Getting out of Bondage

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Get­ting out of Bondage — some­times, the way out is the way through — you got­ta fig­ure out who you are, and go for it — with­out regard to “nor­mal.”

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Last time, I wrote about addiction to pain 

I was mak­ing the point that while pain might be a nat­ur­al occur­rence — an “I hit my thumb with a ham­mer” kind of thing — it’s also a drug of sorts. Many peo­ple “get off” on feel­ing “bad,” and twist their real­i­ty to have more of it.

Relationships are a prime target

Peo­ple get into rela­tion­ships for lots of rea­sons, and for pain addicts, it’s to “feel hard done by.” They push and push, and when the push-back comes, they get to play vic­tim. They set up un-winnable games, and have a great sense of sat­is­fac­tion that once again they are in pain.

Many of my past clients did exactly this — they entered relationships that “made them” feel awful — punished.

Peo­ple in bad rela­tion­ships are sub-con­scious­ly meet­ing a deep need to feel pain. Engag­ing in scream­ing match­es is the same thing as want­i­ng to feel phys­i­cal pain. Manip­u­la­tion is a game to nev­er quite get what you want. 

“Bad relat­ing” is just a mat­ter of degree.

I used the illus­tra­tion of my mom want­i­ng to be the sick­est per­son in the room. This was not a hob­by… this was a deep-wired part of her per­son­al­i­ty. It drove many of her choic­es, includ­ing her choice to be 70 pounds over­weight and to con­tin­ue to pack in the sug­ar even after end­ing up with diabetes.

She found plea­sure in her pain. Per­haps, if she had tried, she could have found anoth­er way.

Some do it with work or school… they love pain and feeling “oppressed or prejudiced against,” so they set themselves up for conflict / failure so as to feel “normal.”

They can tell me their pat­terns… how they can’t seem to stop doing what they say they don’t want to do… And yet, each and every time, the go right back to set­ting things up to think they’re hard done by.

Call me sil­ly, but if they have such a burn­ing desire to feel fail­ure, per­haps they could find anoth­er thing to strate­gi­cal­ly fail at.

I’d rather they come up with an alternative, as opposed to repeating what doesn’t work, and then judging themselves for doing it again.

In a sense, It “sounds like”: Find­ing a benign way to feel pain ful­ly, with­out set­ting things up so that they sim­ply end up play­ing the vic­tim. Big price to pay for a lit­tle jolt of pain-pleasure.

Now, some ther­a­pists might argue that find­ing a way to expe­ri­ence pain with­out dra­ma is “wrong, or not nor­mal.” They try to get their clients to stop doing what they’re doing (me too… I hate watch­ing peo­ple repeat inef­fec­tive behaviours…) 

What this sounds like is, “Your addic­tion to pain-plea­sure is wrong.” I dis­agree. It’s not the need to feel and process pain that is “wrong.” It’s using dumb ways to accom­plish it that seems silly.

So for example: 

• a per­son who needs to feel pain and who does it through BDSM no longer needs to cre­ate crap­py rela­tion­ships — they have their outlet.
• The per­son who needs sex­u­al vari­ety, and who sets up hon­est, open rela­tion­ships, no longer has to sneak around. 
• The per­son who want to exper­i­ment with some­thing new can just go do it (safe­ly), instead of com­ing up with tor­tured log­ic to jus­ti­fy their behaviour.

For example, lots of people make it difficult to admit out loud to being sexually turned on.

I wrote the fol­low­ing in my book, This End­less Moment

Repression simply leads to breakdown or explosion.

In Mar­ty Klein’s book, Sex­u­al Intel­li­gence, he makes this same point. He calls out ther­a­pists who make them­selves uncom­fort­able over the sex­u­al activ­i­ties of their clients. He says that often ther­a­pists are uncom­fort­able about sex and their own sex­u­al­i­ty, and fall into the trap of declar­ing what “nor­mal” is.

And then, they try to move their clients toward “normal.”

Except there is no nor­mal.

Or bet­ter put, sta­tis­ti­cal norms exist, but are irrel­e­vant on a case-by-case basis. 

A sim­ple exam­ple: a cer­tain can­cer has a 75% mor­tal­i­ty rate. So, if you have that form of can­cer, what’s your mor­tal­i­ty rate — what’s going to hap­pen to you? 

Answer: there’s no way to pre­dict. A sta­tis­ti­cal norm has noth­ing to do with an indi­vid­ual case.

Thus, the real thrust of Klein’s book, and of this blog, and of my work, and of my life, is this: you need to discover: 

• who you are, 
• what you want, 
• be will­ing to stop judg­ing what isn’t work­ing, while 
• exper­i­ment­ing with alter­na­tive behaviours,
• thus mov­ing in a direc­tion you choose

Not toward a statistical norm of “adult behaviour” (yuck! spare me!) but toward finding and enacting “you.”

Dif­fer­ent from “the norm,” to me, is a won­der­ful, won­der­ful thing.

I see in my mind’s eye what could be. And many times people I know have discovered “amazing powers.” 

To paint. To cre­ate. To build excel­lent relationships.

The sex­u­al explor­ers have dis­cov­ered all kinds of orgas­mic delights. Polyamory. BDSM as a tool for let­ting go. Sex­u­al inti­ma­cy projects.

Normal? By whose standard? According to whom?

Interesting? Hell, yes.

Oth­ers, the major­i­ty, stop them­selves. They stay in dead rela­tion­ships, or refuse to deal with the con­se­quences of their behav­iour. If they are slight­ly thwart­ed, they go run­ning home to mommy.

They dig a hole over a decade, and then expect it to fill itself in, so they can walk our unscathed.

They cling to the past, blame oth­ers, (“Men!” “Women!”) or use sub­stances to get through the day.

I despair a bit.

But then, I remem­ber the ones who choose to fly, to explore, to ask for what they want, to open them­selves to actu­al­ly being exact­ly who they are. 

They have a slight­ly shell-shocked look about them — “I can do that? Wow!” Or, “Oh! I thought that was weird and wrong, and now I see it feels good and is so right… for me!”

Thus I mention things that will challenge, stretch and turn you on. The world is sinking slowly in the muck of mediocrity, of rules and regulations… of normal, brittle, and boring.

I want to offer another way… and this is it.

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