Bottled Anger
I am not very good at dealing with anger. What I mean is that I have never really allowed myself to feel anger. I have always been very good (too good) at allowing myself to cool down, to take myself out of a situation, to deal with it rationally, and then come back to it later. I never fire off the angry email. I cannot remember ever yelling at someone. I can get snippy, but never *angry*. I usually regret things I speak in anger. I have learned not to speak from that place.
As a rule this serves me very well. What this also means, though, is that I rarely experience the cathartic letting go which releasing anger allows. The last time I remember being truly possessed of my anger was January 1, 2001. Following a new year’s eve party my ex-boyfriend hosted with his then new boyfriend, I went out into the woods and screamed and cried and raged against all that I felt was unfair about the end of our relationship. I was in deep, deep anguish but I had bottled it up in the name of being mature and grown up about the situation.
One of my major fantasies about relationships and sex is to be in situations where a dominant makes me angry and doesn’t release me or comfort me. An example: a Dom I chat with talks about how in his last D/s relationship his boy often slept on the floor, that it was a treat for his boy to sleep in bed with him. Now, I am a hopeless romantic. I love cuddling up next to my boyfriend. So one fantasy is to be flogged (or otherwise given pain on the outer edge of what I can handle), and then be bound, muzzled, and left to sleep on the floor for the night. A variation on that is coming home on a Friday, being told to cancel my plans, and then being bound by myself for the evening or whole night. I imagine I would be angry in either situation. In my fantasy there would be nothing I could do about it. And that makes me.. extremely… horny.
Given that I have fairly firm control over my emotions and my anger, it makes sense that in my fantasy life I confront this and give myself over to it. I’m not sure why I didn’t make this connection before. It gives me hope I can make similar connections, in order to better understand where these deep desires come from and be more emotionally open and available.
Well, they call it psychosexuality for a reason! One of the things I find amazing and wondrous about BDSM is the ways in which it can mean so many things not just to different people but to one person (or, more wondrously, the two people mutually involved.) Like many great things, there’s a paradox here — that encounters involving disparities in power and authority can lead both parties to understand themselves more deeply. I’m not a “spiritual person”, but I often find myself talking about BDSM in spiritual terms — probably because it’s the only language we have to describe these things and the atheistic, rational mystic in me likes the idea of it. But, it’s true, BDSM is a means of plumbing the dark and sometimes frightening caves of ourselves, in the same way that the various mystical, and often very intense, spiritual orders. And, on the plus side, there’s always a rope handy to climb back out with!
10 August 2011 at 6:12 am
I think it’s interesting and mildly frustrating that I haven’t been able to see these connections before now. I know why they are starting to present themselves to me, I just wish I had been paying attention more so I could have at least started to understand before. Because it’s helpful in understanding why I get aroused by what arouses me, but also because it makes me feel less awkward about why stuff turns me on. Seeing how each is a separate side of the same me helps me see an integrated whole, and feel less that one side or the other needs to change.
10 August 2011 at 8:43 pm
I think it’s more interesting than frustrating. It’s the nature of self-discovery. Things may seem quite obvious in retrospect, but they only become visible when we’re ready to see them. Yes, it would perhaps have been nicer to save yourself the pain of thinking you need to change, but things shouldn’t always come easily. You describe these revelations as making you feel less awkward about what turns you on, but I’d say it’s probably more of a feedback loop: you feel less awkward about them so you are more open to exploring them in an open way which in turn leads to discoveries that makes you feel even less awkward, etc.
The whole question of “why” things turn me on is complicated and often annoying. The fact that they turn me on at all seems good enough to me, most of the time. On the one hand, asking the question often seems to assume there has to be a “reason” for something so . . . deviant. On the other hand, I’m an introspective person, and something as vital and human and complicated as sexuality just needs to be explored. And once I got over both my nonchalance and my crankiness, I’ve found that such explorations, when undertaken in light of genuine understanding and not banal explanation, can be deeply rewarding in aspects of my life that otherwise seem disconnected from BDSM. Trying to stitch together a whole person out of the millions of random parallel processes of the psyche is not easy, but it is worth the effort.
11 August 2011 at 5:00 am