Submission, gosh, even writing that word is extremely difficult for me, a card-carrying, and proud of it, member of Control Freaks Anonymous. Submission is all about giving up control, letting someone else drive, and you are not, repeat not, allowed to touch the steering wheeel, even with the little finger of one hand, nor may you give directions, they get to decide where to take you.
Even though I trust my partner completely, if I did not we could not live a DD lifestyle, letting him do this is so extremely difficult. My natural inclination is to keep one hand at least close to the wheel, just in case I need to grab it again (purely in cases of emergency you understand!!), or to at least direct him to exactly where I want to go. True submission in this case means sitting on my hands, keeping my mouth firmly shut and going wherever he decides.
Submission is particularly difficult too as outside the home, in my professional life, I need to be dominant, strong and decisive, having a clear understanding of where we need to go, when and how to get there. Also I naturally expect the people who work for me to follow my lead without question. Of course I do not expect them to behave as mindless morons and I am happy to encourage a health debate about the relevant issues, but ultimately I decide where we go, even if they do not like it, and thus I am responsible if I make the wrong decision. Inside the home, I clearly am not the boss and should submit to my HoH's authority, but switching between these two modes can be very difficult, especially as I am not accustomed to sumission in any form. We both agree that it is easier for the HoH, who can, of course, can retain his dominant role all all times, outside and inside the home.
So why submit at all I hear you all asking, well all one of you who have read this blog so far!! As I have mentioned before, I spent the whole of my married life being in control, making every decision for my family because no one else could or would. After my separation and subsequent divorce I had no choice but to continue doing this. I was the "boss" at work, supermum at home not to mention sole breadwinner, chief cook, bottle washer and general dogsbody. A pretty awesome set of responsibilities for one "small" woman!! It was also an extremely tiring set of responsibilities and even though I had to do all of this for my family to survive, day after day I was both physically and mentally exhausted, not to mention emotionally drained. But, in some way this was also comforting, as the rest of my life was so out of control I needed to be "in control" somewhere.
You would have thought that when I finally found someone new to share my life with I would have been happy to share some of the responsiilities too. Obviously I would not expect my new partner to finance me or the kids, but he did expect, naturally that he would be able to look after me. However, better the devil you know than the role you don't know as they say, and I just could not give up all this control and allow him to do that. Every time he tried to help I would push him away, I was too scared to admit that this is what I truly wanted him to do, in case he would see me as weak or useless, or try to take advantage of me. The more he tried to help the worse I became, always trying to put him down when he tried, just to make sure that he didn't come up for air a second or third time. It was getting to the stage that, he would ask if I wanted him, for example, to lay the table for supper, instead of saying "yes, thank you" like a normal person, I would start shouting and ask him if he thought I was so useless that I couldn't lay a table myself, following this up with a long list of insults about firstly how useless he was about laying a table anyway - so it was easier to do it myself and then, I would reel off a long catalogue of every other one of his miniscule little faults, just for good measure. Even though he would admit that he is not the most domestically capable of men he surely did not deserve, nor should he have expected, such a response from me when he was just trying to help.
Of course I could not allow myself to admit that what I really wanted was someone to take care of me, as this would mean that I would have to admit to some kind of weakness. So instead I looked after everyone else, friends, family, colleagues etc and neglected myself, always putting others' needs before mine.
Part of the want/need to be looked after does come partly from my Christian upbringing with the ideal of the strong husband, taking care of his weaker wife ("to love her like Christ loved [his bride] the Church", an awesome responsibility for any man), who submits fully to his authority (yeah right, as one of my teenagers might say!), and partly from my observation of my parents' marriage, which was incredibly strong and although I consider that my parents were equals in most things, I always felt that my father was the "boss" of the house and took care of my mother, even though she was more than capable of doing so herself.
Just so that it is clear to you all I want to make it clear that though I am a Christian this is NOT a blog about Christian Domestic Discipline as I feel very uncomfortable with the extremes to which some people go under this heading.
So to summarise, we have a woman who is desparate to submit to her strong man, but is fighting it with every atom of her being. She is so scared of the prospect, that not only, is she running very fast in the opposite direction screaming, she is also doing her best to completely destroy the man she adores and cannot live without. She is doing her best to drive him away with her vitriolic tongue and outrageous behaviour because this is prefarable to admitting that she is terrified of losing him.
We also have a man who is desparate to take care of her, if she will only let him, but is getting seriously hurt, because she really knows how to kick a man when he is down, after all she knows his every weakness and exploits each one mercilessly, as they are, after all, like two halves of a single person. He does not want to fight back in case he hurts her, because he feels she has gone through so much pain in the past few years, and he does not want to leave her (as a sane man should do) because he loves her too much.
How can you stop her self destructive behaviour which is destroying both of them? He knows she hates herself for the way she behaves, she knows she is going to drive him away eventually, it is just a question of time, but just does not seem able to stop. As he won't fight back, she suffers no consequences for her behaviour and just repeats it over and over. He wants to take care of her, to relieve her from some of her burdens, but she just can't, or won't, let him in.
What can anyone do in these circumstances? Well, that was the question we were asking ourselves time and time again, we just seemed to be going round in circles with no way out, me engaging in the self-destructive behaviour described above, driving him away millimeter by millimeter, him becoming more and more demoralised wondering how he could exit the relationship with his sanity intact.
That was the point at which we stumbled over the practice of domestic discipline, the light came on and my life was turned upside down. From reading the blogs listed above, I finally understood how it could all work, how I could be "made" to let it work. I was finally going to be forced to submit to his authority, to give up the control to him and let him decide what was right for me and most importantly I was going to have to suffer real consequences for my awful behaviour. In return, he was going to have a chance to finally wrest the role of HoH from my grasp and to see an awful lot of my bare backside!! In short, he was going to give me a damn good spanking the minute I put a toe out of line.
I was going finally have to accept the word "submission" as part of my vocabulary and to learn how to do it properly. Yes it was a scary thought, but in fact, far more scary was the possiility that I might lose him and I was prepared to submit to anything rather than face that prospect, even if that submission would likely prove to be extremely painful in both the physical and emotional sense.
Even though I trust my partner completely, if I did not we could not live a DD lifestyle, letting him do this is so extremely difficult. My natural inclination is to keep one hand at least close to the wheel, just in case I need to grab it again (purely in cases of emergency you understand!!), or to at least direct him to exactly where I want to go. True submission in this case means sitting on my hands, keeping my mouth firmly shut and going wherever he decides.
Submission is particularly difficult too as outside the home, in my professional life, I need to be dominant, strong and decisive, having a clear understanding of where we need to go, when and how to get there. Also I naturally expect the people who work for me to follow my lead without question. Of course I do not expect them to behave as mindless morons and I am happy to encourage a health debate about the relevant issues, but ultimately I decide where we go, even if they do not like it, and thus I am responsible if I make the wrong decision. Inside the home, I clearly am not the boss and should submit to my HoH's authority, but switching between these two modes can be very difficult, especially as I am not accustomed to sumission in any form. We both agree that it is easier for the HoH, who can, of course, can retain his dominant role all all times, outside and inside the home.
So why submit at all I hear you all asking, well all one of you who have read this blog so far!! As I have mentioned before, I spent the whole of my married life being in control, making every decision for my family because no one else could or would. After my separation and subsequent divorce I had no choice but to continue doing this. I was the "boss" at work, supermum at home not to mention sole breadwinner, chief cook, bottle washer and general dogsbody. A pretty awesome set of responsibilities for one "small" woman!! It was also an extremely tiring set of responsibilities and even though I had to do all of this for my family to survive, day after day I was both physically and mentally exhausted, not to mention emotionally drained. But, in some way this was also comforting, as the rest of my life was so out of control I needed to be "in control" somewhere.
You would have thought that when I finally found someone new to share my life with I would have been happy to share some of the responsiilities too. Obviously I would not expect my new partner to finance me or the kids, but he did expect, naturally that he would be able to look after me. However, better the devil you know than the role you don't know as they say, and I just could not give up all this control and allow him to do that. Every time he tried to help I would push him away, I was too scared to admit that this is what I truly wanted him to do, in case he would see me as weak or useless, or try to take advantage of me. The more he tried to help the worse I became, always trying to put him down when he tried, just to make sure that he didn't come up for air a second or third time. It was getting to the stage that, he would ask if I wanted him, for example, to lay the table for supper, instead of saying "yes, thank you" like a normal person, I would start shouting and ask him if he thought I was so useless that I couldn't lay a table myself, following this up with a long list of insults about firstly how useless he was about laying a table anyway - so it was easier to do it myself and then, I would reel off a long catalogue of every other one of his miniscule little faults, just for good measure. Even though he would admit that he is not the most domestically capable of men he surely did not deserve, nor should he have expected, such a response from me when he was just trying to help.
Of course I could not allow myself to admit that what I really wanted was someone to take care of me, as this would mean that I would have to admit to some kind of weakness. So instead I looked after everyone else, friends, family, colleagues etc and neglected myself, always putting others' needs before mine.
Part of the want/need to be looked after does come partly from my Christian upbringing with the ideal of the strong husband, taking care of his weaker wife ("to love her like Christ loved [his bride] the Church", an awesome responsibility for any man), who submits fully to his authority (yeah right, as one of my teenagers might say!), and partly from my observation of my parents' marriage, which was incredibly strong and although I consider that my parents were equals in most things, I always felt that my father was the "boss" of the house and took care of my mother, even though she was more than capable of doing so herself.
Just so that it is clear to you all I want to make it clear that though I am a Christian this is NOT a blog about Christian Domestic Discipline as I feel very uncomfortable with the extremes to which some people go under this heading.
So to summarise, we have a woman who is desparate to submit to her strong man, but is fighting it with every atom of her being. She is so scared of the prospect, that not only, is she running very fast in the opposite direction screaming, she is also doing her best to completely destroy the man she adores and cannot live without. She is doing her best to drive him away with her vitriolic tongue and outrageous behaviour because this is prefarable to admitting that she is terrified of losing him.
We also have a man who is desparate to take care of her, if she will only let him, but is getting seriously hurt, because she really knows how to kick a man when he is down, after all she knows his every weakness and exploits each one mercilessly, as they are, after all, like two halves of a single person. He does not want to fight back in case he hurts her, because he feels she has gone through so much pain in the past few years, and he does not want to leave her (as a sane man should do) because he loves her too much.
How can you stop her self destructive behaviour which is destroying both of them? He knows she hates herself for the way she behaves, she knows she is going to drive him away eventually, it is just a question of time, but just does not seem able to stop. As he won't fight back, she suffers no consequences for her behaviour and just repeats it over and over. He wants to take care of her, to relieve her from some of her burdens, but she just can't, or won't, let him in.
What can anyone do in these circumstances? Well, that was the question we were asking ourselves time and time again, we just seemed to be going round in circles with no way out, me engaging in the self-destructive behaviour described above, driving him away millimeter by millimeter, him becoming more and more demoralised wondering how he could exit the relationship with his sanity intact.
That was the point at which we stumbled over the practice of domestic discipline, the light came on and my life was turned upside down. From reading the blogs listed above, I finally understood how it could all work, how I could be "made" to let it work. I was finally going to be forced to submit to his authority, to give up the control to him and let him decide what was right for me and most importantly I was going to have to suffer real consequences for my awful behaviour. In return, he was going to have a chance to finally wrest the role of HoH from my grasp and to see an awful lot of my bare backside!! In short, he was going to give me a damn good spanking the minute I put a toe out of line.
I was going finally have to accept the word "submission" as part of my vocabulary and to learn how to do it properly. Yes it was a scary thought, but in fact, far more scary was the possiility that I might lose him and I was prepared to submit to anything rather than face that prospect, even if that submission would likely prove to be extremely painful in both the physical and emotional sense.
In the next installment I will try to explain "submission and how to do it right", or at least how I try to do it as I am still somewhat of a novice in this respect and am still feeling my way in this unfamiliar territory. More importantly I will try to put into words the vast benefits that I have already experienced in the three months we have been living in a domestic discipline relationship, although it may seem unbelievable, there really are huge benefits to finally agreeing to submit to my partner's authority.
1 comment:
Hil,
Wow, what a post! It scared me for a minute as.....That hit at home. I thought for a moment that maybe you knew me and was describing me!
Love you blog, I must catch up to date.
Minx
Post a Comment