Contract awaits

 I await the Contract. No, it's not a legal contract and no lawyers are involved. Nevertheless, it seems like a lot of thought is going into the document, in spite of the fact that various iterations are expected to get it just right.

I made a small contribution. I was asked if I had any requests or ideas, and I made a note of them. I wanted to express what I saw as my role and the characteristics that make up that role in my mind. I wanted to express what I saw as his role. It's what the hypnotist refers to as the Keystone statement. 

I didn't have any deal breakers since we've been together quite long enough, I would say (48 years!), to trust that nothing is going to be a dealbreaker at this stage of the game.

I mentioned, very broadly, maybe there's a few things I could have at my disposal to key him in to me wanting attention without breaking the tenor of the Contract...

Maybe there's a list of 'go to' activities that he can know are welcome. Maybe not. I think they think that's not the way to go; maybe, apart from the obvious no-go zones, everything is a green sign. 

I thought a nighttime ritual would be cool, and the hynotist responded to that with an idea I like very much.

In other words, it's all up in the air, and it's kind of like some old show I used to watch where the owners of the house leave and the designers come in and make over your house. 

Not quite. It's a sort of a negotiation. I think.

Most of the time I can be patient about this, like a girl awaiting a proposal of marriage, maybe. You sort of know it will happen sometime soon, but you can't be sure. Is it tonight, or in three months? So, you just sort of await the other in some sort of suspended animation.

Half a week ago the hypnotist and I had a brief chat around the Contract, extending out the conversation to traverse the relationship that would result from it. I happened to mention that my submissive appetite was waaaaaay up and he said something rather surprising to me.

He said that a passionate force (me, I guess) required a strong hand, clear boundaries and high standards.

 I interpreted this as strictness, maybe because I was wayward. I tend to think that this sort of statement is directed towards someone who needs to be kept in her lane. David, my friend who died some years ago and was sort of like a father to me, said to me that he kept me in my lane, but that there were bumpers on the lane. So, I rolled like a ball from the left to the right but stayed in my lane. Never forgot that. I felt it was said endearingly.

No, no, no, the hypnotist assured me. It was not a derisive comment at all. His explanation is really worth reading carefully.

He said that there are three motivations for a person to want to express his or her submission. It could be devotional (love), positional (a desire to do things well) or transactional. I tended towards 40% for the first two and 20% for the third.  (He may have said 50% for the first two and zero for the last category. I know my husband thinks there is a negotiation side of me.) I remembered as he explained this that I knew this material from a podcast of his and we had even briefly discussed it months ago when we were first getting to know each other.

He made me an audio message and said that I was a person who wanted to do things well, that that mattered to me and so to "win" at my submission I needed a 'strong hand, clear boundaries and high standards'.

When he put it like that it was far more palatable. I didn't need to feel like I was 'bad' which is an insufferable thought or feeling for me. He was committed to explaining all this to me because he was not in any way criticizing me. That was comforting.

Since writing the last post and this post I have had wonderful sex and although I have no quarrel with the explanations above, I think really great sex goes an awfully long way to a girl being more than happy to follow the rules as laid out. I may be smiling as I write this, but we both know it's true. 

Feeling State Theory and Intense Sex

I am becoming familiar with Feeling State Therapy. An example was given of a young woman who was crying herself to sleep every night because she missed her boyfriend so much. They had recently broken off their relationship.

The therapist asked her to think of a time that was particularly memorable with her boyfriend and she remembered immediately a time when they went dancing. She was asked how that make her feel and she replied that at that moment she felt "special" which is, of course, a perfectly normal and natural human desire.

There were lots of aspects of their relationship that she didn't miss and hadn't enjoyed but dancing with him, feeling special, had become associated with him, and she missed that feeling, more than she missed him, which was quite a revelation to her. This conversation eased her loss of the relationship and she stopped obsessing and stopped crying too. Now, she was free to find the feeling of being special in some new way other than feeling it all hinged on her boyfriend.

This prompted a somewhat new line of thought for me. I thought about the times when I have felt elated, buoyant, fully present and alive and I would have to say, as sluttish as it is going to sound, that I have felt most thrilled and exuberantly happy and authentically me when I have had sex in something of a primal way.

I remember once thinking that if a man gives a woman an intense full body sort of orgasm, in her mind regardless of their future projectory, they would be somewhat wedded for life. That is, in the corner of her mind, no matter how far into the distance the experience was, she would hold a torch for that man. For example, I remember once an orgasm so overtaking of my senses and so overwhelming that my mind completely shut down in a total yogi sort of way. I go to that particular second in time quite often and relive it in my mind and my body because it was a moment that stands out to me as one of the most significant moments of my life.

I don't think I felt "special" or that I "belonged" or that I was "cared for", the big things that people desire. I just felt authentically me. I felt...alive. I felt..."free". Yes, feeling free is a big human desire of some people.

If we associate our big desire with a person, or a thing, we get some addictive or obsessive thinking going on. I know this from experience. In Feeling State Theory I believe the idea is that if it is not possible to feel free with that person any longer for whatever reason, it's the therapist's job to help the client find some other way to feel free, or whatever it is they desire to feel.

It seems that for some of us, intense sexual experiences are deeply desired and freeing, and there's nothing wrong with that, so long as you embrace that with someone who also wants to give you those intense experiences, and that this arrangement works into your life in a harmonious way. It's perfectly simple really, in theory anyway.