Quote Originally Posted by tabuk
My selfworth had been thrown out the window and ground to dust which blew away in the wind. I was ashamed of being a woman. I am not anymore because of this lifestyle.
Your posts are worded very well and the ideas are easily understandable. Many people would say that makes them eloquent in their own right.

The only issue I can take with the posts you have made if the statement you made above. I know I'm using "you" a lot, and that makes people defensive, but forgive me and please try to read on to the end with an open mind.

BDSM, in whole or in part, is not a replacement for therapy. Being raped and having your self-esteem ground into the dirt cannot be alleviated by the administration of bondage or submission. In fact, in many cases those thing will only serve to make the hurt worse. What can fix your self-esteem is talk. Communication. So, what you have told me is that, yes you found a relationship that fits you, but the more important thing to you is the relationship you formed with your master. You have obviously found someone in which you can trust and with whom you can communicate openly and honestly, and I would venture to guess that is what helped you. Not the BDSM, not the Gor, not the submission.

While I will admit that BDSM can be a very positive thing and BDSM can help people in a wide variety of ways, I will also be the first to admit that many people do not understand how to use it as a positive thing or how to administer it in a way that might be helpful. I have said this before, but I will repeat it here for your benefit solely. To the damaged mind, BDSM can be very attractive. The discipline, the rules, the structure of it all can instill one with a sense of worth, a sense of routine, and a sense of being needed. However, if carried into different avenues, many forms of BDSM play and activities can just as easily fracture the fragile mind farther than it already has been fractured previously.

Humiliation, emotional uncertainty, and even the discipline can tear one down even further, but the oddity is that, to the submissive, they feel like they are being built up. They feel safe with the disciplines in place and with the structure, but what they might not see is that they are replacing their pain with dependence. And this is not a specific example to you. This is a generalization in the broadest sense. A person woth low or damaged self-esteem may feel worthless and weak, and the disciplines of BDSM may make them begin to feel better and renewed and whole again. In some cases, this may be true. In some cases, it's not.

It's very much like in the military. The first thing they do is to strip you down to your barest, most vulnerable form, and then they introduce all their rules and discipline to show you what you can be and to mold you into the image they desire of you. The same can apply to a person who has been damaged by trauma. They have ben stripped down, and now they are desperately seeking a reason for it all and something to "heal" their wounds. Introduce discipline, especially rigorous discipline like you might find in a Gorean relationship, and you now have an ideal on which to be built. With proper communication and trust, that can be very good, but just used as a tool for sex, control or manipulation it can be very, very bad.

A person who is damaged needs to regain their control and their independence, not learn new, stricter ways to lose more of it. The best way to regain the feeling of control and independence is to share with people that can understand the situation, offer advice, and that can show the person that what has happened to them has not made them any less of a person. The event that damaged them has merely reshaped them in a way that has altered a belief system of theirs.

This is where BDSM may fail the person. Certainly, as mentioned before, the structure may feel nice, but is it demonstrating to the damaged individual that she is a healthy, normal person or is it just filling a hole that has been missing? Patching a hole without repairing it will just leave a hole that will re-open at some point in the future. It is only by making the hole whole again by talk, trust, and reliance, but not dependence, that a person can truly begin to be healed and renewed. And that is what I feel you found in your relationship. It could have just as easily been vanilla, regular BDSM or Gor; it was the person that mattered to you, not the choice of lifestyle.

Or I could be completely wrong. All I can tell you is what I have experienced. All I can hope is that by sharing this I have offered you some advice or something to think about that you might not have thought about previously.

And I know all of this post has been completely off-topic, but I did feel the point needed ot be made. Sorry to the people that are reading this in the hopes of finding Gorean information and instead finding "Dear Abby." LOL