The Meaning Of Leather, Rubber, and Latex Fetishes
Posted: November 13, 2012 Filed under: Sexual Fantasies, Sexuality, Unconscious Mind | Tags: arousal, confidence, fetish, guilt, insecurity, invulnerability, latex, leather, michael j. bader, rubber, sex, sexual fetishes, sexuality, shame, strength, unconscious mind, vulnerability, worry Leave a comment
Elements of sexual fetishes are common in most people’s sexual fantasies – the strong and attractive look of a high heeled shoe, or the invulnerable appeal of the “bad boy” character – but these mild fetishes are not necessarily preferred routes to sexual pleasure and release for everyone. In contrast, some people require the presence of a particular fetish in order to become aroused, however is cases where the fetishization is mild and perhaps not even noticed, we can learn something about the milder appeal to most, by understanding the role the fetish plays in more extreme examples.
In his book, Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies, Dr. Michael J. Bader explains that with fetishes, “the part is treated as if it were the whole, or, conversely, a whole being is reduced to a part.” In sexual terms, a person is said to be fetishizing when they objectify a person, or personify an object, or as Bader puts it, “when we reduce something human to the status of a thing, or imbue things with human qualities.” Specifically, fetishes work to remove the human dimension of a sexual interaction, thereby freeing the fetishist of any guilt or worry they might have for their partner which would ultimately interfere with their ability to abandon control and climax.
How does leather, rubber, or latex function as a fetish? These materials are imbued with a human quality, being that they are suggestive of a second skin, one that is taut, smooth, shiny, and perfect. To the wearer or onlooker, the qualities of this second skin are suggestive of strength and invulnerability, youth even. The unconscious impact is to counteract feelings of worry or guilt on the part of the onlooker, and shame or insecurity on the part of the wearer. This is particularly evident when we imagine the opposite appearance of skin that is looser, vulnerable, older, and wrinkled.
Some examples of this fetish in action are given by Dr. Bader. He mentions a women who reported that she felt strong and invulnerable wearing an outfit made of leather, rubber, or latex. Her usual feelings of insecurity and weakness were smoothed over, so to speak, and she was able to become the strong, confident woman she longed to be. For someone who simply enjoys wearing these materials in a sexual scenario, but for whom their arousal does not rely on them, the element of strength and confidence will likely still be related to the appeal.
Another example is of a gay man who found leather on other men very attractive because it immediately suggested to him that this man would be a “hard-edged top,” thus allowing him to overcome his feelings of guilt for being strong or hard-edged himself. Only a partner who appeared stronger than himself would do, so he could assure himself that he couldn’t possibly hurt his partner by losing control sexually. My post on slave Master fantasies explores this dynamic further.
A third example is given, of a man who also felt guilty about hurting others were he to lose sexual control, and this man enjoyed being tied up to assuage his guilty feelings about this, a concept explored in my post on bondage and beating fantasies. He also enjoyed wearing a rubber suit, and specifically enjoyed being tied up by young boys. Unfortunately, not much explanation is offered for these aspects of the example, but perhaps the rubber suit served as a protective, and youthing layer, to decrease feelings of bodily shame around younger and presumably more smooth and taut sex partners?
Bader doesn’t mention the protective aspect of the second skin, the fact that one’s own skin is literally covered up, that one’s own senses are paved over, but I would suggest that this is another way to look at how this fetish serves the wearer. The covering of one’s own skin would likely have a numbing effect, therefore lending to the feeling of strength and invulnerability, because like with the use of drugs or alcohol, one’s senses are blunted. Yet another way to understand setting free feelings of shame or vulnerability.
~ “I urge you all today, especially today during these times of chaos and war, to love yourself without reservations and to love each other without restraint. Unless you’re into leather.” – Margaret Cho
PTSD And Manifesting A Healing
Posted: November 10, 2012 Filed under: Addiction, Ayahuasca, Bashar, Drugs, PTSD, Rape, Rape Drugs, Trauma, Unconscious Mind | Tags: adapative, aggression, alcoholism, anger, anxiety, bashar, blacking out, compulsions, control, denial, dissociation, dreams, drinking, drugs, fear, feelings, freud, healing, injury, insomnia, job performance, judith herman, manifestation, marijuana, mastery, men, numbing out, power', PTSD, rape, repression, roofies, shame, startle response, suppression, survival, trauma, unconscious mind 5 Comments
I still have post-traumatic stress disorder – PTSD – from being drugged and raped in 2007. I used to just think that the PTSD symptoms were just negative personality traits of mine. I thought I was just irritable, easily provoked, and agitated by nature. I thought I used marijuana habitually because I was too “weak” to give it up, and yet I was aware that I felt more “normal” with it than without it in terms of sleeping, eating, and mood. I’ve never sought an official diagnosis, but since February 2011, when I became consciously aware of the rape, it was suddenly painfully obvious to me that I’d been suffering from PTSD for years.
I’ve always felt shame when expressing my “negative personality traits,” and simply attributing them to PTSD has made no difference in this respect. Perhaps the shame is there because I haven’t taken the time to appreciate the adaptive purpose PTSD can serve? I feel I’ve begun to gain a deeper understanding by reading Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith Herman, particularly of how PTSD initially affected my life immediately following the rape, even though I was completely unaware that it had happened.
You might be wondering how I could not be aware of being raped – I wondered that too! I can only assume that because I was drugged unconscious, and perhaps also because I was badly injured during the rape, my conscious mind automatically denied the possibility of rape to me, this being an adaptive response so I could remain functional. It wasn’t conscious denial, it’s just the prospect of rape didn’t even cross my mind. As Herman notes, “This voluntary suppression of thoughts related to the traumatic event is characteristic of traumatized people.” I told myself it was just that I had a mystery back injury from drinking. “Did I fall?” I wondered to myself. The point is, after the rape, I was unaware that rape had occurred, and yet my life began to disintegrate before my eyes. At the time it was a mystery to me why I felt compelled to make so many bad choices, but compelled I was and there was no stopping it. This post is an attempt to understand this “bad behaviour” as adaptations for survival instead of simply shameful behaviour.
After the rape, I was suddenly afraid to live alone, so I moved in with Sam, someone I’d just started seeing and barely knew. I couldn’t roll over by myself to get out of bed due to the rape injury, so I told myself that I simply needed Sam to help care for me. My job performance immediately crumbled into shit, and as I watched myself fail I felt powerless to fix it, but also felt uncharacteristically neutral about it. I was more confrontational with bosses, and more antagonistic with peers. I started drinking heavily and blacking out regularly. I just trusted that Sam would take care of me and babysit me when I was drunk, which he usually did. I wasn’t attracted to him, and I was in no emotional state to be dating anybody, but I knew he’d do anything for me, so… in that respect he was perfect! Sam eventually pushed for sex, and I was so numb I let him and honestly didn’t care if he was using me. I broke things off with the attractive Italian architect I’d been seeing because I didn’t want him to know what a mess I was. I now know all of this was a reaction to the rape, but at the time I hated myself for letting everything go to shit and could make no sense of any of it. The only explanation was that I was a terrible person, and that’s what I believed about myself.
In Trauma and Recovery, Herman discusses the three cardinal symptoms of PTSD: (1) Hyperarousal; (2) Intrusion; and (3) Constriction. Having read examples in the book about how these symptoms manifested in others, I was shocked to see how my “bad behaviours” were actually attempts at mastering my own feelings of helplessness and reestablishing a sense of control of my environment.
Hyperarousal is the first cardinal symptom of PTSD. It means constantly being on guard for something bad to happen. For me, this first manifested as insomnia, explosive anger, and aggression, but years later has turned into generalized anxiety and a fear of alcohol, night clubs, and even fear of walking past strange men on the street. I have a strong startle response to loud noises as well, and was recently reminded of this when Hallowe’en fire crackers started going off two weeks ago. The question is, how is any of this helping me?
The adaptive purpose of this chronic arousal of my nervous system is that I “feel ready” should I be faced with any further traumatic events. It’s actually an elaborate illusion of smoke and mirrors though, since there’s really no way to prepare oneself for an unknown future trauma. Rather than offering me any real control, hyperarousal serves to allow me to feel a sense of mastery and control over my environment when in fact no one is capable of that level of control. Complete vulnerability is the fundamental state of humanity, and that’s hard to accept for anyone. Even those who have not been traumatized feel a false sense of control over their environment when in truth, if someone really wanted to hurt them they could find a way to do it. But there’s comfort in this illusion, and therefore it is adaptive.
Intrusion is the second cardinal symptom of PTSD. It is a replaying of the trauma, either in dreams, in actions, or in words. Herman explains that people often feel compelled to “recreate the moment of terror, either in literal or disguised form,” and that “in their attempts to undo the traumatic moment, survivors may even put themselves at risk of further harm.” Since I had no conscious memory of the rape, for me the intrusion manifested more like it would for a child who’s play scenes reenact an early trauma of which the child has no conscious memory. For me, it seems this played out as drinking heavily and blacking out, and also letting Sam “rape” me. Herman further explains that even when voluntarily chosen, there is something about these reenactments which feels involuntary. These behaviours appear maladaptive on the surface, but there is something more subtlety adaptive at work here.
Freud called this reenactment the “death instinct” since he could not understand why a person would voluntarily place themselves in great danger again and again. I certainly could not understand why I was doing these things, only that I was compelled to do them. I can see now that I was unconsciously trying to recreate the scenario so that I might gain mastery over it. I had more control when I made myself lose consciousness then when I was forced unconscious by another. I had more control when I agreed to be “raped” than when I had no choice in the matter. Dreams that replay the trauma are also part of the intrusive symptoms, but I would not experience an intrusive dream until four years later, which was an exact replaying of my memory of leaving the rapist’s apartment, and not really a “dream” at all, a quality shared by the traumatic dreams of other PTSD sufferers. After I had that dream, I indeed found a way to master the situation by reverse engineering and fixing my rape injury.
Constriction is the third cardinal symptom of PTSD. This means going numb, giving up, being the proverbial “deer in the headlights” calmly surrendering to death or danger over which you have no control. This is the response seen in animals caught by a predator, knowing they face certain death. I felt this most in my inability to respond to the fact that my life was disintegrating before my eyes. I also experienced constriction when I cared nothing about letting Sam use my body for sex. It’s like it wasn’t even me, like my body was no longer a part of me. It was a simple trade-off for the protection I needed and was in no way an expression of sexuality on my part. Sex was the furthest thing from my mind. Taking drugs or alcohol in hopes of intensifying the level of dissociation is also part constrictive symptoms, and I was drinking every single day to achieve maximum numbness. Years later I was, until recently, using marijuana on a daily basis to deal with the constant anxiety I felt. One of the unexpected side effects of ceremonial shamanic use of ayahuasca was no longer feeling the urge to numb myself with substances every day, and I truly feel that this was where healing began for me.
Although constriction is a merciful reprieve in the moments before death, or expected death, its continuance is ultimately maladaptive to healing if one survives the attack. Healing only happens when we feel, and numbing my feelings day after day was a huge obstacle to healing. I feel my substance abuse was one of the most shameful aspects of my PTSD because I attributed it to shortcomings in my personality, not understanding its purpose. It was only after I no longer smoked every day that I understood and forgave my reasons for it, so harsh was my judgement of it.
Now that I have a better understanding of how PTSD has affected my life, I hope it will be easier to accept that I’m human and not superhuman, and that I was simply reacting to a trauma in ways that were normal and ultimately adaptive for me following the rape. The shame I feel about these behaviours has been felt for a number of years at this point so it’s now a case of deconstructing false negative beliefs I’ve created about myself, and honestly, I feel better already after simply writing this post. This post focused more on how PTSD initially affected me, and less on how it has morphed as the years when on, but that is definitely something I’ll be writing more about in a future post.
If you have any stories about how PTSD has affected your life, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Although PTSD looks messy on the outside, it’s all just an instinct for healing and mastery. However, I also feel that in my experience and on the grand scale, PTSD symptoms have been adaptive behaviours to simply feeling powerless. What has made all the difference for me is knowing that I have the power to manifest healing in my life, and that I do not have to be a passive reactor to my environment, using these behaviours as crutches to limp through life. I don’t always remember that I have this power, but I do my best to remind myself of it often. I have the power to heal myself, I have the power to choose change, and I have the power to be happy.
~ “Enjoy where you are or you will never get where you’re going. Enjoy where you are and you will BE where you are going.” – Bashar, channelled by Darryl Anka
What Do Fantasies of Giant Breasts Mean?
Posted: October 25, 2012 Filed under: Abuse, Sexual Fantasies, Sexuality, Unconscious Mind | Tags: abuse, beliefs, boobs, breast men, breasts, childhood, family, fantasies, guilt, michael j. bader, neglect, parents, sex, sexual fantasies, shame, unconscious mind, worry Leave a comment
I’ve been on a personal quest lately to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning behind sexual fantasies, and have been reading a book by Michael J. Bader, called Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies, in order to gain some insight on myself. The giant breast fantasy isn’t exactly my thing, but it certainly is a common thing, and I found Bader’s explanation of it pretty interesting, so I thought I’d share.
We already know that hetero men love breasts. Some guys refer to themselves as “breast men” after all, so no surprise there. But have you ever wondered why there’s a sexual fascination with women’s mammary glands whose biological purpose is to feed milk to young infants? If you made the obvious connection and guessed it has to do with motherly nurturing, you’d be right, but according to Bader there’s a lot more to it than that. Actually, this might get weird because it has nothing to do with mothers, and everything to do with mothers.
As I covered in my first post on sexual fantasies, we once again see the primary purpose of a fantasy is to relieve feelings of guilt and worry, which are brought on by pathogenic and negative beliefs about the self and others. Orgasm can only be reached once these harmful beliefs are somehow negated, and the fantasy works to do just that. So what sort of negative beliefs does the breast man have?
According to Bader, he likely has a pathogenic belief that he is undeserving of caretaking, and that his needs are burdensome and greedy, that a woman would experience giving to him as depleting. Therefore he feels he has to prove himself worthy of any caretaking from women. He actually feels guilty needing nurturing from a woman, and feels like it is coercive because, after all, he believes women have nothing to give. That’s pretty harsh. Why would he believe these things? Childhood neglect is a big part of it.
He likely had a relationship with his mother that was very one-sided, one that was all about her: her needs, her moods, her wants. He sees his mother as weak and fragile, as someone who he has to worry about all the time. Bader notes that the result of this relationship is a belief that women don’t “have the capacity or inclination to devote themselves to a man’s pleasure or to their own,” and so to want such a thing leads to extreme guilt.
So with all that unsexy guilt for wanting nurturing in the way, he fantasizes that a woman is turned on by “mothering him,” a.k.a giving him the breast, so that he can get sexually excited. For some men this means fantasizing about actual breastfeeding during sex, but it’s not that he is making any direct sexual connection to his own mother. It’s all about removing the guilt and worry he was trained to have for women. He needs to receive pleasure without having any responsibility for his partner’s needs. He needs her to happily give to him and expect nothing in return.
In the breastfeeding/breast sucking scenario, where the woman wants to give to him and is gratified by giving to him, he is free to let go of the guilt. Not only does she not need him to be her caretaker, she wants him to take from her and isn’t depleted when she gives him maternal nurturing. His desire to take is met with her desire to give. His negative unconscious belief that women are too preoccupied, burdened, depressed, or busy to take pleasure in nurturing him is thus negated. And the bigger the breast, the more nurturing she has to give him.
So there you have it! Even in “extreme” cases where a man is turned on by fantasies of breastfeeding from a woman, it has nothing to do with any creepy latent desire to be sexual with his mother. It’s just that his mother was a selfish narcissist! Or maybe just dysfunctional and depressed. Either way, it’s not about his mother, ladies, it’s all about your enthusiasm and happiness to give to him… and your super luscious breasts.
Why We Forget Our Traumas
Posted: October 23, 2012 Filed under: Abuse, Rape, Rape Drugs, Sexual Abuse, Trauma, Unconscious Mind | Tags: denial, memories, rape, trauma, unconscious mind Leave a comment– 
In an effort to understand how I could immediately “forget” being raped, only to recover the memories four years later, I started reading a book by Amanda Ripley called The Unthinkable which discusses people’s seemingly irrational responses when threatened by impending danger. What’s interesting is that people are not as rational as we assume they are. Even when the twin towers were hit with planes, people in the floors below (those who survived) hesitated for an average of six minutes before heading for an exit stairwell. One person reported waiting forty-nine minutes before deciding they needed to leave! The first chapter of this book deals with one survivor’s recollection – or lack thereof – of her experience on 9/11. The first impact rocked the building and she says she remembers the sound when it hit eleven floors above her. Her recollection of the events takes her through the stages of disbelief, frantic deliberation, and finally action, but throughout there is a thick fog of denial, along every step of the way.
She reported that when the first plane hit, instead of running for the door, she wanted nothing more than to stay. The theory is that people want so badly to believe that everything is going to be ok, that they simply stay put. Apparently this is especially common in structure fires – we assume everything is going to be okay because it always has been before. This “normalcy bias” occurs because the brain works by identifying patters, and we understand the present and anticipate the future according to past experience. It’s also mentioned that if everything turns out to be okay then we save ourselves the social embarrassment of overreacting as well.
It’s a herd mentality, and after delaying awhile, another painfully long stage of deliberation sets in where people feel the need to check in with each other and see how others are feeling about the situation. Lucky for this woman, a person in her office quickly began to scream at everyone to leave immediately. She still delayed a bit longer, looking for items to take with her. She was circling in her cubicle and said “it was like I was in a trance.” She chose to bring a mystery novel she had been reading.
Once decending down the stairwell, disbelief and deliberation continued to rack her brain. She said she never felt she was in a hurry. She said “it’s weird because the sound, the way the building shook, should have kept me going fast. But is was almost as if I put the sound away in my mind.” Apparently everyone in the stairwell was very, very calm and moving in an orderly fashion. “Crowds generally become very quiet and docile in a true disaster,” Ripley, the book’s author states.
During her descent she began to make up stories to explain the events, first that a pilot must have had a heart attack or stroke, then after being told that a second plane had hit, that two stupid pilots must have been racing. She could not wrap her head around the magnitude of the situation. Her brain was searching its database for a reasonable explanation. Even when a man told that the hits had been intentional during their descent, she simply ignored this new information and put it out of her mind as if he had never said it. More denial.
When the second plane hit, she says she did not even hear the sound. Her senses were switched on and off at certain key points as happens with many people in traumatizing situations. She recalls someone screaming to get away from the windows and running for the center of the building. She was then overcome by intense anger at herself for being in this situation again (she had been in one of the twin towers during a potentially fatal incident in 1993 as well) and she had a moment of clarity and panic saying to herself, “I’m on the forty-fourth floor of a building. Where am I going? I’m still way up high. I can’t go anywhere!”
Then just as quickly everyone stopped running and continued back down the stairwell again in an orderly fashion like mute robots as if nothing had happened. When asked to describe the sound of the second collision she says “ As far as I’m concerned, I’m telling you, it was as if it didn’t happen. It’s not even that I forgot it. It’s just that it was as if it never happened. Never.” Classic dissociation normally used to describe the experiences of children suffering from physical or sexual abuse. Dissociation, the book states, is an “extreme form of denial,” and as the 9/11 survivor put it, “I could not afford to dwell on it. My job was to just take it one step at a time.”
She further explained, “When you’re in trauma, the mind says, this is a very local problem. This is your little world and everything outside is fine. It can’t afford to say that everything outside is horrible. The sound that I heard on the seventy-third floor should have told me, this is bad. The feeling of the building shaking should have told me, this is bad. The explosion when I was on the fourty-fourth floor: bad. The smell of debris is the lower stairways: bad. Yet in every single moment, I made it my little world here. And nothing else exists.”
When she finally made it to the main floor to exit the building, there were dead bodies all around, this is how her brain processed it: “I’m slowing down because I’m starting to realize that I’m not just looking at debris. My mind says ‘It’s the wrong color.’ That was the first thing. Then I start saying, ‘ It’s the wrong shape.’ Over and over in my mind: ‘It’s the wrong shape.’ It was like I was trying to keep the information out. My eyes were not allowing me to understand. It couldn’t afford it. So I was like, ‘No it can’t be.” Then when I finally realized what it meant to see the wrong color, the wrong shape, that’s when I realized, I’m seeing bodies. That’s when I froze.”
Freezing is apparently also a common response during disasters, but luckily for this women a stranger linked arms with her and said “We’re getting out of here.” She remembers the woman’s dark skin tone, her red sleeve, but then simply stopped seeing altogether. “There was no smoke there. I didn’t see anything at all.” She was not even frightened by this temporary blindness since she was no numb at that point. She was now relying on hearing, but although these two women talked and talked as they walked away, she can’t remember a word she said except when they finally got outside she heard her say, “Look, we made it.” She remembers replying, “Yeah, we’re outside.” But she could still not see anything, and she never even saw the woman in red’s face.
This story really hit home for me. It is a testament to the lengths our brains will go to to protect us from sensory input when a trauma is occurring. Only that which helps us get out alive appears to be consciously processed. It seemed very strange to me at first that something so awful happen to me and that I could completely block it out of my conscious memory. In terms of survival, it doesn’t seem strange at all. It was my own mind protecting me and giving me a chance to overcome my circumstances.
~ “There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” – Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral’s Kiss
Accidently Losing My Fear of Living
Posted: October 20, 2012 Filed under: Abuse, Addiction, Ayahuasca, Incest, Rape, Sexual Abuse, Unconscious Mind | Tags: addiction, anxiety, ayahuasca, demons, denial, emotional pain, family, fear, healing, incest, learning to trust, memories, rape, sexual abuse, shamanism, trauma, unconscious mind 2 Comments
I often use the metaphor that my life used to be like a building that was beautiful on the outside, but dark and decrepit and languishing on the inside. Nothing gets spared when you experience sexual abuse as a child or experience being raped. It makes a complete mess of everything and you don’t even know it until you know it.
I was afraid to live because I thought I was a bad person. I was a bad person because of all the things I’d do to cope with feeling bad. I was even bad for wanting love, because bad girls don’t deserve love. People only want them for sex. And women who are good for sex are whores. And whores are bad too. But I was only good at being bad.
I wasn’t brave. I was busy running away from the problems and pain but one day all my demons caught up to me, and it was going to be them or me. I was so sick and tired of being unhappy in this beautiful but languishing building that I finally wanted to see what was hidden inside, so I lit a match to see the horrors for myself. And there they were hiding in the shadows, all of my demons. Everything in my life finally began to make sense, and I could see I wasn’t bad after all, it was the demons, and the demons had to go.
But how does one kill a demon? I tried to chase them out many times before but it was ayahuasca that taught me the only way to kill a demon is with fire. They must be charred into ash and returned to source, and this is how I accidently burned the whole building to the ground.
I watched piece by piece as my life burned up, every piece of what I thought of as “me,” drenched in flame and reduced to ash, crumbled and disappeared, and I saw that the demons I tried to set fire to were just shadows cast by my own structure. I saw that the only thing to fear was myself, and the fire’s transformative alchemy spared me no dust-covered illusions from my attic. It left me naked and nameless and powerful.
Every relationship I had changed, because I had changed, and there was nothing I could do as I watched the old relationships burn, for they were just reflections of me. I was laid off from a job where I was unhappy, I left my showroom perfect apartment, and I began to operate on an unapologetic level where I could just exist and not have to answer to anyone but myself. When I was all that was left, there was no more fear; there was nothing to lose anymore, and that is what set me free. That is what showed me who I am really am and what I’m really made of.
~ “Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.” – Jim Morrison
What Do Bondage and Beating Fantasies Mean?
Posted: October 20, 2012 Filed under: Sexual Fantasies, Sexuality, Unconscious Mind | Tags: childhood, family, fantasies, michael j. bader, parents, sex, sexual fantasies, sexuality, unconscious mind 2 Comments
The more I learn about the psychology behind sexual fantasies, the more impressed I am by the kinky yet intelligent conversation going on between our unconscious beliefs and our sexual expression. Here’s what Dr. Michael J. Bader has to say about bondage and beating fantasies from his book Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies.
Once again, we see that the fantasy is a means of removing guilt, anxiety, and worry in order to find a safe place to “let go.” Negative unconscious beliefs are what make us feel these negative and unsexy things in the first place and by creating a very specific fantasy role for ourselves and our partner(s), we find a way to disprove our negative beliefs about ourselves and others.
Turns out a belief that others are fragile and will be hurt by one’s own exuberance, energy, and self-assertion can lead to super hot bondage fantasies that work to remove the guilt a person feels for pretty much existing at all. Neat.
Ironically, when being tied up, the person is released from guilt and freed of responsibility for anyone’s pleasure but their own. While being tied up and/or blissfully beaten, they know that they are not hurting their partner. They are 100% being done to rather than doing to someone else, and so there is also no question of the partner’s complete interest and pleasure of involvement. They know their partner is having a good time, so now they are free to have a good time too.
I’ve often wondered why bondage has historically been so popular in Japanese culture, where they have basically turned it into a beautiful art form called Kinbaku or Shibari. Perhaps there is some collective cultural guilt among Japanese women that they are too strong and men are fragile and must be protected from their strength. Similarly, there may be a belief among sexually dominating Japanese men that they are responsible for the feelings of women and capable of unintentionally hurting them. I covered the topic of Master-slave fantasies in a previous post.
So, isn’t that interesting how a sexual preference for bondage and beatings isn’t so much kinky as it is purely considerate? The person who longs for whips and handcuffs is really just saying, “See? I’m all tied up and helpless over here so if you’re into playing along, I can’t do anything to hurt you even if I lose control!” So the BDSM community has been stigmatized called deviants for nothing? Turns out a lot of them are just super considerate because they falsely believe that they’re the sexual-emotional equivalent of a bull in a china shop. That’s deep.
~ “I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.” – Anaïs Nin
What is the Real Symbolism Behind Nails and Nail Polish?
Posted: October 19, 2012 Filed under: Abuse, Addiction, Dreams, Sexual Abuse, Unconscious Mind | Tags: abuse, addiction, breaking the silence, dreams, intuition, meditation, morten tolboll, nail polish, sexual abuse, symbolism, unconscious mind Leave a comment
The saga continues. I was going to wait a few more days or weeks to buy this particular polish colour. I can’t be accumulating nail polish at a rate like this: Eight bottles of OPI in the past two weeks. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how good Live and Let Die looks. More dark polish with glitter bits! I swear I was just going to buy a sandwich and somehow found myself at the mall again. I didn’t even deliberate or stare at the bottle, I just grabbed it off the rack, and justified buying another dark blue as well since it was on sale. I could get into all the scientific stuff about addictions and brain chemicals, but today I’d rather take a philosophical approach to understand my compulsion. That’s right: symbolism.
The observation of one’s waking life as if it were a dream is a meditation technique based in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. One observes the symbolism in their waking life just as one would the symbolism of their dreams. Morten Tolboll mentions this symbolic approach to understanding the self in his document Meditation as an Art of Life: A Basic Reader.
Toboll explains that, “So the images in the movement of time are shattered reflections of the great vision of the Universe. They are shadows, dreams, masks, fables, fairy tales, fictions, and they flow in the movement of nature itself – they are, as the Tibetan Buddhism says, relatively valid dreams.”
First of all, it’s interesting to me that the name of the polish I wanted was Live and Let Die. I’ve been in a bit of crisis mode last few days because I fear my father will die because of me. Then I have to remind myself that I am not responsible for him or how he chooses to deal or not deal with his shit. But in hearing that his health is failing there is a magnification of that feeling I’ve always had that I was responsible for him, and it’s a big reason I stayed in blissful denial that he was ever capable of really sexually abusing me. Breaking the silence seems to be making my worst fears manifest – that I could provoke my fragile father’s death with the truth. It’s really testing my clarity on the situation. So, “live and let die” might actually be the very thing I needed to hear. Not exactly a cryptic or vague symbol. In fact, this is so literal I’m not sure it counts as symbolism at all, but what an interesting coincidence.
Nail polish also reminds me of a piece of poetry I wrote as a teenager. “Painting innocence on my nails” was part of a line in that poem. Could this point to an unconscious association with fresh manicures and a return to innocent times? Fresh manicure = fresh innocence? Also, nail polish is also a distinctly feminine accessory that literally leaves one feeling “polished.” I also have a hand washing compulsion, so maybe there’s an unconscious desire to both clean and polish my “dirty” hands?
Well, that’s all I’ve got. Any other guesses at why I’m choosing nail polish for my brain chemical rush rather than other consumer goods?
~ “The quickest way to know a woman is to go shopping with her.” – Marcelene Cox
What Do Rape and Gang-Bang Fantasies Mean?
Posted: October 16, 2012 Filed under: Rape, Sexual Fantasies, Unconscious Mind | Tags: fantasies, michael j. bader, rape, sex, sexual fantasies, unconscious mind 2 Comments
So, if you caught my first post on sexual fantasies, you’d already know that I’ve been reading Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies by Dr. Michael J. Bader to gain a bit of understanding about human sexuality and the impact of traumatic events on it. I’ll be sharing interesting bits of info as I read, and I thought this topic was worthy of a post.
This was always something I’ve wondered about. Why do some people fantasize about rape, when such an event would actually be traumatic? If you remember from my first post on the meaning of sexual fantasies, all fantasies serve to create the psychological safety required for sexual release, as mentioned Bader.
Here’s the deal with rape fantasies, which both men and women have reported, but which are much more common in women. Women are socialized to be objects of desire, not desiring subjects, which can make it hard for women to be ruthless lovers. They are often feeling guilty and worried.
Rape represents an act of overwhelming and controlling another, and so a woman fantasizing about a man raping her means that she feels she overwhelms and controls men, and needs a man so overwhelming that she couldn’t possibly hurt him.
Rape fantasies counter the belief that a woman is too strong for fragile men, that the woman’s needs and wants are too much for him. In a rape fantasy, she doesn’t need to protect him; he knows how to take what he wants so she can focus on getting what she wants.
Bader adds that “though the manifest script often puts her in a passive position, the underlying unconscious message is that she is guilty about being too much for a weak, limited, or inadequate man.”
Similarly, fantasies about gang-bangs derive from guilty feelings about being so “sexually voracious” that it takes numerous people to do the job. Women often have ruthless sexual fantasies of this type since women are socialized to feel guilt about their sexuality.
Does knowing all this kind of ruin it? I wonder how many men out there think their woman has rape fantasies because she just can’t get enough of him?
~ “Gender differences, though real, are not as profound as one might expect. The only relevant question is: what pathogenic beliefs do dominance and submission solve?” – Dr. Michael J. Bader
How To Reverse Engineer A Roofie Rape Injury
Posted: October 12, 2012 Filed under: Counselling, Dreams, Rape, Rape Drugs, Sexual Abuse, Unconscious Mind | Tags: anxiety, counselling, denial, depression, dreams, family, injury, inspiration, intuition, parents, PTSD, rape, roofies, unconscious mind 3 Comments
After I was raped by an American guy in Shanghai in February 2007, I had a terrible back injury, but no memory of actually injuring myself. I couldn’t even roll over in bed by myself, and you’d think that would be enough to make me clue in that something fishy had happened. Nope! There was literally a dent in my spine and I still did not suspect that the nice American guy I’d met was actually a sicko rapist. Since I had been drinking the night it happened, I figured it was simply from some obscure event that I couldn’t recall, like… maybe I fell on some stairs or something? Denial is serious business! I think the main reason I didn’t put it all together right away was that I was in a foreign country by myself and was already dealing with too much other stress at the time, like trying to figure out how to speak Mandarin Chinese. My subsequent figuring out that I had actually been raped came at a time of relatively low stress, so this is my best guess as to why it surfaced years later. Either way, I understand that it was my unconscious mind – which was completely aware of the events that had transpired – that was protecting me from being overwhelmed.
So after living with a mangled back for four years, how was it that I finally Sherlock Homles’d the case? Three things:
1. I created a safe space. For me this meant time away from my family.
I took a 6-month hiatus away from my parents from September 2010 to March 2011, at the urging of IAM Center co-founder, Joseph Maldonaldo. At the time it was not a question of recovering any memories of rape. That question was not even a consideration since I had repressed, suppressed, blocked out – whatever you want to call it – my knowledge that I’d been raped immediately after it happened. My concern at that time was overcoming other life challenges, and Joseph explained that spending time away from my family would allow me to develop a newfound strength to do so. And you know what else was “weird”? I didn’t miss my parents one bit! It was the beginning of the end of my contact with them.
2. I listened to my dreams, and emotions.
It was in February 2011 (exactly four years after the rape) that I awoke one morning, still watching a dream fade away, only it wasn’t a “dream,” it was a memory of walking out of the rapist’s apartment in a foggy haze thinking it should be 3:00 am and dark outside, but seeing the sun blazing in the sky instead. I was crying as I awoke, and perhaps there was more of this “dream” that I didn’t consciously recall upon awakening, but either way, it had a deep emotional effect on me.
3. I listened to my intuition, and trusted my inspiration.
Now awake and crying, an idea came to me suddenly. My boyfriend was already awake, asking me what the matter is. I asked him to do something for me. I moved to the end of the bed and lay on my back with my knees up. I extended my right arm out. I asked him to hold my arm firmly with both hands and first gently pull on it as if he were going to drag my body, then quickly and firmly push my straightened arm back towards my body. He did and I heard a loud crunching noise! My bones went back into place and my back felt normal again for the first time in four years. The tears came like a flood at that point – the immediate implication was that the injury has been caused a very violent dragging of my body by my arm. It hit me like a lightening bolt – rape. It was rape.
So what did I do about it? I didn’t seek counseling at the time. I was just so grateful that my back felt normal again! I spent that day crying a lot and just doing my best to take care of myself. My boyfriend thought I was mistaken and kept referring to the rape as “that thing you think happened.” It would take eight months for him to get over his own denial. He just couldn’t believe that such a thing could happen and that I would be unaware of it. Ultimately I was happy to not consciously remember the experience, and was just happy I survived it. Life goes on I thought… hoping that was the end of my ordeal. Not even close.
By the following September I was struggling with depression and major anxiety. Everything in my life was suffering, but I hoped it would simply pass. Then February came again, and I was beginning to see a full blown case of PTSD develop. Even simple activities like leaving the house to buy groceries resulted in an adrenaline rush, and not the fun kind. I finally understood the appeal of burkas. It was like being stuck in a state fight or flight with no escape. Since the rape, February had always be a hard month for me since it’s the anniversary of the incident. It was hard even when I was unaware of the rape.
It was that same month of February in 2012 when the fire alarm rang one morning, which got me out of my apartment and into a coffee shop down the street. I ordered a coffee and tried to read a newspaper, but I ended up having a complete emotional breakdown instead. With tears in my eyes I searched for “Vancouver rape relief” on my iPhone. I had to talk to someone immediately and had an appointment at the Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter later that afternoon. It was a good move talking to the counsellors there. They helped me find courage to dig a little deeper and heal. Funny how it took a fire alarm to get me there.
~ “I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?” – Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
~ “I’d still thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the fear-would fade in time. But that hadn’t happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to grow stronger, to the point where I could feel their weight in my chest. Nothing, however stuck with me more than the memory of stepping into that dark room and what I found there, and how the light then took that nightmare and made it real.” – Sarah Dessen, Just Listen
Dreams: Messages From The Unconscious Mind
Posted: October 10, 2012 Filed under: Dreams, German New Medicine, Sexual Abuse, Unconscious Mind | Tags: dreams, german new medicine, sexual abuse, unconscious mind 1 Comment
Dreams have been one of the ways in which my unconscious mind has hinted to me that I was sexually abused as a child. There have been just a few occasions where dreams of this sort have occurred, and it’s usually when I am looking for answers in my waking life that they pop up. In fact, I had such a dream just this afternoon during a nap, and I can pinpoint two things that might have caused it to come forth: a conflict with a new male roommate who made an inappropriate sexual comment about my body, and dousing with my “tiger tooth chain” to ask questions about how early the sexual abuse started in my life and the extent of it.
Today’s dream was of my father entering my room to stare at me where I was sleeping naked. I was aware that he was doing this and although I was “awake” in the dream, I was unable to open my eyes in order to see him. I rolled around trying to cover my body as I yelled at him to leave, all the while struggling to open my eyes. I could feel him standing there, and when I finally managed to open my eyes I saw him doing exactly what I felt he was doing – standing in the doorway staring at my naked body and ignoring my vocal requests for him to go away. Now with eyes open I escaped to an ensuite bathroom where I could hide from him.
The theme is this dream is very similar to a more disturbing dream I had a few years ago. In that dream he is trying to peep at my naked body through a textured window pane as I take a shower in the basement of my parents’ house. His eyes are black like a zombie and he slowly presses his face up to the glass. He then enters the house and wanders around the basement like a zombie along with my zombie mother whose eyes are also black. This one had me waking up in hysterical tears. The peeping part of this dream actually happened in real life when I was 15, although at the time I didn’t know who the peeper was, but I could see the fresh footprints in the snow outside the window when I checked afterward. Not that this is proof that is was my father; the dream might be using this direct experience as an analogy.
Another very disturbing dream I had was in early March of this year, a week before I left for Peru. There was a very small, almost newborn baby, which then turned into a toy doll with moving legs and arms. The toy baby had blood and semen all over the crease where the right leg joins the body, and I was trying to clean it off, having to reach into the crease with tissue to get all the blood and semen off of it. I have another true life experience that this dream reminded me of: when I was about 11 years old, I had an enormous boil appear on the outer edge of my right labia which left a deep scar that I still have today. This was the exact location of the blood and semen on the baby in the dream. According to German New Medicine, anytime there is pus coming out of the body it means the person is feeling attacked and/or soiled.
And so it goes, piece by piece, information stored in my unconscious mind slowly leaks through to the surface, only telling as much as I can handle for the moment. I’m sure there is more to discover when it comes to my experiences of being sexually abused as a child, but sometimes I’m not sure I want to know.
~ “Nature is often obscure or impenetrable, but she is not, like man, deceitful. We must therefore take it that the dream is just what it pretends to be, neither more nor less. If it shows something in a negative light, there is no reason for assuming that it is meant positively.” – Carl Gustav Jung
Your Body Is Perfect Intelligence 