You can listen to this musing here or read it below.
There are many ways to categorize emotions, and maybe it’s impossible to experience how a particular emotion feels in another person. However, there are many studies and theories. I remember reading about the seven universal emotions by Paul Ekman (1950-), a doctor and clinical psychologistic who studied non-verbal behaviour in modern pathology and native tribes. He proved that it’s possible to detect emotions in facial expressions and predict behaviour based on it. And Paul says;
Emotions are a process, a particular kind of automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring, and a set of psychological changes and emotional behaviors begins to deal with the situation.
Paul Ekman
There is one positive emotion, enjoyment, and six more-or-less negative: Anger, Contempt, Disgust, Suprise, Sadness and Fear. I guess dealing with the challenging aspects of life simply proved more important through evolution. Other researchers add two variants to the enjoyment: trust and anticipation (that then relates to surprise). And yet, others argue that contempt and disgust are the same emotion. So it’s unclear, but I think this diversion is good enough to approach the question: what emotions are you looking for in your bondage?
Most beginners in bondage are looking for enjoyment, and it’s a fun leisure activity for them. They are drawn to the physical intimacy, the feeling of ropes on their body, and pleasure oscillating between freedom and restriction, tension and release. However, enjoyment is an already readily available emotion in modern life. And it’s almost like our society is hooked on it—the instant gratification of having our needs met. Rope bondage, in particular, and BDSM in general, offers much more. It’s a way of accessing emotions that we usually try to repress because there is no space for them in happy-happy joy-joy land. Before going into using bondage to explore negative emotions, I, hopefully unnecessarily, need to touch on the concepts of frames and shared narratives. So even when studying a negative emotion, like sadness, it’s framed inside a conscious and consensual agreement, which hopefully makes the overall activity joyful. Or maybe more correctly said, meaningful. So please see my musing about playing safer if you want to know more.
For me, the negative emotion closest at hand in bondage is sadness. I often describe my sessions as sad love stories, and my soundtrack almost always plays in the minor scales. There is a sense of longing, longing for belonging, and longing for freedom. But it never gets there. When diving deeply into a power dynamic, sometimes even climaxing, there is always a coming back to equals, average, and status quo. The polarity is too volatile to keep forever, especially if it has been strong. I believe that being entirely immersed in dominance, control, submission, and surrender for too long is not healthy. It’s like we, at some point, need to raise the head about the water if just for a single breath or pull the parachute in the middle of free falling, independently of how mesmerizing the movement is. Leaving this state brings sadness, and so does knowing that it’s not for real and not forever. However, there is great potential in learning to let go and say goodbye. People often ask me if it doesn’t hurt, and sure it does, but it hurts because it meant something. It was meaningful.
In a way, in rope bondage, when not tying for happy-happy joy-joy, every rope adds another level of intensity—taking the session one step deeper. Therefore the pain, suffering, exposure and humiliation are felt examples of the depth of the polarity. At some point, everything is vibrating, when anything, a breath, a heartbeat, or a rumbling orgasm, will make everything collapse back to normal again. And this is often precisely what I’m looking for in my bondage. It’s the feeling that I crave.
What about the other so-called negative emotions. Suprise and fear also interest me, as they heighten the senses and remind us of the vulnerability in the loss of control. They also release adrenaline rather than endorphins to alert the mind and enhance presence. I enjoy this feeling as a contrast or an exclamation mark in my bondage. You can read more about adrenaline in rope bondage in my musing called pain and kinbaku. Anger, contempt, and disgust are also more adrenaline related emotions, and playing with them gives the opportunity to rebel. To fight and lose and to feel overpowered by the experience. Many people need to test if their partner is strong enough to hold them. It’s like feeling that it is for real, inside the frame of a shared narrative. Personally, in the dominant role, I’m less interested in my partner’s rebellion and more interested in their submission.
I would categorize fear, surprise, and sadness are more surrendering emotions. While anger, contempt, and disgust are more confronting. In real-life, when faced with a hardship, I think there are two different ways to go: surrendering or confronting. By surrendering, one tries to accept what happens and grief it, so the change happens inside oneself instead of outside. On the other hand, by confronting, one tries using anger to change something outside of oneself, trying to (re)establish control, or in other words, domination. In my experience, different people have different ways to deal with hardship. When neither confronting nor surrendering works, then only apathy remains.
As a tangent, I think the same division is also applicable to trauma awareness. The aftermath of trauma can cause recreation of a similar experience as an attempt to internally conquer it through grief, submission, and surrender. It gets complicated to know if the behaviour is retraumatizing, healing, or just simply kinky. Again, consciousness and consent help a lot. This would be fawning in the “fight-flight-freeze-fawn”-model. Another trauma response is then crusading against and confronting the experience, corresponding to fight and flight in the “ffff”-model. Being stuck in an endless battle sucks as much as in endless submission, even if our society often teaches us always to be strong. Finally, death, apathy, or freeze remains when nothing else is possible. I have written much more about this in my musing about Judit Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery.
I want to touch upon the trauma tangent to raise awareness if one starts to explore the “negative” emotions using BDSM and what is attractive about them. Hopefully, it helps to be conscious and consensual about relating to previous traumatic experiences. So that’s the warning side of the musing. But on the other hand, I want to encourage everyone to allow themselves to dig into the “negative” emotions of bondage. Finally, I think the emotion must be shared inside the session. It connects to the idea of making oneself vulnerable by sharing what is happening inside and therefore allowing oneself to be controlled. Initially, I think it mainly applies to the submissive to establish polarity. Still, very soon, it also is equally important for the dominant to reach any depth in the play as I have been writing about in the past few musings.