I am finally able to engage with my fellow humans.  I don’t need to be needed.  I don’t even have to want or to seek.  It will come to me.