(Note: the following post should not be taken as advice. It is only my personal experience.)
“Don’t beat yourself up.” That is what therapists have told me, self-help books have told me, friends and family have told me. Telling yourself how terrible you are is self-defeating, it paralyzes you, it doesn’t help. You made a mistake; everyone makes mistakes. You aren’t perfect. Stop judging yourself so harshly. Stop beating yourself up.
I tried. I would tell the therapists, the friends, the family, exactly what they wanted to hear. I would do the exercises in the books. I wanted to succeed. I wanted to be good. But eventually, I would do something wrong, or fail to do something right, and that internal monologue would start again. “You’re no good. You’ll never be any good. You’ve failed to live up to your potential. You fail at everything.” Then I’d beat myself up for beating myself up. “You can’t even do therapy right. You can’t even be honest with the therapist. You’re so stupid, to punish yourself like this mentally, when you know it doesn’t work.” THEN I’d beat myself up for beating myself up for beating myself up. Then I’d overload and sit in front of the internet or the television or a computer game for days or weeks on end, unable to engage with anything.
Nothing worked. Until this.
“You’re not allowed to beat yourself up. I’m the only one allowed to hurt you. You’re not allowed to hurt yourself. I’ll take care of you.”
When I start telling myself how stupid I am for something, what a mess I made of it, I tell K.
“I love you. You’re valuable to me. I decide when you feel pain. No one else can.”
The idea of “beating” someone has powerful negative connotations, for good reason. A man who beats a woman — an abuser, right? Not when the woman says, “please use the flogger, please spank me, please hit me.” Not when she says, “please punish me when I’m bad.” Vitally, not when she has a safe word that he always respects, which gives her the power to stop everything. I never had a safe word with myself. Nothing could make me stop hurting me.
The whoosh of a flogger, the smack of a hand, the calm voice telling me, “you know you’re not allowed to hurt yourself.” They short-circuit the endless, paralyzing cycle of self-hatred. I beat myself up, and K makes me stop. The physical pain and the way it allows me to submit wash away all self-hatred.
He tells me, “you’re a good girl.” And, for the first time in my life, I believe it.
Oh, man, I relate to this so hard. When I’m getting really down on myself, or I’m hurting emotionally, I crave a beating. It’s when I become most masochistic. To physically have the emotional pain beat out of me, and then, when it’s over to be told that I’m a “good girl.” And somehow, all is right in the world.
You just described one of the central themes of the movie Secretary.
Not having seen Secretary, I don’t know whether this is good or bad.
This post is so powerful. I dare say your best yet.
Thank you!
Excellent post, I am currently studying to be a sex therapist and believe that kink can be therapeutic if done properly. Sometimes a good flogging can bring emotions to the surface and allow you to let it all go.
And definitely watch The Secretary, one of my favorite films!
This post really speaks to something that I’ve known for awhile now but haven’t articulated.
My mentor (as I don’t have a dom of my own right now) often reminds me I’m not allowed to hurt myself. At first I assumed he meant don’t bind myself and attach clothespins to my breasts but that was only part of it. It took some time for me to realize that what he was truly saying was that I wasn’t allowed to beat myself up emotionally, even when that would be my natural reaction.
This is an amazing post.
That’s something that I struggled to understand about BDSM. It has been ingrained in me that hitting someone else, that controlling another adult, is wrong. Not “healthy”. It’s an interesting experience to be finding my inner Dom and understanding that this is, indeed, what the other person needs/wants and can be “healthy”. I’ve got Secretary from Netflix; I need to go watch it.
tl;dr – Great post!
Since I met Ruf, I don’t need to starve myself. I guess you put your finger on it. He finds me valuable and will hurt me if I say I require it. There is now enough violence in my life within the safety of his love that I have learned to be kind to myself. Thank you for articulating it.