Values

I’m grateful to Dr.Yaldah Tovah for his wonderful writings about the female submissive. Perhaps, there are other professionals who have also written papers on the subject, but I’m not aware of them. I recommend his writings to you and I suggest you look out for an article on the Internet entitled ‘The Healthy Female Submissive’.

Dr. Tovah is concerned that women with a submissive nature are receiving incorrect messages from society at large. He writes:

“Here in Western society, we place highest value on independence...the less needy and more self-sufficient. We value competition over co-operation, tangible achievement over achievement in relationship.”

But, is this, he wonders the right way to think?

“There is something wrong with believing that such independence is the only good. It is especially wrong for the most relatedness-oriented among us, the submissive female.”

I don’t think there is any dispute that societal expectations can be hard on the female submissive (and the Dominant) and Dr. Tovah has some suggestions to make:

“Part of the newly aware submissive’s task is to separate out the internalized voices of her culture: those voices that tell her she is too needy, too dependent, too focused on the others in her life. Once she can articulate what those voices tell her, she can begin to question not HERSELF, but the validity of those internalized values, using her own yardstick to measure her life, rather than our culture’s standard.”

I think I have felt guilty at times for my choices in life. I’m not out there climbing any corporate ladders or fulfilling my ‘potential’. It soon became very obvious to me that with my husband’s ambitious nature, working full time would leave my children without the focus of a parent for much of the time. I just didn’t want that and nor did my husband. It worked for us to have less materially and to have one parent for whom the focus was, the children. I don’t regret that decision at all but I confess I have felt that I may have gone against some code that says ‘women can have it all’. They can, of course, but for me, having it all meant that I could choose to make my children and my husband, the focus of my life. Mine is a different perspective.

Dr Tovah writes, “We can see how perspective is critical in understanding a phenomenon. He suggests that submissive women should ask, not ‘am I weak?’ but “is there something missing from the yardstick I use to measure myself?”

The truth is that personally, I long ago stopped worrying about societal norms. I don’t mean that I fly in the face of conventions because I don’t do that. I tread quietly across this earth and I don’t look for conflict. But, I am proud of myself for finally fully accepting my submissive nature and for putting in place (with assistance) a way of operating in my life and with my husband wherein we are both happy, where we both feel natural and at peace, and where we do no one any harm. I am proud of my willingness to go against conventional wisdom and the thinking of the group to live my own life on my terms.

If life had been a little different, it seems that my choice of career was indeed suited to my submissive nature. Dr. Tovah notes the little girl with a submissive nature has a “sixth sense” about people. The submissive “often finds great fulfilment working in fields such as social work, nursing, medicine, counselling, teaching.”

I am touched by Dr. Tovah’s understanding of the female submissive’s needs in a partner:

“Those who consciously seek a Dominant partner are those who are perhaps, so sensitive that they require not only benevolence, but someone who understands PRECISELY how mouldable and influence able they are, and is capable of using the power to mould her and influence her deliberately and consciously, for her good and the good of the relationship. In that kind of relationship, the submissive is freed to be all of herself. She is safe enough to feel her exquisitely sensitive reactions to others, to play like a child, to give care and to take care, to be angry, to lose shame.”

In my mind, he is exactly right. He might well have been talking about me.

Dr Tovah writes, “There is a strength beyond measure in self knowledge and acceptance. There is freedom in jettisoning shame, in letting go of ‘shoulds’. To know oneself as a submissive woman, to accept that it is neither the terrible thing that society tells us it is, nor the only right and true way to be for OTHERS, is to be free. What is, is.”

I completely agree. No other article has ever meant more to me than this one.