Question: What is a "sex addict" and do you consider that BDSM practitioners are "addicts" or are "sick"?
I don't presume that I possess sort of inside track on what's "perverse", "sick", or "addictive." My approach will not add a unilateral carried out what's "got to go" in a very person's behavioral repertoire then ferreting the causes and reasons of the behavior while using goal of eliminating these "unwanted" sexual practices. The question of whether a sexual activity or behavior is definitely an "addiction" or "sick" can't easily be answered. "Addiction" or "sickness" is incredibly much dependant on the individual's own inner subjective experience. One common concise explaination addiction is "continued (compulsive) use despite adverse consequences." Only the person can determine what constitutes adverse consequences and if one's chosen erotic expression is rigid and compulsive.
If I'm "against" anything, I guess it would be compulsion - of any sort, really, regardless of whether it were only eating raw carrots. My own personal value system includes the fact that it is merely the opportunity to choose that separates us from animals. Freedom is an important value in my experience, and I suppose I can't help but pass any particular one value system on to my patients. The importance of relatedness to others is the one other a part of my own value system that influences my work. Closeness to others is, to my view, part with the sweet fruit of living.
That being said, I see a healthy sexuality as emanating from a proper mind. A person who's relatively clear of compulsion and who's offered to identifying and empathizing with the needs and wants of others can't help but have healthy, non-perverse sex. Question. How would you define a sexual "compulsion" and just how can an individual get without any one? When a fantasy relocates somebody in the world of his childhood for the purpose of mastering an historical conflict or traumatic relationship, the quality of his/her scenes will likely be rigid, fixed, imperative and not linked to the wants/needs of present-day partners. If somebody is unconsciously seeking reparation of a childhood relationship by looking for an idealized, omnipotent parent to replace the individual that failed, or perhaps wanting to control an individual who couldn't be controlled in his/her childhood, his/her scene serves symbolic, historical, and unconscious needs rather than real, present-day, conscious ones. These scenes never really satisfy; they solely trigger the recurrence of your need. The script, although it affords a short lived a feeling of strength and self-esteem, needs to be repeated again and again with rigid compulsivity as it doesn't resolve problems inside the self.
While a 24/7 "Daddy/Little Girl" script may provide enormous satisfaction through meeting certain mutual needs, a 45-year-old woman isn't really a four-year-old girl and must, ultimately, manage herself in real life. The satisfactions which a real four-year-old girl gets from using a daddy who loves, nourishes and cares for her resemble although not similar to those that a 45-year old woman receives from her scene "daddy". If certain needs weren't met back when, they're gone forever and require to be mourned ahead of the individual is liberated to love the individuals who's looking at her (instead of the historic one who's behind her). People need to differentiate between role-play and reality. When the unconscious goal of sex is one area unattainable (to get historical daddy to provide her what she didn't get), compulsion shows its head and actually starts to be bad for you. With its misery and desperation, its insatiable yearning for what cannot be satisfied, the scene represents an ambition that can not be attained yet cannot be relinquished.
The inevitable result of the failure to attain impossible goals is depression. The scene never quite satisfies. Such an individual paradoxically has an impoverished sex/fantasy life. Her erotic freedom is inhibited, restricted to her mandatory, imperative script. Sex could only be imagined from perspective. What's needed is made for the average person being prepared to undergo hard work of private healing. Emotional blockages and perceptual distortions need to become resolved, understood or transcended. As he learns to lessen unwanted self-states through psychological processes, rather than through turning to compulsive behaviors, his scenes dwindle driven and much less anxiety-ridden. With healing, anyone can start to re-invest energies into real relationships with real people, rather than continuing to populate his world with ghosts.
Question: What is your way of treating people within the BDSM scene? How is treating BDSM people different from treating non-BDSM people?
What comprises successful answer to people within the scene is, with a large extent, what comprises successful treatment for everyone. Good therapy facilitates the achievement of your more vital, whole, cohesive sense of self and making you make use of your abilities and talents. It helps you find approaches to connect meaningfully with people and also to exercise intelligence in productive/creative activities. With that as a psychological foundation, interest inside the scene might be pursued inside a balanced, playful and non self-destructive way. Of course, issues of dominance, submission and power-exchange are aspects of all human relationships. Some a higher level S&M is found in every sexual activity. Longings for passionate attachments, to feel deeply understood and replied to, to get cared for and also have our pain and loneliness lessened by an idealized other, or being admired by an appreciating other are ubiquitous in human affairs. People who identify themselves being inside scene, however, tend to get those who are always looking for approaches to expand the confines of every day, moralistic, culture-sanctioned reality. They go up against the grain in the status quo.
This, naturally, 's what the truly great creative discoveries inside arts, sciences and humanities can also be about. If a "pervert" is somebody who "perverts" the status quo, well, I guess you'd must say some from the greatest minds and talents of our own times happen to be perverted. Question: What are your views concerning the relationship between the therapeutic community and the BDSM community? Why think many people within the scene are wary about psychotherapists? Therapists are people and are often in denial relating to own deepest erotic longings. These split-off and unacknowledged fantasies are defended against and lead to therapists often viewing scene activities as misbehaviors that represent weakness or childish indulgences which might be be subject to moral condemnation.
Therapists often believe that the patient's a feeling of being judged is a projection with the patient's own self-judgment, but I believe there's an element of reality inside the therapist's message of confusion, fear, reluctance or even repugnance. A therapeutic interaction this way becomes traumatizing as the customary response to this atmosphere of nonacceptance from your therapist is further psychological concealment and shame, which is anathema to get affordable therapy and good mental health. Seeing non-normative sexuality as "deviant", the therapist often leads to the psychological symptoms with the patient who already lives with shame and guilt as a daily companion. Furthermore, wanting to remove a crucial outlet for relieving fear, depression, shame and isolation often creates more psychological distress than it ameliorates. Mental health care professionals within the west criticize Chinese and Soviet therapists for pathologizing those who hold political beliefs which can be not normative. Western clinicians, however, make a similar mistake when they pathologize people that have unconventional sexual predilections and interests.
Question: Submissives sometimes speak of an quality of liberation and freedom they experience after a scene. How do you take into account this?
Yes, people often believe that they're truly alive, or truly themselves, in the scene. They often feel a a sense expansion inside the acute vulnerability they experience with their scene. A famous psychoanalyst once wrote that certain method in which children stay connected to emotionally fragile parents is to produce a "false self", which is really a self that embodies the qualities that they can think their parents need these to have. I believe that good scenes allow somebody to yield this false self. A scene can on occasion enable years of defensive barriers that offer the false self to get broken through. The desiring the scene is really a looking for the experience from the true self. Deep down all of us long to give up, to "come clean", as part of a broad longing to get known or recognized. Being known by an idealizable dom is part from the feeling of relief and even ecstasy that many people experience. Scenes could also, for doms and subs, give expression to peoples' need for play. People take delight in fantasy production. Disneyland it not just for the kids.
Scenes have tremendous possibility of potentiating fantasy. Costumes, rituals, scenarios, sex props and elaborate sets can reveal the richness with the creative inner life and speak to abdominal muscles real human need for fantasy play. These fantasies are carriers of an full spectrum of human feelings: to manipulate, being controlled, to tease, being teased, to try out, to thrill and to achieve solace through the confines in the mundaneness each day life. They represent the suspension of normal reality that is definitely an occasional necessity for all those healthy people. Finally, the submissive achieves a a feeling of balance from your good scene. The experience of receptivity and sensitivity counters the Western imperative to become strong, rational, unfeeling and constrained. Strength could be a terrible burden. People desire to disappointed and let go.
Question: What elements in the scene, if any, may be psychologically problematic?
In certain individuals, psychological processes for example impairment in reality testing as well as a split within the integrity in the personality may appear. Question: What inside world does that mean? Enslavement with a fantasy script that is repetitively re-enacted is often a subversion of truth. The individual can start to have a lessened power to function optimally inside real world. An appreciation and acceptance of sensible limits could be eroded. Denial from the truth with the fact that problems and conflicts need being resolved within the self, not from the infusion of somebody else's magical power or through having treating another woman's behavior, could be deleterious to an individual's power to make good choices. We see this sort of reality-sense impairment all the time inside the scene. A female submissive divorces her husband and takes her children across the country to go together with a male she meets on the net. He holds out the hope to be a benign master who'll intuit and satisfy her deepest submissive wants and needs. However, the stronger the necessity, greater risk of distortions exist.
Six months later, she returns home, alone and dejected, because her wish for the right master triggered psychological and, perhaps, physical abuse. A male submissive gives his bank card to his mistress who racks up frivolous charges. American Express then sends the balance to his wife, and he's in for a kind of punishment in which he previously not bargained. This enslavement to a unreal vision can rent the personality by 50 percent - the part that believes what's real (present) as well as the part that believes what's unreal (past). This "split" results inside a failure to realize a unitary vision with the self. The person harbors opposing and mutually exclusive goals, judgments, feelings and thoughts in different sectors with the personality. The mind of a woman who is a high-powered executive in daytime plus a meek submissive during the night, or even housed within an integrated self, may start to become exhibit paralyzing indecision and self-defeating compromises. Energy available for creative/productive endeavors is siphoned off, producing relationships without depth and within the participation in activities without zest. A a sense through an integrated a feeling of self is especially critical for those who walk the line involving the scene and vanilla worlds.
In addition, what's available for is involved inside a frantic look for aliveness through scenes, it is possible that he/she is planning to hide from feelings of inner deadness. If a sense of aliveness is achieved exclusively through scenes, the issues that give rise for this feeling of inner emptiness may go unresolved and the rest of the person's everyday life could be negatively affected. Oddly enough, sometimes an individual experiencing depression inside the course of psychotherapy might be a positive development as it can often mean he/she's starting out feel the inner emptiness they have been running from. Question: You have written "Ritualized suffering seems to become a way of giving meaning and value to human infirmities." I assume you mean the suffering a bottom feels inside a scene. Can you say more about this?
There seems to get no dearth of suffering in daily life. The pain of helplessness, disappointment, loss, powerlessness and limitation can be a part from the human condition. It is my hunch that there is something like a universal need, wish or looking for surrender for the totality of life, including it's more unpleasant aspects, common within the human psyche. Submission, losing oneself to the power in the other, becoming enslaved for the master, is the ever-available lookalike to surrender on the inevitability of living. The writer who may have most influenced my thinking concerning the should embrace the suffering of life's Carl Jung. Submissiveness can be imagined as cultivation of the Jung known as the "shadow" - the darker, mostly unconscious part in the here psyche -- which he regarded not being a sickness, but as an essential part with the human experience.
The shadow could be the tunnel, channel or connection by which one reaches the deepest, most elemental layers of psyche. Going from the tunnel, or breaking down the ego defenses, one feels reduced and degraded. Embracing the shadow supplies a fuller a feeling of self-knowledge, self-acceptance and a fuller feeling of being alive. The experience with the shadow is humiliating and frightening, but is often a reduction to the fullness of life - to essential life, which include suffering, pain, powerlessness and humiliation.