Verbal Abuse & Fear

There are times you wish you’d started writing in the white-hot instant of self-illumination. Days pass and the seeming clarity grows murk and the words don’t spring so readily to mind.

As I’ve said being humiliated can be difficult for me to imagine. Humiliation requires shame. Shame requires a consensus of embarrassment. Much embarrassment is rooted in social norms: they are powerless if you don’t share them. The human race is all too addicted to shibboleths valueless proprieties.

Shame can come from a violation of self-image. Toying with a persons sense of honor, for example, is dangerous. Self-worth even more so. Not that it absolutely cannot be done. It requires enormous circumspection. The wrong word may cause a wound that will never heal.

Which is why many dominants won’t consider humiliation scenarios, even if they are delicious in the mind.

Rare tops say a bottom should accept humiliation with pride and affirmation. The examples I’ve seen are what in my own language I call degradation. Degraded I certainly can be. While I may wince there can be an amazing afterglow.

And there are acts so subjugating that the distinction between being humiliating and deeply humbled is obscure. Those can be wonderful.

Verbal abuse is something I’ve long thought humiliating. But given what I’ve said above why should harsh words make me feel so. Finally I discerned that for me there is another element: fear.

Yes, fear.

There was an early evening that Alexandra and I shared. The recollection can take my breath away (and make my cock hard). That she was a full embodied Bitch Goddess I’ve always felt. But I gave much of the power to those several seconds to the way she was hitting me with the cane.

She was also speaking to me: harsh, critical, unforgiving.

Much later I realize I was scared. Probably by the pain. But I think more so by the tone of her voice.

I started to write that vocal anger is something I can’t handle. Not true. I had a lover who was a fount of it. Patiently I waited for each fit to end so that I could be consoling. (Rather naïve at a late age I thought my tolerance was special gift I offered.)

But when my business partner is going over the books, cursing because he’s struggling to track down a misplaced dime I often want to leave the shop. To flee. He isn’t cursing me. He’s annoyed by his own clerical error.

But it upsets me.

Verbal anger, spoken criticism connects far back into childhood. It reaches to the earliest days when my own Great Satan - my father - was mad (in more senses than one). Not necessarily with me, maybe with my momma.

This is why it sends a potent shock through my nervous system.

Are you are thinking, “Gosh Richard this is disturbing.” Or wondering if I should seek counseling. The answer is: No.

I’ve long known that much of my BDSM orientation comes from growing up with the old bastard. Much of who I am. It doesn’t bother me. Without my father I might be an ordinary schmuck in Savannah, GA, with a wife, 1.5 babies and holding an unimaginably tedious job, living for my evening with the television set.

We’ve never really done much verbal abuse.

I’ve been torn between wanting to be knocked down that way again and a worry that frequency would kill the power.

And - being me - I worry. Alexandra did once say something that knocked me out of the slave trance. And there’s that damned nagging fear of triteness. But I think it is the tone - not the words. And all things going well it isn’t as if I’d be in a mood for literary criticism.

(Oh, damnation! I just realized that I put the word abuse in the title. I guess it was perhaps when I was a kid. But naturally within a sane relationship it is a risk aware consensual kink.)