And Mind Games Can Never Hurt You

Degradation was my first experience of BDSM. I wasn’t expecting it. Nobody in the kink community would have called it ethical, but if that moment had never happened, I wouldn’t be in the kink scene today. Eric was the sadist in question. He didn’t know much about kink either, but he did know how to love me. He was the first human who accepted everything about me, even the rotting parts. Even the evil parts. Even the slutty parts. Maybe that’s why his darkness felt like light to me. I knew how much he loved me. In that moment, I became a wholly different person.

My self esteem is so sick it belongs in an ICU ward. I was raised into self-hatred, and yet Eric’s degradation made me walk taller. He saw, acknowledged, and used every nuance of me: All the dark, the light, and every shade in between. He saw every colour, every texture, and every fractal of light. Shame dies on exposure, and when he loved me because of my darkness rather than in spite of it, he taught me that all of me was worth loving, not just the pretty parts.

He showed me parts of myself I’d been too ashamed to show, and then I blossomed. Kink became a healing force.

Degradation is edge play at the best of times, and the risk only grows if you’ve been raised into self-hatred, too. D/s is a two-way force—an exchange, with energy flowing back and forth along a living artery, always adding oxygen and life to the mix. Eric replaced everything he took from me, so I let him take everything.

You don’t get to keep nice things unless you take care of them, and E took care of me. He made sure I was nourished, cared for, and at peace. He made sure I knew my value. In exchange, he received all the power.

He also got a truly whorish sub. That’s what happens when you accept every cobweb and corner of someone else’s psyche. It’s all good until it becomes very, very bad, and in the end, degradation killed our relationship. I began to believe his degrading words, and so I began to suspect Eric of cruelty. I found myself swept up into a tornado with a thousand blades. With sharp edges flying everywhere, I couldn’t figure out who had done the slicing. Was it him for degrading me or was it me for shouting “yes”?

We had an Olympic swimming pool full of kinks, and not a drop of sense about how to stay afloat. It’s okay. It’s not as though we were doing risky things like breath or knife play, so we figured we didn’t need to have a clue. Ours was a psychological power exchange relationship, and mind games can’t hurt you.

Can they?

Well, yes. Words can hurt you. Sometimes, they hurt even more than sticks and stones. Eric made me feel more alive, more pure, more certain of my value for a while, but emotional play is edge play. It can never be entirely safe. We packed enough love into our kink to prevent lasting harm, but not enough to save our relationship.

It’s easy to understand the dangers of a bloodied-up blade. If you’re like me, though, you’ll run towards degradation as though it will catch you as softly as a cloud. And it won’t. To be human is to be frail. That’s a part of our beauty, but it often opens up a world of pain.

When it comes to emotional play, the magic word in the RACK acronym is awareness. Just acknowledging the difference between play and life builds a Chinese wall between love and destruction. The better you achieve that, the more impermeable that barrier becomes, and maybe, just maybe, you won’t lose a precious person in the process.