Not your usual BDSM and abuse story

[ Posted here and at Let Them Eat Pro-SM Feminist Safe Spaces ]

I have this friend.

When I met her, she was in a marriage with a lot of partially hidden problems; those problems started coming out more blatantly as things started to fall out, through the separation, through the divorce: the extensive emotional abuse, the 'I got over my situational depression just fine, you should just cheer up out of your clinical depression and stop being such a whiner', the waving his penis in her face to demand oral sex. When they separated, he resented any suggestion that he take responsibility for her, because hey, they were broken up, that gets him out of any obligation to his wife, even though divorce paperwork wasn't even being negotiated yet, even though he wound up shacking up with "a hot redhead" and blowing vast amounts of recreational money while his wife was struggling to make rent in part because he insisted on moving to an area of the country with rampant unemployment where, furthermore, she's miserable.

I helped talk this friend through the breakup and the divorce, pointed out things that she was missing like, "Your asshat ex is really treating you very badly" and "You are being taken advantage of here". Supported her through a bad time and helped her out of the abusive situation.

And one might think that would be the end of it.

Of course, like many people who have been in abusive situations, she has done a lot of thinking about how she got into that place, what patterns there were in her life, and how she needs to change to not go there again. Which includes talking that over with a variety of her friends to try to pick things out.

And at some point, one of the people she was talking about her relationship history with, asshat ex and before, said, "You know what you sound like to me?" And said she sounded like someone who was wired up like a submissive, but who hadn't the experience or knowledge to figure out how to deal with that without turning into a doormat, and who had had partners who were willing to take advantage of that set of psychological hooks.

So she came to me, as the out submissive she knew, to talk to about this. And we talked. And after a bit of thinking, she took this fellow up on his offer to give her a grounding in managing her own submissiveness to see if she felt better for it. I got tapped, sort of, as her spotter, as someone she could talk to about the experience of being a sub, as someone to give her advice and resources, as someone who would understand things.

I watched her flower.

The joy she took in the early parts of that relationship was amazing. The way she took to the discipline of the d/s and the focus it provided her got her stable and secure in a way I had never seen her. He took care of her in quiet, straightforward ways; she commented more than once, in stunned tones, that she did things with him that the asshat ex had tried to coax and berate out of her for years.

Even the difficult times -- and there have been more than a few of those -- she has tackled with dedication and devotion, with the support of the commitments she's made and the simple not wanting to disappoint him. She's given up smoking, she's learning to draw boundaries to keep her family from taking as much advantage of her as they have in the past, she looks at the terror of having all of her emotional issues in relationships coming up faster and hitting harder than they have in the past and says, "This time, I'm going to work through this shit."

And she has patterns to work through and break, and is utterly frustrated by them at times, and is working on building up the capacity to choose, to act freely rather than constrained by fears and phobias and the scars of past damage. She talks at times about feeling like she's in a cage with the door open, and is trying to work up the guts to escape so she can be with him.


And so when I see people going on about the abuses of BDSM, I find myself thinking of her, and the way she's been building herself away from being readily abuseable by dealing with someone who respects who she is and how she responds.

(This post was written with her permission, her dom's okay, and her pre-posting approval.)