playing the game of domination
We don't have to survive the ways we learned to as children. We can reject the culture of domination that has trained us to play by rules that were always meant to keep us small and afraid.
There is a real reckoning coming regarding the "anything goes" mentality around kink and consent.
We all get raised with a social backdrop of conditioning that teaches us how to survive in our family and culture of origin.
As children we often learn to agree to things we don't want, to endure discomfort for the sake of avoiding conflict, and to behave in ways that please others or help us fit in. We internalize this so readily, all typically without receiving much guidance in learning how to check in with our own desires and act in our own interests.
This is dominator culture.
We are conditioned to submit to something else "out there" rather than taught to connect to our power within.
We internalize norms from our family, media, schools, government, and communities. We learn on a subconscious level to suppress parts of ourselves, to control, to play our role as it was taught to us, or to "rebel" by choosing another role.
Part of the way domination functions is by being invisible.
This conditioning happens outside of our conscious awareness, and determines the patterns that lead us into adulthood.
We can learn to play with sovereignty as a sexual and relational practice, rather than with limited and tired ideas of dominance and submission. We can start to really examine our desires and become curious about what's underneath them.
This shift allows us to begin to build compassionate awareness of our felt experiences being raised in a dominator culture.
The pains of a child fearing shame and exile do not leave us as adults: lifting dissociative barriers means we can be the adult we needed and take the actions our younger self deserves to be safe.
Dismissing desires as "just fantasy" is a sure sign they are worth inquiring into.
The path to true power and transformative intimacy is the path back to our Self.
We don't have to survive the ways we learned to as children. We can reject the culture of domination that has trained us to play by rules that were always meant to keep us small and afraid.
To be a whole human being is to expand beyond the status quo, choose life or survival, and create something new.
What do you truly desire? How can you let yourself have a little bit of that, right now?
