One might think it easy to be submissive, that you merely take what is dished out to you. And it is true that hypothetically everyone is capable of submission. Indeed people submit every day of their lives – to their job and to their boss, to their role as a good wife/husband or mother/father, to the laws of the land, and to social conventions.
And in much submission there is also suppression. That is – suppression of one’s own true desires and yearnings. And so the most delicious submission is that which intersects one’s own desires. To take a seat at a dinner party, and allow the chef to serve up a fabulous feast, while you yourself relax and enjoy and indulge. To have your partner see you are stressed out from your day, and force you into a warm and fragrant bubble bath.

These notions of accepting submission I’m sure that most people can identify with. But the BDSM idea of submission many find much harder to understand, the one that involves submission to the will of another to give them the ability to inflict pain and marks on one’s body. It is easy to accept and submit to pleasant things, but harder to accept pain.

Firstly, it takes trust. Trust that the person will respect and indeed be sensitive enough to gauge the submissive’s limits. Trust that they will not cause serious or permanent harm. Trust in their psychology, and indeed of your own evaluation of them.

Secondly, it takes an understanding of the benefits of pain, so as to truly accept pain. Pain works in natural contrast with pleasure, intensifying the experience and our memory of it. And it teaches us something about the transitory nature of things – for the intense pain of the cane decreases and fades, eventually passing. Indeed painful moments journey and pass on. Even thngs of intense emotional pain such as loss of a loved one, journeys from the overwhelming and all-encompassing sense of pain and loss, into something that we find we can eventually push on from and endure, and continue our everyday life again, even while we get punctuations of the pain and loss reminded to us at times which bring a new tear to our eye. And this teaches us to appreciate the transitory nature of any experience we go through in life to be endured.  Psychologically, pain provides a sense of processing and release, the venting of deeper things buried within ourselves. It may in these ways act as a vehicle to better understanding ourselves, and the stuff we are made of.

Pain aids deep submission. If  you can accept pain from another, trust in another, there is a beautiful intimacy which can be forged from it. For the person who exerts the pain follows and observes the journey of the other. He/she invests in inflicting the pain, to accomplish a physical and psychological response. For a moment of time there is only the inflictor of pain and submissive together in that space, their own world of two. Nothing else exists for a moment, only the moment.

Of course pain can equally be used for angry abuse and unjustified suffering, and such things I abhor and denounce, such as the ill treatment of animals and children and spousal abuse. But I wanted to write at this moment of pain put to the purpose of sublime and intimate submission, between two consenting and sane adults. And oh, how there is a joy and journey in that.