my relationship with subbing

Lately, I’ve had a lot of questions in my Formspring inbox about BDSM in my relationship. I figured I could address a lot of it in a post of its own.

To be frank, there’s a lot more *desire* to integrate BDSM (specifically bondage, dominance, and submission) into our relationship than we have so far. There are a few reasons for this. The main one is that I have a very, very hard letting go of my mind. During sex but also just in general. I have an extremely active brain, always mentally sorting things and being in charge and adding things to my to-do list and needing to know exactly what’s going on at all times. I’m a control freak, yes it’s true. I’m trying to find strategies for shutting down my brain a bit, but it’s largely a process of trial and error. This doesn’t mean that I’m checking off my to-do list while fucking, but it does mean that I tend to be focused a lot on what she’s doing and how and why and what does it feel like, rather than just letting go and getting into any sort of subspace. I desperately want to find that subspace and carve out a mental home for myself there, but for me it’s definitely a process. I suspect this has a lot to do with protecting myself from trauma, because when I was raped, I guess you could say in a way I went waaaaaaaay too far into some sort of subspace. So now, whenever I feel myself slipping into submission to ML, my mind tenses briefly and it’s gone.

Trust is my main way out, I think. We both need to be able to trust each other absolutely in order to pull it off. I need to trust that she is taking care of me, and she needs to trust that I will be absolutely honest about what’s ok and what isn’t. Conversely, we both need to be able to trust ourselves. She needs to trust herself that she won’t hurt me and that she is absolutely capable of carrying my pleasure in her hands. And I need to trust myself that I will know my limits once they’ve been reached, and that my body is strong, not fragile. So, trust. I think we’ve got the trusting each other part down. Why is trusting yourself so much harder?

All of this isn’t to say we don’t use elements of BDSM in our sex, because oh, we do. That’s what makes me crave it so much, because I want more. Feeling physically trapped has been, so far, the most reliable way of triggering my slip into a preliminary subspace of sorts. She’ll lean her arm across my chest to pin me down and I gasp and feel a tug and a release inside somewhere, in my mind. Last weekend, when we were in Cambria for the long weekend, she had my arms pinned down to the bed and she was on top of me and she was looking over my shoulder at something and when I asked what she was looking at and tried to follow her gaze, I couldn’t because I was trapped beneath her, and she laughed at my struggle and I felt that familiar internal tug and release which is the best way I can figure out to describe the feeling of letting go of control. It’s like I feel physically and emotionally surrounded by her in the best way possible. It’s hard to explain. But it’s that feeling that opens the tight fist my mind has over me. That’s the feeling that I equate with submission.

Bottoming is something else entirely, and maybe I’ll write a separate post soon on what I consider the difference between “bottoming” and “subbing” and the difference between “topping” and “domming.” Quickly: topping/bottoming don’t involve head-space and power imbalance. Subbing/domming do. I “bottom” quite a bit — she orders me around, fucks me, spanks me — but I’m only sometimes able to land in sub-space. I’m working on it.