subjugation as love

I mentioned, in my previous post, my (now confirmed) hypothesis that what I’m calling “subjugation” is one of Joscelin’s ways of submissively loving me, and one of the ways he fears that I don’t understand/appreciate/desire/reciprocate.  What I mean by “subjugation” – and this is crucial to why I think he thinks I don’t get it as a kind of love – is something in which I am perceived as distant, alien, and possessed of my own, unknowable motivations.

I may not be accurately describing anything that he actually feels, mind you.  I’m guessing a bit blindly, though he seemed to confirm what I was saying yesterday.

I don’t think empathy is the only way to understand another’s feelings, but it’s certainly a starting point.  What I want, really badly, is for Jos to describe this feeling to me, to tell me what it’s like for him.  What does it feel like?  What thoughts go along with it, encourage it?  What kinds of thoughts are anathema to it, or don’t fit into its worldview?  I want the goods.

When I imagine feeling what I imagine he feels towards someone, I get something that I don’t think is what he’s talking about.  The dominant who is tormenting me from an emotional distance is either someone I really don’t care about, in which case I am bottoming and not really thinking or feeling about that other person at all, but just absorbed in my own experience, or, if I were close to the person and experienced this kind of alienation, I think it would be like Violacious described in her comment, frightening and possibly damaging.

In the first case, it’s definitely not a form of love, and in the second case, it’s the kind of love that would break and harm me – a helpless love opening a black hole of need within me.

When we switch and Jos really hurts me, then…what do I feel?  I don’t feel deep intimacy, generally, nor am I kind of ignoring him the way I might with someone I just met and am having a scene with at the club.  I like when he seems stern and tormenting.  I feel submissive to him in those moments.  But I don’t think I feel ruthlessly subjugated in the way that I’m talking about here.  I don’t feel like there is no mercy for me in the universe, or like I am the plaything of an overlord.

What I feel in those moments is the reciprocal of what I feel when I’m really deliberately hurting Joscelin – either mindless sensation, or a feeling that he’s making me endure something that I have to go through for some reason.  (That’s one of my kinks, if you recall – a kind of caretaking while hurting someone.  Like a nurse, trainer, or priest who has to do something painful to you for your own good.  Mmm, hot.)

Clearly there are times when we play (me on top) where I am doing that nurse/trainer/priest hurting-you-for-your-own-good thing to Joscelin, comforting him while I hurt him, and on his side he’s being tormented as a plaything for my (unempathized-with) pleasure.  That seems fine to me – his view is more or less what’s actually happening, after all.  The fact that my compassionate act is part of the torment is all right, since it really is an act.

I don’t know.  There are a million lenses through which to view what we do, to conceptualize something that is really about feelings and experiences in the moment, and that often involves an altered headspace anyway.  But I really do hope that Jos will sit down and tell me about his feelings, in as much detail as he can muster.