Listening Skills and D/s (22)

This made me smile. I found myself disagreeing on the boards not so long ago, because I personally disagree with any blanket assertion that Ds relationships are "better than" vanilla ones. Of course I accept that, for some, they simply are; it is the kind of relationship they need and want, and therefore the relationship is better *for them*. But I struggle to accept that they are better in blanket terms than vanilla.

However, I actually do see something in this Ds comparison with counselling. The reason I see that is the power imbalance. Modern therapy has moved well away from "All Knowing Powerful God Type vs pathetic victim in need of help" [the irony of this is not lost on me....] which is how i see traditional Freudian psychoanalytic treatment. It is much more now about removing the divide between all knowing therapist/helpless therapee. And making it collaborative. For example, person centred therapy is all about empathy, having positive regard for someone whatever they share, and being fully in the moment and honestly responding to what someone is telling you. But there is still that awareness of the power differential. Someone is there to guide and advise and facilitate(am fully aware any therapists on here might take issue with my choice of words here), and someone is there to be helped.

In Ds, someone is in charge and doing the guiding in the relationship, pointing out how things are, should be,or will be, and moulding the relationship and the submissive along those lines. Good Ds (to me) is about the Dominant helping the submissive in whatever way she needs helping. And whilst that of course applies in reverse in a "good relationship", this particular function of a relationship to me is skewed within Ds. So that's where i find myself agreeing with the OP. I see the parallels.

In theory.

Then I find myself agreeing with Belle. Because, frankly, there are plenty of rubbish Ds relationships (or those which purport to be) where those skills are not present, and the relationship is not a good one.

And to be clear, I don't think Ds is a substitute for counselling if therapy is needed, but I really do see that it can very very powerful in terms of how to run a relationship.

I found it interesting that the OP couched much of the parallel in terms of the discipline/interrogation element of the dynamic. Using active listening as a combative weapon to "win".

I get that, but i see it in much more general terms, much more pervasive.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. (Buddha)

Edited 20 Mar 10, 5:45 AM by Cinnamon_Tart

Skills such as active listening, paraphrasing, reflecting are counselling skills and are used by a wide variety of people in a wide variety of situations. Nurses, teachers, police, etc all use these skills as can parents, partners friends and family.

It is a skill that many people find come naturally to them and they will find that they use it in all walks of life without having realised it had a name.

As a dominant you use these tools to facilitate the control of your sub and I have no doubts that it aids you greatly in what you are doing ... Just as it aids me as a sub to clarify what my Master wants, to understand his needs of me .... Just as it aids me to listen to my daughter, to clarify her needs to fully understand what she is trying to tell me. Just as it aids me to help my retail customers and my counselling clients.

But it has nothing to do with the fact that I am in a wonderful D/s relationship and everything to do with the type of person I am. Being sub or dominant is not all that we are, it is just one facet of us determined by our personality and needs the same way our personality and needs will determine if we are good at using counselling skills or not.

Tazallie
Getting there!

As focussed as one may be on what's being said, there's a wealth of communication going on which isn't being spoken...the way they're sitting, breathing, holding their arms, how tense they are, where they're looking...90% of communication is nonverbal.

My girl is rubbish at reading nonverbal communication, and even though I am always thorough when I give her an order, or explain something to her, she's had disagreements and misunderstandings with me and friends where she's failed to catch some signal or other that I assumed would be obvious.

The way I use the skills in my dominance would be to "outsmart" her, or use it as a tool to get further into her head, get an insight into how much she likes a certain activity...she has problems sometimes admitting how enjoyable some of the edgier things are to her. I very much enjoy the challenge of getting her to admit her enjoyment. I think it'd fall under "humiliation", though really it's just another aspect of the things I like to do to her

Active listening is a skill everyone can benefit from. It's helped me immensely in my work - being in Tech Support and spending 8 hours every day doing nothing but listening, you become very good at picking up on verbal clues and assessing the REAL problem, rather than whatever it is the caller is blathering on about.

Where I'm seeing conflict on this thread between what the OP is saying and respondents, is that the OP hasn't yet realised that while it IS true that active listening and the skills he uses as part of his Dom arsenal are indeed essential, there are many factors involved which will not gel with what other people see in their relationships. Semantic issues are of course most prevalent in any "debate" thread, but you also have the situation where a person may not recognise that this is what they're doing, but they still, to an observer, do it, and do it well.

An example, I participated in a discussion on Emotional Sadism not long ago on here. At first glance, I thought it was something I would never have any truck with. As other people joined in, and I got an insight into what people see as emotional sadism, I concluded to my surprise that it's something I do quite regularly and enjoy a lot. It's just that I'd not married the actions to the words.

It's always surprising to find things that we take for granted in one area of our lives has a transferrable value in another. What we need to do, rather than overblow our reaction to that surprise, is simply smile and enjoy the secret knowledge that the knot you learned from watching a shibari tutorial now holds your mothers' hanging plants in place

You know they say it's always the quiet ones you have to watch? That's me.

I think part of it is my attempt to cover up how much I do crave my submission, afraid of seeming silly or pathetic, I suppose, but I would like to be better at it and be able to take it more seriously. I think it would make me a better girl for Sir. x x x

*grumbles and raises eyebrow

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. - Goethe.

Practise senseless acts of beauty.

I'm sorry, I can't work out from this what it is you're saying I "haven't yet realised".

It looks like you're saying something like "people see some things about this differently. Sometimes this is to do with different ways in which we use words, but sometimes it is to do with having a different perspective so that from one angle it looks like it is happening while from another it is not so apparent". If that is the case then I do not think that it is the area of conflict, and I feel that I have explicitly acknowledged all of those points at some point during the thread, and implicitly accepted them elsewhere.

It's always surprising to find things that we take for granted in one area of our lives has a transferrable value in another. What we need to do, rather than overblow our reaction to that surprise, is simply smile and enjoy the secret knowledge that the knot you learned from watching a shibari tutorial now holds your mothers' hanging plants in place

I think you have misunderstood me completely. I don't believe I have expressed surprise (except perhaps in the relative lack of some skills in the other attendees on the course); what may have been mistaken as surprise is my intellectual interest and sense of being intrigued by parallels. I don't understand what point you are trying to make with the shibari tutorial analogy either. But what seems to me to be the debate in this thread is something like this: some respondents are saying "everybody uses knots, so the fact that shibari and plant hanging both use knots is nothing special" whereas I am saying, "there's a specific reason why these knots are similar to one another, but are different from knots you might find in other places." From their own perspectives, both statements are correct. It is just a difference of focus and there are valuable lessons to be drawn from both approaches.

Simply that transferrable skills are everywhere. Knot typing can be useful in all walks of life. I'm just as likely to learn to tie knots by indulging my desire to learn to sail. As it happens, I leanrned by watching bondage tutorials. I enjoy the quiet, private smile of knowing, when making a friendship bracelet for someone, where I got that skill.

Yes, exactly. The ones who are saying "It's nothing special" have come to terms, or readily accept that a skill learned in one area of life is usable in other areas, what you're saying, I interpret as showing surprise, or if you prefer, intellectual fascination.

The simple fact is that there's NO difference between the couselling skills you talk about and the skills some people use in their D/s lives.

To take the rope analogy again, the knot holding the potted plant in the air may be identical to the knot used to hold your slave in the air. In context, though, they'll look VERY different. While it's clear there's a difference in intent, there's no difference in practise or execution.

I'm a fan of brevity, so given a choice between describing something as "an intellectual journey of discovery, which was prompted by a realisation that a new experience has parallels in more than one aspect of my existence" and "I was surprised", I'll go with the latter, every time

You know they say it's always the quiet ones you have to watch? That's me.

Well, that's all very well, but it doesn't seem to me to add anything to the discussion. That is why I was confused in the first place. What I would say is that there is a place for both the private knowing smile AND for the intellectual examination

Yes, exactly. The ones who are saying "It's nothing special" have come to terms, or readily accept that a skill learned in one area of life is usable in other areas, what you're saying, I interpret as showing surprise, or if you prefer, intellectual fascination. [/quote]

Well, that's a failure of communication, then - because "surprise" has nothing to do with what I feel. It simply isn't a feeling of surprise. That isn't something that I recognise as coming from the words I've used, and it also isn't a connotation I find in the term "intellectual fascination". I also don't recognise why you are apparently assuming that I haven't "come to terms/readily accepted". It seems to me that you are saying that because I have reached different conclusions then I must somehow be not as far advanced as you - or else that liking to study things implies a lack of acceptance of them. Some people are happy just to use words, others like to know where they come from - does that mean that etymologists do not yet "come to terms or readily accept" the meanings of words?

Well, YES! That's exactly what I was saying all along! In the passage you quoted above, I said as much. I also said (and this is the key point) that knots you find in areas that do not involve plant hanging or person-suspending, are different from those knots that appear when you are suspending something/someone. They are similar in that they are knots. They are different in that they are tied differently and perform qualitatively different functions.

Again, that's exactly what I was saying all along! There's a whole section of the OP dedicated to discussing that aspect of it!

But then you have to go a step further and observe that not all knots you encounter are tied in the same way or have the same mechanical function, so when you observe that two knots are mechanically similar it makes sense to say that there are parallels between the two circumstances. Then if you find other knots that are mechanically different you can also say that they are parallel only in that they are knots.

My experiences and observations of life lead me to believe that the skills that commonly appear in vanilla relationships are not equivalent, even though they are of the same type, as those skills explored on the taster course and also used in D/s. That is, in terms of the analogy we are using, they are different types of knots, but the techniques of knot-tying are similar in each case.

Obviously, this viewpoint is developed from my personal experiences. Other people may well draw different conclusions if their life experiences and observations of vanilla versus D/s are different in character from mine. But using that as a basis to tell me that I am wrong and have just not understood my life experiences properly (which is what I felt was happening at times on this thread) is not a valid argument.

Right now I feel that I am not communicating effectively on this thread and wasting my time. If this post doesn't make my position clear, I don't believe any further efforts will.