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Fifty Shades of Truth and BS

Exposing abuse under the guise of BDSM & related reflections on self-recovery.

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The House Mouse Who Escaped – Trigger Alert

Trigger Alert


Master Ron wanted to save me. No one had ever saved me before and it sounded like a dream come true.  He made me feel safe, he gave me a security that no other man had ever given me.  I would have done almost anything for him.  I say almost because it was his final demand that completely broke my trust in our relationship and him and resulted in my escape.

Our relationship was new to me.  It was nothing like I had ever experienced before.  It was something that I felt I needed.  I had engaged in BDSM relationships before but had never been in an 24/7 TPE relationship where it was clear what my daily role was.  It gave me structure and purpose.  It made me feel wanted and loved.  He was much older than me, older than even my own father.  I called him Master or Daddy.  I was proud to have him rule and protect me.  I felt invincible while I was by his side and I didn’t care what anyone thought of our relationship.  He gave me attention that no one else had ever given me, including my family.  He seemed to care about me and it drew me in.  I felt loyal to him and did not question his actions.  I felt that surely if he were in the place he was, he must have had the authority to guide me in life.

I was his house-mouse and his number two submissive.  He had one other woman who was senior to me in the pecking order of our house and I felt happy in my place.  I had my own bedroom and rarely slept with Master Ron.  His other submissive slept with him nearly every night.  My main role in the house was to keep the house in perfect order by cooking and cleaning and to also cater to his personal needs whenever he wished.  I felt that I had purpose and that I was in a “family” who loved and looked out for me.  It was everything that my real family had never given me.  I craved this closeness and interaction with people who I felt accepted me for myself.

My daily life with Master Ron was highly structured and if I faltered I was punished.  Punishment was an important aspect of our relationship, and I craved it.  I felt I needed to be corrected and guided.  Before meeting Master Ron, I never had a man provide such guidance in my life.  Punishments varied depending on my offense.  I was punished for anything from not cleaning to Master Ron’s standards to not meeting my weight loss goals.  I felt that punishment held me accountable and that with Master Ron’s guidance I was able to hold myself to a higher standard and better myself.

Our relationship began to falter only when his number one submissive went missing.  We soon found out that she was living a double life and had a husband and children in a different part of the state.  I began to lose trust in Master Ron because I could not understand how he could bring such a lying and manipulative person into our lives.  I had exposed every part of myself to Master Ron and his number one submissive and felt betrayed by both of them on numerous levels.  I held to my word however and decided to stay loyal to him regardless of my feelings of confusion and betrayal.

And then our happy world was shattered.  He offered to abandon his number one submissive and for me to take her place.  He was frustrated with her and also felt betrayed.  But somehow this change in roles hurt and confused me deep down.  I knew that he thought I would take his offer as an honor but in reality it drove a wedge between our relationship.  I did not understand how he could so easily drop this woman from his life, regardless of the lies she had spewed at us.  We were after all a family who had been through so much together.  I felt that our family should have attempted to work out the differences and to move on.  I felt that him replacing her behind her back, regardless of her wrong doings was dishonest and honesty was of the utmost importance to me between his and my relationship.  I don’t know if this was naive of me but I did not want our family to fall apart.  I also feared that if Master Ron could so easily replace his number one, that he could also replace me with ease.  Our unique family was something that I never had before and I couldn’t believe that it was falling apart before my eyes.

I never officially accepted his offer, telling him that I would like to see if his number one submissive would return.  I not only had a relationship with him, but I had one with her and I respected her as well.  I felt loyalty to her much akin to like a sister would.  I knew that he felt that I had defied him by not accepting his offer and he began to push me in ways that he had never done so before.  At this time in our relationship I was so completely confused and perhaps distant because our family as a whole had been shattered and the family dynamic was something that I felt I needed.  He began to punish me in ways that I felt were abusive and were not in my best interest.  One such punishment was making me sleep on the floor of the gym for a week while eating nothing but weight loss drinks because I had not met my weekly weight loss goal.  This was his first punishment that truly felt wrong to me.

His final demand broke me.  He told me that if I was not to be his number one, that I would remain his house-mouse and nothing more.  I was to take care of the house and that included his guests.  When he said this I had an inkling of where his demand was going.  He told me that one of his friends would be coming to visit and that he would sleep with me in my room.  I was to “take care” of his friend while he stayed.  I was in complete shock.  Sleeping with another man was something that he knew I was not willing to do.  I felt that Master Ron was attempting to coerce me into doing something that went against everything inside of me because he wanted to see how far he could push me while still staying loyal to him and his demands.

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This was one of the first times that I truly trusted my gut.  My entire being told me to run and to get out fast.  I did not like where our relationship was headed and I was confused as well as hurt.  I was self-aware enough to listen to my inner voice and decided to escape.  By this point in our relationship, leaving Master Ron truly was escaping because I feared him in many ways that at the time I did not see as unhealthy.  We lived in a remote location where no one could help me if I ran.  I had no car of my own and relied on him in every way.  I could see bad things coming if I did not leave at once.  One day while he was out of the house on an errand I quickly packed my bags and arranged to be picked up.  I had left before he returned.

One my way out of the remote location I saw him driving towards me on the other side of the road.  My heart pounded as I felt all of the fear that I had kept at bay bubbling up inside of me.  Luckily, he did not notice me in the passenger seat of the car and he kept driving on.  It was at this time that I realized how truly scared I was of him.  I was proud of myself for listening to my inner voice and escaping a situation that seemed to be nothing but bad.

For a long time after I escaped Master Ron tried to lure me back into a relationship with him by contacting me through email.  He told me that he had wronged me and that things would be different if I were to return.  He tempted me with similar mind games that he had played on me once before, but this time I could clearly see them.  This time around I listened to my gut and did not return to him.  I was so thankful that I had stayed true to my beliefs and my personal limits and that I had not compromised who I was inside.  I realized through this relationship that if you compromise yourself for someone else, you may lose yourself completely.  I was pleased with myself that I was able to stay true to myself regardless of the situation I was in and how much fear I held inside.

And if finding that staying true to myself was the only lesson that I learned from this relationship, I am still pleased with the outcome.  This was a lesson that I had never fully understood before given my upbringing.  I had always been taught in various ways that submitting to a man and authority was the right thing to do regardless of your feelings inside.  Standing up for your own beliefs was to be put on the back burner.  I knew from this experience that holding to my beliefs was in my best interest because I never regretted leaving.  It taught me that I can stand up for myself and what I feel is important.  Before this point, I was terrified to do so with anyone I saw as an authoritarian figure.  It saddens me that I had to experience such drastic measures to understand this lesson that so many other people are taught at a much young age by their caregivers but I am thankful that I had the opportunity to learn it.  There have been times since leaving Master Ron that I have chosen to ignore this lesson out of self doubt and I have learned even more from doing so.  Life after all, is about living and learning.

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A Lesson Learned from my Dismissive-Avoidant Ex-Boyfriend

My last relationship took me for a loop that I could have never expected.  My boyfriend was an overall good guy, not the type I was typically used to dating in the past.  He was not physically or verbally abusive and everyone who knew him seemed to adored him.  I only heard people speak highly of him and I mistakenly assumed that he would make a wonderful partner.  I was very wrong.  Our relationship ended in a lot of drama and pain that left me confused and hurt for some time.  I have learned a lot from this relationship and I am now thankful for the experience.

The most important lesson that I learned from this failed relationship is that love is simply not enough to make a relationship work.  I loved my boyfriend very much and I assume that he also loved me.  I dreamed of spending the rest of my life with him as I had never been with such a “good guy”.  I wrongly assumed that he was the love of my life because he was loving at times and not abusive like the past men that I had been with.  Our relationship in general seemed better off than any other that I had engaged in in the past.  But there was always something not quite right and in the whole two years we spent together and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until the very end.  Once I realized what was wrong our relationship was far too damaged to salvage.

What was so horribly wrong with this man that everyone seemed to put on a pedestal?  I began to realize that his friends and family’s needs were a priority over mine and even his own.  I thought he was just being a good guy by taking care of everyone but I began to realize that by doing so he completely ignored and avoided my emotional needs at the same time.  Not only did he ignore my needs, but he would also put his on hold to please others regardless if the outcome would damage his self-worth and our relationship.  After a lot of therapy and reflection I now know that this man is a “Dismissive-Avoidant”.

A dismissive-avoidant is someone who subconsciously fears intimacy because they have learned that caregivers are not dependable.  Because of this deep-seated fear, a dismissive-avoidant type may feel that they are better off alone and will usually resort to avoiding the closeness of emotional intimacy.  This type of person is often unable to take attachment issues seriously and when pushed to do so becomes agitated and unwilling to discuss the issues at hand.  They often use work or other activities to busy themselves so that they may have an excuse to avoid emotional attachment.  They do not understand that emotional distance has an impact on them.  These types will often subconsciously resort to having their own emotional needs met by a less demanding partner who does not require reciprocation of real intimacy and closeness.  On the outside, dismissives may pin their relationship issues on their partner while deep inside they have such low self-esteem that they do not feel worthy of love and affection.  This is something that they learned from their caregivers who failed to meet their emotional needs at a very young age.

When you are in a relationship with a dismissive-avoidant they repeatedly remind you in many ways that you are quite low on their list of priorities.  They often feel that any relationship problems are their partner’s problem as they cannot identify their own feelings deep within.  A dismissive-avoidant will use distancing to limit the intimacy within their relationships that they can’t seem to tolerate. There are many different ways a dismissive can distance themselves from their partners but in my case my boyfriend would frequently “mentally check out” on me when I was trying to discuss something that was very important to me.  This treatment lead me to realize that my emotional needs were the least of my boyfriend’s worries.  And that made me feel very alone, although he was physically by my side nearly every day for our entire relationship.

Our relationship started on the rocks and I should have taken the red flags to heart and ran the other way.  The biggest wedge in our relationship was his friends and family who treated me with complete disregard and were frequently downright disrespectful to both him and me.  The first time I met his brother, he drunkenly flipped out on me and caused a huge and embarrassing scene at a party.  I felt completely unwelcome amongst his friends and family after this occurred.  His friends were the most disrespectful group of people I have ever encountered, bullying and belittling me even in front of my boyfriend who could never muster the courage to stand up to them.  My boyfriend’s family gradually became more and more abusive towards me and when I would bring these issues up to my boyfriend he would simply dismiss and avoid them.  He was used to this treatment and to him it was no big deal.  Towards the end of our relationship I felt so completely alone and worthless because that was what my boyfriend subconsciously engrained into me.  But everything else seemed great and I chose to ignore these blaring red flags because I loved him and thought that was enough for our relationship to endure.  I am not saying that the failure of our relationship was one-sided but that simply both sides must be equally engaged for a relationship to thrive.

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What have I learned from all of this heart ache?  Love is not the only factor needed to maintain a healthy relationship.  Respect and communication are also key.  Attentiveness to your partner’s needs are of the ut-most importance regardless of how you unimportant they may feel to you.  Communication cannot be one-sided and both parties must be willing to dive deep into their emotional issues if a healthy level of intimacy is to occur.  I wish that I had fully understood how important each of these aspects of a relationship are two years ago when I began my relationship with this boyfriend, but I am also thankful that I am now able to take the pain that I felt from this relationship and turn it into an important learning lesson that I hope to never forget.

And with that being said… if things just don’t feel completely right in a relationship, I suggest that you take a hard look at the red flags you are encountering and be honest with yourself.  If something feels wrong, discuss your feelings with your partner and work together to resolve them.  If the issues are being pushed back to you as your own personal problem, then your partner is dismissing your needs and may not be capable or willing to fully engage in an intimate relationship.

I hope that by sharing my experiences and reflections that my readers will be able to take my journey as a lesson and apply it to their personal lives.  Red flags in any relationship are something that should not be ignored and are there for a reason!  If you can work through them, your relationship will be that much stronger.  If you can’t, then perhaps it is time to take the high road regardless of feelings of love.

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