Would it be useful to find social circumstances where a terrifying display of sadistic cruelty is the appropriate response, appreciated as an art form by observers and savored by the nominal victim?
If you mean the BDSM world, I used to be quite the diva—I trained people to dance in ballet boots and arm-binders; I put on staggering productions, I was making quite a name for myself.
Then the girls I was living and performing with broke up with me and alleged abuse, and (because I was deeply in love and had attached my ego-validation processes to their opinion of me to an unhealthy degree) I wholly internalized that narrative.
That was, in fact, the exact moment of the beginning of my collapse.
The seeds were planted a lot earlier, of course—I spent most of my childhood in rather nastily abusive situations, and developed an unhealthy obsession with status and power and dominance—but I’m fairly certain the actual structural collapse occured in mid-2006, when all the support structures that I had built to compensate for those earlier flaws got ripped away.
Would it be useful to find social circumstances where a terrifying display of sadistic cruelty is the appropriate response, appreciated as an art form by observers and savored by the nominal victim?
If you mean the BDSM world, I used to be quite the diva—I trained people to dance in ballet boots and arm-binders; I put on staggering productions, I was making quite a name for myself.
Then the girls I was living and performing with broke up with me and alleged abuse, and (because I was deeply in love and had attached my ego-validation processes to their opinion of me to an unhealthy degree) I wholly internalized that narrative.
That was, in fact, the exact moment of the beginning of my collapse.
The seeds were planted a lot earlier, of course—I spent most of my childhood in rather nastily abusive situations, and developed an unhealthy obsession with status and power and dominance—but I’m fairly certain the actual structural collapse occured in mid-2006, when all the support structures that I had built to compensate for those earlier flaws got ripped away.