Finding My Voice
I was listening to a recent episode of Over the Knee in which @amysubmits and @CynicalDom were discussing submissives having a voice within their dynamic (link to full episode). It got me thinking about my voice in my own dynamic with @sous-sir.
I feel I have more of a voice within our dynamic than before we started D/s. This is largely because our communication has become more deliberate and more purposeful. When I communicate something to SS now it generally falls into one of three categories; general conversation, expressing wants/needs, or providing information.
· General conversation is fairly straightforward. We talk about things that happened at work or stuff going on with friends and family. It’s the same type of conversation we had before D/s and it’s a way for us to stay engaged in each other’s lives and feel closer.
· Expressing my wants deliberately is new within our dynamic. It might come in the form of asking permission, such as when I asked if we could get some salad kits at the grocery store this weekend. It’s not a rule or expectation that I ask permission for groceries/meals. Instead, it was my way of expressing a want, essentially saying ‘I want to have salad with dinners this week but it won’t kill me if we don’t.’ Other times I express my wants more directly like when I tell him I really, really, really want Dutch Bros!
Expressing a need generally comes in the form of a meta talk. I might say, “When we get a few minutes, I need us to talk about denial as a punishment.” He knows this is something that must be addressed, and he makes sure we have time to have this conversation.
· Providing information is something I do both from my own personal need and from a sense of responsibility. I trust him to make decisions for us based on the best information he has available. Sometimes I have knowledge of things that he does not, and it is my responsibility in our dynamic to communicate that information to him so he can use it to make decisions.
One example of this is when our ice-maker broke and the kitchen flooded. I thought of a potential solution before SS did, and I shared my thoughts with him so he could decide how we would proceed.
Another example came during a recent conversation with SS when I told him I had been able to get a healthy lunch from the cafeteria, but I was sorry I had not packed myself a lunch the night before. He already knew I hadn’t completed the task of packing myself a lunch. What I was sharing with him was that I had not deliberately not completed the task, that there were not any extenuating circumstances that prevented me from doing so, and what I did to try to address the error. What he does with this information is not up to me, but if I do not give him all the pieces of the puzzle, I am hindering his ability to make the best decisions for us.
Before we started D/s, I used to lump everything I said together as “communicating.” My ‘voice’ had been a tangled mixture of thoughts, feelings, needs, and observations without any obvious distinctions. It’s no wonder things were often mis-communicated between us and I frequently felt like he wasn’t really hearing me. Now I’ve learned to distinguish between the different types of communication, and it has made my voice more purposeful. He is able to respond appropriately when he knows what I am trying to communicate. I have always had a voice in our relationship. For us, D/s has not diminished my voice, it has only made it stronger.