Roots of the Problem

 Whenever you reach the juncture where the Vanilla world intersecting with my world and curiosity is peaked  there comes the question 

 What got you into BDSM in the first place? 

The problem comes before the solution. My parents fell  somewhere on the less than healthy end of the mental health scale. Granted in the late 70s and early 80s mental health was not where it is today. This says a lot  since we still have a long way to go with mental health. A look at the prevalence of mass shootings fully confirms this . I am not making excuses for how my parents abused me. As a parent who is mentally ill, I can see how the trail of bad decisions and lack of self care could lead to that place. My amends to my parents is to do better with my child than they were able to do with me.  

Escape was the first coping skill I acquired. I made myself into a fantasy world. Enamored with monsters and superheroes , Transylvania was safer than the world outside my bedroom.  High fantasy like Tolkien and Robert E Howard’s Conan books painted landscapes for my imagination to travel. This was before the 90s gave rise to the anti-hero. Bat-man was still traipsing around with Robin in brighter colors than the ones he is shown today. My favorites were all outsiders and loners. Conan , the Hulk, Frankenstein and Tarzan. Other kids played with Hot Wheels and Transformers, while I played with action figures of the Universal Monsters.

 Those characters and my other heroes had one thing in common. They were all strong. Some endowed with superhuman strength than others. Frankenstein handled men like they were children. As a child being mishandled by adults the equation was simple: the stronger you were the more in control.   It is no mystery why superheroes have been important to me. They are empowered. Children have no power . This is magnified when you are abused at a young age.  The abuser is larger and more powerful, amplifying this feeling.  This instilled in my mind might be right. This is not a concept that is always untrue. Here we get into what is right and wrong.

I can tell you it was seeing Lynda Carter tied up as  Wonder Woman . That image stuck with me, but if I am being honest and not just surface level honest, is that the real reason? I could tell you the reason this book is called “Smell the Glove” is because it’s the name of a Spinal Tap album, and a wink to heavy metal imagery of leather and chains that pushed this idea further into the teen years.Are so called “normal” children stimulated by those things? What made them resonate with me is where we need to go . It is also where things are going to get complicated. I can see where this colored my choices . My earliest interest in domination was wrestling with other little boys. Always naturally strong this preoccupation with subduing people only continued. With parents who were somewhere on the unhealthy side of the mental health spectrum, 

This is not to say that you played a part when you were or even an adolescent. When you choose to drag it around into today as an adult then that is the part you play. 

“You are a man you could never understand what it is like to be raped and abused. 

“Thank you for bringing that up. When I was eight, my father was the pastor / leader for a bikers for Jesus movement. He took in his old Hells Angels buddies when they got out of prison. This was done in hopes to convert them. Even in the conversion process at least two of them like to get drunk and take turns raping 8 year old boys. Well one in particular … me. So in other words shut the fuck up. 

This launched me into adolescence with an excess of aggression.   BDSM is certainly the most appropriate avenue to channel this aggression in a healthy way. My choices were not always healthy. There are many theories tossed around by doctors. One is I was genetically predisposed to mental illness and  self medicated with drugs. Another would be mental illness was latent and the drug abuse brought it to the forefront. Whatever the case was, I spent 17 years doing drugs. The last six were serious heroin. I kicked heroin on my own and after a year of trying to drink, smoke pot and do cocaine like a normal person I enlisted the aid of the 12 step programs, as well an outpatient treatment. 

My greatest teacher during this period was my therapist Sandy. I would be dead today if not for her. Certain concepts like medication I was resistant to. I was sober for six years before I began taking medication, as the depression became too much to handle and I began making suicide attempts sober. During this time my diagnosis was a major depressive disorder. It was not until a few years ago that I was diagnosed with bi polar 2. The symptoms of my mania had been present along , but never identified. It manifests in anxiety, insomnia. Obsessive masturbatuion and hyper sexuality. To the point that Sandy had suggested I look into 12 step programs for sexual addiction.  It was cool to hear other people struggling with problems of that nature, looking back I have to wonder how many of them were just undiagnosed like me. Labelling myself a sex addict , only gave me feeling of guilt and shame which were the same feelings I medicated with drugs and alcohol. My mother’s drug was religion. As a result I was told these impulses were wrong and dirty. Jesus was watching me masturbate. If he was watching teenage boys do that, which I find hard to believe, he certainly was not a god I wanted anything to do with. 

Lets go back to masturbation. Due to being abused as a child, the need for control colored all the early sexual fantasies. In the 80’s a common trope in  science fiction was for the villain to create a resume of disdain  often some kind of would be tyrant in power, would capture the female protagonist or love interest of the male protagonist and upon capturing them would forcibly strip them or force them to strip in front of them. This introduced an element of humiliation. These scenes fueled my early masturbation excursions. I already had a fetish for women who looked like super villainesses, like Elvira and Sybil Danning.  This along with eroticizing any sexual elements in horror movies was the vehicle that carried me into my early sexual years as an adolescent. Taking a more dominant role with other high school girls. The fantasy was always better than the reality. 

Choking was the first common activity that crossed over. The imagery is of course all over heavy metal culture, particularly the band W.A,S,P that I was into who chained girls up to a rack and mock tortured them in concert. Things like this were alluded to in movies, the first dominatrix I remember seeing was in the horror movie “From Beyond” . If Hollywood was being used as the picture of what BDSM looked like then it seemed this was a role only taken on by women. There was no appeal in being handcuffed to a bed. It did not make sense to me, when girls I dated tried to take on this role, I simply overpowered them, the handcuffs were always so cheap I could break them . Being submissive was just not in my blood.

Thus began my journey into BDSM , for which I found a path I might turn the wounds of the past into strengths rather than live life as a victim. While I might not be a submissive, we have created a program which works for both types of the power dynamic. For further information feel free to contact us and keep reading here.