I know, I know, CJ! You should always trust your partner, even in a vanilla relationship. Pfft! Okay, so you mean you trust your partner enough to tie you up, beat your ass and not let you set up infection in the wounds? Right. Don't look at me sideways. You know what I mean. This needs to be the person that you can tell anything, that you do not fear in any capacity, and that is only interested in seeing the best things for you in life.
Once you get beyond earning and reciprocating that trust, you will need some kind of starting point. This article is for the new dom, written by the more dominant aspect of the author. Subs, read on, because you will need to understand why your dom does the things that he or she does; this is advice that I offer from the submissive aspect. This article will give you some decent ideas, and may help you have a clearer understanding of the person flogging you.
When I started in this lifestyle, I had no idea that I would come out a switch in the end. I assumed that I would spend most of my time begging and squirming. When I decided to switch, and test the dominant waters, I was so unsure of what to do, I was almost afraid to do anything. I needed a starting point, so I thought about what I had been looking for in my dominant; what things would make me want to stay with him/her? How would I want to be trained? What kind of exercises would I be willing to participate in. I used these things to my advantage, and tried to implement them.
Dominants, lets start with this: It is your job to know, love, protect and lead your submissive. This person is just that, a person. They are not your personal fuck toy (okay, well they are…but there should be more than that.), they are not your personal whipping post, they are not there to bear your frustrations at the world, or to serve as a punching bag.
You should be ready to deal with, and understand their fears, and where they truly want to be as people. In most instances, you should honestly be the stronger of the two partners in this relationship…Well, okay, maybe not stronger, but mentally stable? No…that sounds bad…um…Grounded. Centered. Balanced. There we go.
(Subs, none of this gives you permission to be a flake. Get your shit together. You are making life difficult when you act crazy. And you know some of you do. Be honest, be open and be real. Period. If you want to submit, then do not fight it when you find a dom that will work with you, train you, love you and do the plethora of other things it takes to raise a decent sub.).
You should have a clear understanding of where you are, where you want to be and how you need to get there. You are the guide, so you should have some kind of clear idea about the path. The sub should be giving you clear indicators as to what works for them and what does not. So, the first step, beyond trust, is communication. If your sub trusts you, communication should be calm, relaxed, clear and focused. You should be having daily tasks that include the keeping of one, if not two, journals. One journal should have prompts, and should be open for you to read, if you should choose to do so; the second should be completely private, and should not ever be in your hands unless there is a state of mental emergency.
The prompts you want to offer should be based on things with in the sub that you wish to help them work on, things that they may or may not like about themselves, the shifts in behavior that you are looking for, and how they see the behavior, dreams, sexual fantasies, experiences, and other things that help this human you are caring for evolve. The idea here is to push this person along a journey of self discovery, to find out who they are as people, and how to make their mind work, how to make them tick, and how to drive them to the degree that you need to cross the physical threshold. In this time, you should be interacting with them using responses from the journal so that they can see how their thoughts function in day-to-day life.
A sub who is bi-curious, but is unsure if they wish to cross that threshold, is an example; The desire is there, it has been expressed. This has been discussed between the two of you, and it creates such a level of anxiety that the sub becomes uncomfortable. So, you need to think about why they are uncomfortable. Is it an issue of repression? Is it an issue of insecurity? What kind of things cause this person to want something, yet fear it? (I know. I'm all Freudian today. I think it's the shirt I am wearing. It could also be the Opium.). Understanding where this fear comes from, and how it affects the person who is in fear, will help them to open up to it, talk about it and face it. This is elemental to discovering more about the self.
It is important to state here, as I have had this done to me, and I know how badly it can fuck the brain…do NOT offer ultimatums to the sub. Do not force, but gently push. Swap to bi-sexual or gay porn, inundate the mind with images of what you want to see as desirable or acceptable behavior. Once the person sees it as somewhat normal, the ability to talk about it becomes elemental. In this aspect, you are showing that you have an active interest in this sub facing the excitement/fear/anxiety of dealing with a bi-sexual experience, but that you are also willing to work with them thru each and every step of the way.
To give you an idea based on my own experience, with my own submissive: I kept a daily log of all of her activities; If she left work to go to lunch, she was to text me when she left and when she arrived at the establishment, when she left there she was to send me a text of what she ate, how much it cost her (she was notorious for over eating and over spending so the idea was to make her aware of what she was eating and spending…). There were issues with her being late to work, so she was given a bed time, and a wake up time. If I called her phone after either of those times, and she was not in which ever mode of consciousness she should have been in, then strict punishments were inflicted.(In her case, she was super attached to me, and was excessively clingy, so a weekend long grounding with no contact-in any form- was to be initiated by her.) She had exercise time, she had times that she had to walk her dogs, she had a strict schedule for when she was to clean which rooms of her house, a schedule for when she could and could not be on the computer, or take a nap even; she needed all of these things and so many more because she felt that these were areas that she needed to improve. I should say here that it took me six months of journal writing and fighting with temper tantrums that would rival any pissed off, sugar hyper three year old just to get to this point. She wanted the change, but change scares people, so she fought me tooth and nail.
The journal writing was something I had to refer to constantly; she was to keep an on-line blog of her thoughts in reference to her training; specifically, she could not make generalized statements, (I think training is going really well…blah blah blah..) because just as much as I was critiquing her, she should have been doing the same to me.
As a new dominant, you have to be willing to put this kind of work into someone, and you have to realize that not only are you putting this into them, but you are also working with yourself; you are learning what you, as a human and as a dominant, need/want from your relationship. As you learn, and as you teach your sub, your needs will shift and change, and this constant check system opens the lines of communication, and makes it easier for you as a dominant to keep tabs on how your sub is doing as a person, where you need to improve, and how to do it so that both of you take the most from this experience. Most importantly, understand that there is no end all be all of BDSM, I do not care how long Master whatever has been doing this I can promise you they have not seen everything there is to see. This is your dynamic, and you, as the dominant, have to be the one to set the pace, but you have to do it with the best interest of your sub in mind.
