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Perception and Allowance
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Perception and Allowance I was writing a message to someone about how I have come to sobriety after 40 years of being an alcoholic. A battle I will always struggle with - but for now I am good. As I was writing this, I made a connection between what I had already accomplished with regards to my use of alcohol, and what I was seeking in beginning some type of BDSM lifestyle. My curiousity has now grown to where I am now taking action. Then, I began wondering if I was just replacing one addictive behavior with potentially another one? What did I wish to get out of this lifestyle? We will see. I have modified it a bit to better describe my newest connection. I hope you can relate to it. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ We hear all the time the notion of “you can’t love someone else until you love yourself first” – right? While I believe that ultimately that is true, it is the path to get to that point that is simply undefinable in its difficulty. Trust me when I say, that I am not saying to you – “you don’t love yourself enough” and therefore you are, and will continue to be unhappy. More than one person would tell me that I need to love myself more. That made me take the time to absorb what that really meant. I don’t judge you that way because I didn’t like it much. To me at least, what it meant was that I did not have the ability to release some of the major regrets of my past. I did love myself, but I sure didn’t like myself. That may or may not be your situation. I don’t know you. I don’t know your past. I don’t know your strengths and vulnerabilities, so how can I assume that it is your case? I can’t. When you steel yourself against an obstacle or a force you feel is against you, you will often use your past experiences to understand where you were weak in your defenses, and purposefully reinforce those gaps. This is the perception part. Using past experiences most often placed me in a position of weakness, not strength. For what I would do is say to myself “dude- you screwed that up before – what make you think you are going to see any different result”? You know the definition of insanity pitch. One critical way of thinking that came from many hours of looking for an answer and I have embraced (during my weathering the storm of abusing alcohol) is my realization that: If it is not logical to you, or believable to you, it is not possible to you. It is my strong belief that no one can force me to do something unless I allow it. Now we know that simply isn’t true – right? Others force us to do things all the time. We are forced to go to jail. We are forced to pay taxes. We are forced to face our end of life. The important part of this is (other than death itself), these other things are just circumstances that we find ourselves in. Our choices all along our journey has brought us to this exact set of circumstances. Circumstance(s) are nothing more than small periods of the larger segments of our lives. What no one can do is force us to feel a certain way about the circumstance(s) that we currently find ourselves a part of. At the end of the day, all we have is the way we feel and our experiences. We have to use our feelings (light or dark) as our navigational compass telling us if we are headed in the right direction. Light=we like this and are feeling the flow. Dark= we don’t like this. The one reason (and probably the only reason) that we humans drink alcohol, or take drugs, or gamble or crave sex, to excess and can cause harm – is to change the way we feel. We don’t like how we feel, and we probably don’t like ourselves much either To this end, our partners in life, our parents, our , or whomever, cannot be the ones we count on to complete us and make us whole and happy. To be a mirror that doesn’t reflect who we are, but who we want to be. We can’t expect others to do that for us. While we may transfer power, it cannot be absolute. We must and will always retain our own sense of self to remain human. We may not even realize that by surrenduring or taking power, we are strengthening our self worth. We are liking ourselves more. What we gain from any kind of BDSM relationship (to me) is quite simple: We engage in this to change the way we feel - yes, but we are fortunate to be amongst those (the few) that have come to realize that in the end all we have is our feelings and experiences, and those are totally reliant on what we percieve and what we allow. |
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