The Power of Consensual Power Exchange

There have been some four and a half years of struggle in our lives.  Little bits of that have been shared in what I have chosen to share here and at The Heron Clan.  Most outsiders have some sense of the searing pain we've lived through, but what I've shared has been very limited.  The traumas were so deep and so complex that I simply did not have the strength or insight to lay it all out in the public eye.  I do think, however, that we have come most of the way through the worst days.  We are all much better.  The healing continues, but we have more good days than bad, and we are, generally, feeling good about our life together again.

I tend to not look backwards much.  It is a conscious and deliberate choice for me.  I do not find it useful or helpful to wallow in the pain, fear, and anger of those dark days.  With that said, I do think there is one salient fact about our transit of this passage.  In my view of it all, from this vantage point, I find that I have an increasingly strong sense that it was (to some significant degree) our consensual power exchange that saved us.  I don't want to discount all the help that we found, and were given along the way.  We were held close by a few good friends.  We were listened to and helped significantly by some very, very skilled and talented therapists.  We had excellent medical help to track down some underlying, and sometimes arcane, medical issues that needed treatment as an adjunct to the whole of the healing work that has taken place.  We even had the great good luck to find some fascinating spiritual principles that bore us all up out of the muck of the "alcoholics anonymous cult" that we were all forced to take part in for the first years.  I am continually in awe and so grateful for the many, many gifts that the universe put into our hands.  With all of that, though, there were the strong pillars and powerful boundaries that the power exchange dynamic we have forged gave us... and those structures saw us through the minutes and hours and days when we were alone together trying to find our way.

To be clear, the dominance and submission that pervades our intimate life is different from what it once was.  It is less obvious and less flashy than that early, cocky, "we've got this" thing we once crowed about.  It is, perhaps, more subtle -- but that is really only true in the same way that the individual threads are only barely noticed in the weave of the finest fabrics.  That we do not focus on the single threads, does not diminish the value of each bit in the overall whole.  It turns out that, for us, our D/s dynamic is like that.

Power exchange ties us together.  It is a dynamic that works for us; that we each want.  A lot.  It is so fundamentally who we each are that, even as we found our lives and our relationship in a smoking heap, we remained tied to each other in that delicate balance of consensual power exchange.  Even on days when we did not feel it, and couldn't DO it, it was still there.  It held us in place while we hurt and healed.  It kept us here.  I couldn't bring myself to leave, and he couldn't bring himself to let me go.  It was all we had a lot of the time, but it was so very important.  If either of us had let go, that would have been the end. The strong desire was sometimes confusing, and often painful, but it was also a bond that held us together when we could not see our way through the rubble of our former life.

We don't do this out of some broken place.  If nothing else, this passage has highlighted our various strengths.  We are tenacious and stubborn, sometimes to a fault.  But neither of us is looking at power exchange to fill a gap.  We are capable of building a life without the direction and strength of another person.  We want the power-based relating. It is not a "need."

We clearly understand the difference between fantasy and reality.  Boy, do we have that one down!  If there was an element of fantasy to our "before" life, it was broken to bits in the storm that took us down.  If we were living some kind of "fairy tale" in those days, we got yanked into the real world with a vengeance.  It is really real.  What we have now is solid and sure.  Nothing that we have, and nothing that we do is "pretend."

We discovered that we are equals.  We each bring talents and strengths and limits and failings to the table.  Neither of us is perfect.  That is so very, very clear.  We choose the power dynamic, because it works for us, not because one or the other of us is inherently better or superior.  I've always held that a power exchange cannot work except between people that have power to exchange.  Only equals can make the choice to engage in a consensual power relationship like ours.  This is not a relationship style that lends itself to great unevenness.  Weaklings need not apply.

What we discovered, in the shattered shell of what was, is that each of us had great issues.  What we have learned is that neither one of us can fix the other one's "stuff."  We managed to suppress the FACT of our various fears and traumas and scars in the early intense passion that we felt together, but in the end, they caught up to us, tripped us up, and caused us to fall in a great tumble of arms and legs.  So, we have spent time working on those individual bits and pieces.  That work continues.  I imagine that work will continue for however many years we have left.  The truth is that you can't do D/s if you don't recognize and then work on your own shit.

I had to come to grips with the fact that I am a human, and the fact that he is a human.  I wore myself out trying to be the "perfect" slave, and I put unfair demands on him to be the perfect balance to that.  We both proved ourselves unequal to the task of being other than human.  We make mistakes.  We fall short.  We behave badly.  We get tired.  We feel sad.  Some days there is nothing grand about the two of us, individually or together.  Knowing that; acknowledging that; taking that on as an undeniable reality, frees us up to be who we are together.  Now our power dynamic does not have to be perfect.  Ours does not have to be like anyone else's.  We are learning, finally, to simply be who we truly are together, and that is a good thing.

We've learned to be patient.  Well, more patient.  Sometimes, there is nothing to do but listen and wait.  Nothing has to happen right now, in this relationship.  We can know what we each long for, and what our shared hopes are, and we can work toward those things together.  But it may take time.  We may never get to it all.  We will, surely run out of time before we run out of longings and hopes, but each day we have together is a gift that we will never have again.  We have found the quiet patience that helps us to know that.

We've figured out where the supports are.  We've got friends, and those who have stuck it out through these dark years without judgement or taking sides, are valued beyond any treasure.  We've found some wise people to help us sort it all out, and they are important parts of our lives, and will be going forward.  We've got a life that we share, and that we enjoy.  It isn't grand or showy, but it is comfortable, and we are happy with it.  It is enough for today.

So, as our big, showy, boastful displays of D/s have faded; as we have chosen to talk less about the nitty gritty details; we have learned about the real strength of our power dynamic.  It stood firm through all the bumps and upheaval, and it remains.  It has held us together, and I am convinced that it saved us from washing out into the pounding seas of rage and disappointment.  We are together, and we live in a consensual power exchange relationship.