The Guilty Submissive and The Punishment

I got a question on Twitter a couple of days ago. Cassandra-DeLClaire, a 20 year old submissive, asked me about what she considered to be a horrible mistake on her part. She has written a detailed post in our forum about the situation surrounding the mistake itself so I will not go into the specifics of it.

She touched a couple of things that I’ve experienced before – The guilt of the submissive.

As training and the BDSM relationship between the Dominant and the submissive evolves, so does the submissive guilt when the Dominant points out potential mistakes.

It’s a natural development as far as I see it, because the submissive wants to please and simply put; the Dominant wants to be pleased. When mistakes are made then a natural feeling of guilt occurs as the submissive didn’t succeed in pleasing the Dominant. Before I go any further in my reasoning I will ask every submissive that reads this to think a little bit more about it.

Isn’t it true that you, as a submissive, might feel guilt, to a larger extent than others, in an ordinary everyday situation if you’ve make a mistake?

I’m fairly sure that most submissives will answer “Yes”.

My experience is that this is a quite common feeling among submissives, i.e something that most submissives might feel in any kind of situation that involves mistakes. So let us go back to my original reasoning.

The reason for this is the need for control….yes, you read it correctly.

Some of you might think “Get out of here” or “Yeah right” when you read the statement I just made above, some of you might even think that submissives do not want control and you are totally correct.

Submissives do not want control and simply put; this is a natural drive for getting into BDSM as a submissive – But if you back up a bit and take a look at why submissives don’t want control, then the reason is that they usually have a very controlling behaviour and the Dominant helps them to take a “mental vacation” from this specific behaviour.

I believe this to be one of the core reasons for why some people become submissives.

So let us connect the feeling of guilt and the reason for punishment. When a mistake is made, then it exposes a lack of self control, sloppiness or any other reason that the submissive can come up with to bash herself with – And this psychological self-flagellation can go on work weeks if the mistake is serious enough in the eyes of the submissive. This is, in my opinion, not a very healthy situation and the solution might be a punishment.

The punishment has a central role in breaking the psychological vortex submissives end up in when pondering mistakes and feeling guilt. The Dominant is externalising the submissive’s guilt by handing out a punishment and becomes the absolution that is necessary to end the psychological merry-go-around that is tormenting the submissive.

The punishment becomes the catharsis that enables the submissive the leave the mistake behind her and reconfirms the relationship that she has with the Dominant.

These are natural psychological properties that you will encounter as a part of BDSM dynamics and they might also be the reason why you turned into a submissive in the first place.

If you feel that you are a submissive for other reasons, then share those  with us in a commment to this post or help Cassandra understand her guilt in the forum.