First round of photos with our new digital SLR.

I made the decision to get back into BDSM when I had been clean of self injury for several years. It was a battle reconciling with the healthy masochist. While self harm literature is far from consensus, there is a pervasive idea that continuing to injure the body in any way is a form of self harm. That the self harmer needs to approach recovery much like an alcoholic in AA, with complete sobriety.

I had spent the prior two and a half years avoiding all kinds of pain. I refused to own knives, I would get upset with myself if I even had the urge to hit the wall, and I would not allow any enjoyment of accidental injury. Simultaneously I was feeling guilt about my scars that I would not acknowledge. There was a deep shame that I had ever thought it justifiable to hurt myself. After separating from my vanilla marriage I was plagued by highly erotic memories involving bleeding, bruising, aggression, and submission.

It was a crossroads, a recognition of the merging of two paths, and to continue moving forward these two ideas would have to coexist. I had to be able to be a self injurer in recovery, and a sexual masochist. In one of my first scenes that summer, I consented to a mark, due to a calculation error this mark covered my chest. I found myself in an old turmoil of coping with marks, going between pride, guilt, and shame.

As a self injurer marks are complicated, and in recovery it doesn’t cease to be complicated. As discussion of scars can be triggering, they often go unmentioned in peer support groups. Clinical professionals often have difficulty coping with the self injury of their patients, so there is no safe space to make amends with scars.

My self injury came from multiple places, one was that it verified that my pain was real. There was validation in the damage to my body, however it wasn’t completely positive. It came from self destruction, and often a lose of control. Either from spontaneously self injuring without prior planning, or not being able to resist the urge to engage in the ritual of gathering tools and cutting methodically.

Also loved ones do a downright terrible job of managing their emotions around a self injurer. It is a difficult thing to identify with. So while actively self injuring there is an ever present need to hide the injury. New marks become the center of life constantly looking at clothes to see if anything bled through. Turning the injured part of the body away from others when getting dressed. Keeping hands away when making love.

It was culture shock to see the pride with which those in the BDSM community bore marks. There was also a varied education amongst submissives when it came to coping with pain and injury. For some it was obviously healthy, a sign of trust within a D/s relationship, a sign of endurance, or a moment of healing. Others I observed undergoing serious injury with no real goal or intention, and sometimes without joy in undergoing that degree of pain.

It was then that I began to delve into me to figure out what would continue recovery, and how to have healthy pride regarding my past. I realized that my behavior in the BDSM scene had to come from a place of love towards myself. That the pain had to honor who I was, and that every partner had to honor that part of me. I also had to love my scars, I had to be ok with what was.

It is a humbling experience to approach all decisions from the perspective of self love. It is hard to look at meeting needs in a way that is positive and propels growth. It is also hard to recognize that in some ways we are all unhealthy, and that not all people are dedicated to their growth and despite our love for them, the need to love ourselves severs them from our lives. It was at this point that life became a journey, a constant acceptance between steps. It was then that masochism could be accepted as a need and a tool in working the path.

That December I had a scene that left me bruised from my neck to my toes. The scene didn’t come out of an established relationship, or mutually expressed goal. It was simply for the hell of it, to show that I could do it. There was a laugh in my step as I brushed my hair just so over my neck before work, when it hurt to walk quite right. This ritual of hiding was an old one, in a new context. It was fun, it was sexy, it came from a place of love and power.

BDSM became a place of healing. To me it remains one of the most powerful approaches to bondage. Affection shown through pain, tears and blood calls for more of the self than a kiss on the cheek. To continue on that path from a positive regard for the self and the partner is a place of strength. To continue on that path without fear and without bargaining surrender. When the elements of BDSM come from a place of love, that’s powerful.

Though I still rarely consent to scenes that involve a lot of injury. One reason is that I like to keep a healthy pain tolerance, another is I like to avoid damage to my body. More importantly I don’t wish to lose sight of the value of intention. Self injury starts from a place of “I only need to do this to get over feeling this bad”. That holds true for a little while, but then there is a recognition that self harm can assist in getting over other feelings, and that sometimes it just feels good. It takes more and more damage to get the same result. The initial task of coping becomes one of destruction. It becomes addiction.

For me to stay healthy injury in scene has to have value. Even if only I know the value, even if the value is only found after the scene is over, even if it is never spoken aloud. It has to have value. Much of BDSM involves changing our associations with control, pain, aggression and surrender. It is an ongoing process and I continue to find new demons to confront and ghosts to exorcise. Despite moments of discomfort the sum product is one of growth.

The shift in my attitude has spread to old scars, and I have no issue with my pride. To be where I am today with an ongoing commitment to progress, I had to be where I was. So much of my shift in awareness, so much of what has made moments powerful for me came from those scars. To be able to love them now, gives them value.

Sit on Santa’s Lap on Fetlife.

This is something I think anyone who has been involved in BDSM for awhile already knows, even if it is only implicitly. However, most articles I find revolve around technique, etiquette and protocol. Trust often comes up in a cursory way as something that is necessary, though not as a core component.

When I started to look for Dominant partners for play I realized I was screening in a completely different way than I had in any other relationship. I knew I was into some edgy stuff, and for safety alone it was important that I could trust potential partners to perform these kinds of play safely. The equation ended up being a balance of technical skill, maturity, and empathy.

Empathy? Yes, I used that word in relation to Dominant sadists, what good is it to be in a relationship with someone who can’t tell the difference between being really mean, and being REALLY mean. How could I trust someone like that? How good is play as a submissive if you have to keep one eye open? After a few early experiences I learned that it is important for the Dominant to be able to remain in tune with me throughout the duration of the scene. Not simply in tune with how much I was screaming, but what I was screaming about and why.

This discussion however, is still only reaching the technical aspects of D/s in relation to trust. I tend to think that because the physical acts we do with one another are so different, they get most of the attention. The emotional acts are just as important, and are also altered from a normal relationship. Likewise, a lot of what drives the erotic aspect of a normal relationship has nothing to do with technical skill, it has to do with the emotional interaction. The same is true for BDSM.

ASPECTS OF TRUST IN D/s

The submissive has to trust the submissive: the submissive needs to trust that she can tolerate the full potential of the scene. This trust in herself needs to persevere through the increasing intensity of the scene itself. She needs to believe that can get through it, and continue to be aware, in charge, and genuine with herself and her responses.

The Dominant has to trust the Dominant: the Dominant needs to trust that he knows the how his actions effect the submissive. That his understanding of the skills and tools being used is solid enough that he can gauge what of his actions will have what effect on the submissive.

The submissive has to trust the Dominant: the submissive needs to be able to trust that no action of the Dominant is going to move her past her own safe threshold. This includes physical, emotional and mental safety. The submissive needs to trust that the Dominant can read her and differentiate between good pain and bad pain, and that the Dominant with maintain empathy.

The Dominant has to trust the submissive: the Dominant has to trust that the submissive is rendering genuine responses and is in tune with herself and how she is receiving the Dominant’s actions. If the Dominant cannot trust this he cannot trust that he can gauge the effect of his actions by the reaction of the submissive.

When trust exists along all of these different points, it’s a powerful scene indeed. It also stops being about whatever tools are being used in the scene, it becomes about the emotional interchange. When I am Dominant I am aware of how whatever toys I use simply become an extension of me and my entire focus is on the submissive partner and where I want them to go. Likewise as a submissive I stop feeling different kinds of pain, I only feel the direction of the Dominant partner.

I have found that even scenes with friends or occasional play partners when these equations have balanced out there was a new implicit closeness and understanding of one another. As a successful scene is transcends the actions of those involved and becomes about getting into each others heads, and that happens because the parties involved can trust one another to go there. It’s the true location of power exchange, and it flows in both directions as empathy flows between both parties.

I wanted to add that this also translates to Switch/switch scenes, also to any gender combination. This particular binary was the easiest to work with on this particular topic. For interplay with Switch dynamics please reference those essays, and I promise to write more on that in the future.

Rainbow Brite had a nice home on my desk, she was the girl of bondage bear, and they were very happy cuddling next to my lamp.  One day Rainbow mysteriously appeared on the stairs.  A few days later her I found her dress in my bed.  She had been kidnapped!   Turns out our kitten, Harlequin, aka Little Bit had taken Rainbow to his rape den.  All attempts to save Rainbow and return her to mistress Bondage Bear have failed.  One day I actually managed to catch the rapist in action:

Riot Grrrl was a brief movement in the early 1990s which focused on allowing girls to be grrrls.  It’s agenda addressed violence and oppression of young women.  Focusing on emotional, physical and sexual abuse as well as domestic violence and rape.  The movement also address how girls were raised to be complacent about these issues, and in general.  This was also at the beginning of the third wave feminist movement which moved the focus to flaws in gender norms, sexuality as well as beginning to address feminism cross culturally.

I reached adolescence right after the peak of the Riot Grrrl movement.  My first forays into the internet were filled with riot grrrls.  While I wasn’t super into the music, I did dig some of the politics.  While the actual history of riot grrrl was only easily found on the internet, riot grrrl was alive and well in almost every counter culture movement I participated in.  It was actually an expectation that I would call myself a girl.  It was permission to scream, get dirty, get angry, be fun and be passionate.  Terming myself a young woman would disallow this kind of behavior.

So while many of us had lost touch with what it meant to be a grrrl, and where that philosophy had arisen from, we embraced it.  We rolled around in the dirt, trampled the city in ripped tights and combat boots.  It was an amazingly freeing way to be, and even through getting married, finishing up college, and beginning to go to work I looked forward to the days I could be dirty and loud.  I remained a grrrl at heart.

Thing is, I’m not a girl anymore.  In those in between years when my body, sex drive and mind were all new to me, there was no doubt that womanhood was still far out of reach.  Reverting to grrrl, allowed me to keep a sense of control over my development.  Stating that those behaviors were a part of the female identity, and were how I would learn and continue to develop was important.  I learned a whole lot.  Now I’m in my late twenties, and I don’t identify with the grrrls I meet.

They’re young, into experiencing, they lack dedication to long term goals.  They’re often not as assertive as they think they are, they don’t know nearly as much as they think they do.  I know this in part because I was there no so long ago.  At the same time growing up has not quieted me down a bit, I am as loud as ever.  I own pleather 10-holed steel-toed combat boots, and they’re muddy.  Not much has changed.

Except for that whole experienced piece.  At first it really confused me, I was taught to embrace being a grrrl forever.  Though I was ceasing to identify with all that a grrrl was.  Instead I was feeling more entangled in the mysticism of being a woman.  Through being so loud and crazy in my youth I really got to know my body.  I began to know what I liked, and how to look good, feel good, and approach these things with a sense of deliberateness and maturity in a way a grrrl can’t.

I woke up one day to realize I was a woman different than the mainstream has known.  Though not very different from my mother, the hippie and 2nd wave feminist.  Like her, I wear what I want to wear, and do what I want to do.  No doubt I’m evolved in that I put more emphasis on sexuality, though it is much the same.  No one told me I could grow up to be this way.  I got lucky and stumbled into it.

It makes me wonder about how my fellow grrrls are fairing.   Many have disappeared.  Out of an entire collective of websites only a handful still exist, only 1 or 2 have been updated in the past year.  Of my friends in high school I know several have turned to alcohol or drugs, twice that number dropped out of college.  In the generation behind mine I know that many are drifting from job to job, relationship to relationship, who knows how many gave up on being a grrrl entirely.

How many of us got lost in wondering what came after grrrl?  While it is powerful to speak up for yourself, be in charge and spontaneous there is a certain amount of growth that is absent.  While I do despise the  classic tutoring of young women, no one taught us grrrls to be anything but.  I know that recently I have felt more drawn to taking younger generations under my wing.  Teaching that there is a way along the path from grrrl to woman, without becoming complacent to social norms.

In a generation where the term girl has been moved into mainstream culture without the history of its power I can’t see this being anything but necessity.  We need to know where we came from, and how to take the next step to being women with the upbringing of grrrls.  We can’t grow up and teach when we’re addicted, uneducated, or have simply forgotten who we are and where we came from.  We won’t get anywhere unless we empower ourselves and aren’t afraid to grow.

Here are some resources, and I do wish there were more:

• Wikipedia on Riot Grrrl
• Grrrl Zine Network
• From Girl to Woman to Grrrl
• Wikipedia on 3rd Wave Feminsm

Books:

• Girls Guide to Taking Over the World
• Riot Grrrl: Revolution Girl Style Now!

What isn’t a secret, though I don’t readily talk about is that I am a recovering amnesiac.  When I was 10 my family moved, and it seemed extremely convenient to “forget” everything that came before.  One of my strongest memories was one of my last.  My parents driving me to my old elementary school during recess right before the move so I could sneak in and empty out my desk.  I was afraid the entire time that I would run into someone, because I didn’t have a single friend there.

A lot of my reasons for being, and the heart of my community service is based on the concept of recovery, as that has been the center of my life.  By 12 I was dealing with severe depression, at 15 I met my first therapist, at 17 I started having flashbacks, and at 19 I was in and out of the psychiatric hospital.  I often forget where I’ve come from, and I realize most people who encounter me day to day have no clue about my past.  While overall I am upbeat and have a positive sense of self, I’m still haunted.

The issue with amnesia is that while I don’t remember the facts of situations, my body remembers the emotions, and still reacts to triggers.  So often I cope by shutting out my emotional responses completely, if I don’t feel anything, I can’t feel anything bad.  Except, then I end up flooding, and feel a torrent of emotions all at once.  I’ve gotten stronger over the years and have increased my emotional range, and am triggered less frequently.

Though the more I feel day to day, the closer I am to history.  The more I let in, the deeper it goes.  I experience more triggers, and at times flashbacks.  This process becomes a force all on its own, and it builds up momentum.  If I try to stop it, I get crushed beneath it, all I can do is keep being wiling to move through it.  Sometimes, that becomes incredibly hard.  I spent a lot of late September/early October digging.  I was reacting to situations without knowing why, or knowing exactly what I felt.

Now for the past couple of weeks I’ve been having trouble getting good sleep.  Night terrors, waking up frequently.  It’s getting harder to stay in a good mood, and I can feel something knocking on the door.  Never have I gotten to answer the door to the face of a friendly ghost.

It is hard to not be paralyzed.  Even more so to not be afraid, the more I fear the more I color my memories and my present with negativity.  Though I struggle to continue to be active, and to continue to feel.  To be everyday without anxiety.  To be everyday without fearing that I won’t be tomorrow.  Since I have given into that fear in the past, I have shutdown, I have stopped progressing, and while I picked up and kept moving eventually.  That fear remains.

Often, I accuse the wrong enemy for my troubles.  While I began forgetting, numbing, and pushing away to survive my enemies.  Those coping skills have now become the enemy, and my fear has become yet another.  Perhaps fear really is the chief contender in all of this, and in the end causes the most setbacks and pain.  Because if I fear enough, I really can’t.  It is only if I believe that I really can get through this.

I forget that I am now an adult with a graduate degree, a house, and a car.  I get paid to walk the halls of hospitals, I am no longer locked inside of them.  Even though I still like pain, I have not put a blade to my own skin out of hate or avoidance in over three years.  That these days I am as sane as anybody, and stronger than most.  Despite all the attempts made to shatter me, I always return whole.  Saying is much easier than doing, though at least it is a first step.

Recovery is a never ending process; we hurt and heal until we die.  In psychotherapy there is currently a modal shift to a recovery focus.  Rather than looking at the client as being “broken” and needing to be “fixed,” the field is moving towards viewing the client as already on the path towards healing and the therapist as simply a guide along the way.  I explain this to my clients several times a day.  I know the complex expression of dread, grief and relief, as well the nervous laugh and sudden change in topic to the weather that signals the session is over.

While my hurt is no longer acute, it’s still there.  There are also days when all that I’ve been through seems unjustified, that I shouldn’t have needed to ever experience so much agony to live a normal life, only to realize the irony is that the only way around not judging myself and my own actions is to recognize that much in life does not know justice.  Much in life is unfair or makes no sense.  It’s a simple truth that brings equal comfort and pain in extremes I have difficulty reconciling.  It’s the kind of state of mind that causes us to create gods to make it easier for us to digest.

Eventually I just get over myself and recognize that to try haggle with what simply is is simply a waste of time.  That what I have at this point in time is a lot of experience managing my still very shattered mind.  If I want my life to continue to grow and improve I need to be willing to use that experience and keep working on it.

Truth is we’re all pretty broken.  We’re all born made of glass, and if we’re lucky we get through life with only a few chips here and there.  Glass is strong stuff, however the right angles make or break it.  We’re all trying to repair ourselves and deal with our damage.  Each fissure and shard is as unique as every person.  So unique we can’t really draw comparisons between one another.

So I will always be in a state of repair.  I will always be breaking.  That is the process of life; to pick up the pieces.  While I cannot control or change the past, nor necessarily avoid all harm in the present or future, I choose what I fix.  I choose what breaks are worth the pain of setting.  I decide what I’m strong enough to take.

Recently my life moved from a state of crisis to one of maintenance.  The beauty of crisis is that we tend to only be able to deal with the immediate, and are able to take on super human amounts of trial and pain.  Our bodies and minds adapt as a means of survival.  My crisis was to get to a point where I had the ability to continue to heal and to grow.  Now I’m there, and all of that special ability is gone.  Addressing issues is now just an option.  Most will not cause another crisis, and none will help resolve one.  Really the only motivation I have to continue to address them is all of the mayhem I went through to get to this place.  I decided there was a reason to be here.

There are moments when I am writing in the abstract where I wonder if I am skirting past coping with my own issues or if I am simply coming to a state of acceptance that the details of how I hurt are meaningless, that sitting with these little truths about life are actually how I cope, to be able to sit with an answer, even if it’s just for a moment.

My work day today kept me in the city, so on the way home I went by my former anarchist collective. I still love these guys and believe in everything they do. Sadly, I’m often too busy being kinky to venture out to see them.

They’re always excited to hear about what I’m doing, and I talked about how I’m looking to apply anarchist ethics to the ways in which kinky folks interact and learn from each other. While catching up with my old comrades I realized that my crazy plan from two summers ago was actually working. That I was finally feeling like I was giving back to my old home that had given so much to me.

I remember the heartbreaking moment when I realized my activism was taking a different path, that I had reached the point of diminishing return with a group I had grown so close to, and put so much energy into. I knew that while I had learned a lot from the anarchist community, that my knowledge was not best applied there. I left heading out into a vague territory of sex positivity, erotica and kink.

What is commonly misunderstood about anarchy is that it isn’t about a lack of order. It is about a lack of hierarchy. Forming organizations, and social groups, on a concept of mutual aid and self responsibility. We actually love structure and finding sane ways to communicate and teach ideas. Anarchy is also not just about government, it is about re-envisioning culture. Addressing any social norm or construct that is fundamentally flawed.

My divorce woke me up to many flawed norms regarding human sexuality. Since intimacy, sex, and relationships have always been central and grounding features of my life it seemed worthwhile to address the issue. All that thinking led me here, where I’m traveling to sex positive venues and have kinksters over at our house several times a month.  Living in 24/7 kinky and poly relationships.

Though now my ethics and atypical lifestyle aren’t just about me, and keeping me happy. They’re not just about my close friends and partners. They’re about my community, about our world, and educating anyone willing to listen that there are other ways to be.

Next year is going to be exciting, we’re planning to start a skillshare out of our home by the end of this year. It was a big conversation piece this afternoon with my fellow anarchists.  How to apply new methods of social organization to new methods of sexuality.  I don’t know where that’s going, but I’ve got the sense that it’s somewhere good.