THE DOMINATRIX AND THE THERAPIST

I wonder how my therapist will feel when she reads this. I suspect not all women would be happy to have parallels drawn between themselves and a sex worker. I touched on the subject in our last session and, understanding the respect and affection within which I hold Mistress Elita, she had been OK with the connection I had made, so I think I’m on reasonably safe ground.

I saw Elita for three years, before I stopped seeing sex workers altogether as I formed a wonderful new relationship of a rather different kind. My relationship with my therapist, C (let’s give her a name), started in parallel with that  and is two years old. It is now starting to wind down, or at least evolve, as I grow more confident in the firmer ground to which she has piloted me. She essentially said “our work here is done” in our last meeting.

Here’s a bunch of statements that could be true of either the relationship with The Dominatrix or the one with The Therapist.

• She helped me to acknowledge my feelings and emotions and to become confident in exploring and expressing them.
• Our relationship was emotional and intense but only within the confines of our meetings. Away from that setting, our communication was formal and business-like.
• I would sometimes leave her place after an intense session feeling drained and emotionally wrung out, and need to sit quietly for an hour with a coffee before tackling the rest of my day.
• Our relationship was asymmetrical. She knew me, understood me even, intimately and in great depth, and had unique insights into my true nature, yet I knew very little of her.
• Her profession advocates that the client relationship must be completely transactional and guards against the client developing affection for the provider. But it’s hard to let someone stare that deep into your soul, to be so naked and vulnerable in front of them, without some form of relationship developing. The key is to recognise it for what it is and to understand its boundaries.

I’ve read writing by professional Dommes saying it is wrong for clients to look to them for therapy and so it is.

But it is also inescapable.

A single session with a skilled Dominatrix might be a bit of kinky fun. Twenty or thirty sessions over several years is more likely to feel like a searching exploration of your strengths and weaknesses, a peeling back of layers of protection built up over a lifetime, a journey into yourself, full of discoveries and revelations.

It can, in fact, be just like therapy.

In my time seeing Elita, I started a process that C has continued. I once wrote that Elita had “stripped away all my British reserves, as efficiently as a steamer strips away old wallpaper, leaving what’s underneath seeming fresh and new. My emotional skin felt thinner and more sensitive, just as my real skin did.” My time with her had left me open to therapy and able to engage with it.

The Dominatrix and The Therapist have been the central thread running though this process, but other wonderful women have been no less important.

The Friend, the first person with whom I really talked about my true nature and through whom I gained the confidence to be my true self.

The Escort, with whom I learned that sex was an emotional experience as much as a physical one.

The Lover, with whom everything came together in a relationship that combined the physical and the emotional, the kinky and the intimate, the intense and the everyday.

And others I’ve met along the way, or who have engaged with me on social media or in my blog, who have helped me evolve and break out of the walls my upbringing had left me with.

“Our work here is done,” The Therapist said. I’m sure that isn’t completely true, but her saying so has let me feel that I might be coming to the end of some kind of journey. Like the pilgrim at the end of the Camino de Santiago, I can sit on the steps of the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, remembering each hill I climbed, each village I visited, each person I met along the way; remembering all the places, events and people that have been part of the journey, and so are now part of me.