Emotional Masochism 101: A Detailed Guide.

I think emotional masochism is not only hard to understand, but it is also a slippery slope. There are some questions about it that immediately occur to any person, whether they are well-versed in the subject or not. I recently wrote about the chronic lack of approval in my power-exchange dynamic with my long-term partner as an act/condition of emotional masochism and it led to some interesting questions being asked by someone in the comments section. I don’t usually do posts in Q&A format (makes me sad to realise I could have written an essay instead), but I think their questions have broad applicability and this may be one of those situations where direct questions and answers would be more useful than meandering metaphors (but I’m still going to try to include some metaphors okay). Before I address the questions (embedded in the post), I will state, these are my *opinions* based on my own lived life experience as an emotional masochist and speaking to other people, I am not a psychotherapist so I am not clinically qualified to answer certain aspects of these questions so I wont touch those. 

> What qualifies as emotional pain?

While this question was not asked, I am adding it as a baseline to understanding all of this. Emotional pain is a somewhat vague and nebulous term. I prefer to be more specific about the uncomfortable emotional states I wish to experience and the ones I don’t. I would encourage you to think about these states as you would about implements of pain—canes, whips, floggers, paddles—and consider the individual emotional sensations of them to see which ones make you feel *hurt*. Also, understand that even as a masochist you are not required to like *all* of them, you can pick and choose, just like you do with physical implements. You can also like the experience of those states in some circumstances but not all. The following are some of the states I find alluring as an emotional masochist (ie: I liken to the experience of emotional pain):

- Helplessness caused by not being able to appeal to the humanity of my partner and cruelty.

- Disillusionment and frustration caused by injustice (the sense of not being able to appeal to fairness and being expected to things that are not within the realm of human limitations).

- Feelings of inadequacy and helplessness caused by chronic disapproval and hyper-critical evaluation of my behaviour (essentially, I can do no right no matter how hard I try, and even in my best, there is something to criticise)

- The despair caused by long-term or permanent denial of acts of love, approval or affection, even those that I did not really want when this started but they have over time grown to long-for just because they have been denied so long. Eg) Eye-contact during penetrative sex, terms of approval like “good girl/slave,” being on the receiving end of oral pleasure.

- Sadness in a cuckolding set up caused by how much *better* treatment his other partners get than I do (not like, they don’t get beaten, but that they always get aftercare, he kisses them, goes down on them, expresses sexual desire as opposed to derision, he looks them in the eyes while fucking them, calls them beautiful etc). 

Those are some examples of things that serve as states of emotional pain for me. The pain is in the emotion (helplessness, frustration, despair, sadness) and the acts I have described are the means to achieving those emotions *for me*. Your road to those emotions may differ and some roads, even to desirable locations, are non-motorable. I always find it is helpful to know exactly what emotion I am wanting to experience and which ones I am not (for instance, there are some that are absolute hard limits for me: grief of loss (of a person), some types of guilt etc) and which methods of getting to those emotions are tried-and-tested as reasonably safe, potentially interesting but untested, and absolute no-gos.  

> So , how does this actually work out?

This a broad question so let me condense it into my understanding of it. I took it to mean: If you are in a relationship where you partner withholds approval, practises unfairness, cruelty and causes you sadness, how does that affect your life with one another? Do you just start to feel hated by them? 

Yeah, it’s complicated but let me clarify. The scope of the emotional masochism/sadism is limited to the scope of our dynamic and outside of that scope, as partners, we are extremely kind, considerate and compassionate with one another. For instance, our parenting, our professions, our family life is not subject to governance by the norms of our dynamic so as a partner, my partner is very supportive of me as a person. Note that I said supportive, not approving, the reason I am comfortable playing with the chronic withholding of approval is because I categorically do not believe in “joy from approval” nor do I want anyone to tell me I am a good girl for a parenting-win or winning a work award. You can congratulate me, you can express admiration, you can be critical, but in general, I do not allow people, no matter how close to me they are, to be approving or disapproving of me, that authority rests with me alone. You can say it, I’ll probably ignore it, but it means nothing to me. That is why approval being withheld within my relationship dynamic is no problem. It hurts, yes, because we created the circumstances in which it hurts as well. It’s like making someone’s skin raw with sandpaper before you sprinkle salt on it. On its own, the salt would do nothing, you created the circumstances for the salt to hurt. Which is not to say that hurt doesn’t get pretty real, it does, it doesn’t get injurious though. In a certain state of mind (slavish, masochistic, duty-bound), I may feel terrible because of it, but I know that the state of hurt is transient and does not have bearing on who I am, or how I feel about myself in general. 

I do not feel, at all, hated by my partner. I know that is hard to grasp because inflicting cruelty and seeing neglect to a person feel like acts of hatred, but so could whipping someone or punching them in the face. In this configuration, these acts cannot be viewed from an *objective* point of view, they have to be seen from the view of how the recipient experiences them and what the infictor feels about them. I know people who truly do hate their partners and express neglect as part of that hatred, and in turn their partners have internalised that state of existence as the intensity of their relationship and why it’s still electric. I have also been in a relationship like that and what I missed, then, is that the act is nothing, the intention is everything. My husband hurts me like this because it gets him off to have such long-term and encompassing control over how I experience my emotions, he doesn’t want me to be miserable in *life*, he doesn’t want to cause me emotional impairment that interferes with what I want to do in life, and he knows he is not doing that because he understands how I receive acts of emotional sadism. The ongoing conditions of our relationship that cause me pain are ersatz states of discontentment, the conditions in which they hurt are controlled and created by us. It does not play out in the way that when I am upset or sad because I had a fight with my best friend, he tells me everything that is wrong with me as a person that causes me to have inter-personal relationship problems with other people. 

> Is BDSM really about crying for hours every single day for something you need and will never get?  Why do people even like that?

Who is to say what BDSM is *really* about? I understand the question, though. Yes, it does seem like (and is often true) that an ongoing practise of emotional masochism does cause: 

- Frequent states of despair.

- Denial of things you really (seem to) need but will never get. 

Let me address both of those things separately. 

In my experience, with myself and the people I know who genuinely enjoy emotional masochism, the perception of despair is different. The feeling of crying, the need to cry and being driven to tears isn’t a state of suffering the way it looks, it’s melancholy the way that’s been described by (my favourite European writer) Victor Hugo. *Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.* In that, the resultant “low” states that emerge from acts of emotional sadism and violence don’t feel like harm or injury, I feel the same way about them as many physical masochists feel about lingering pain, marks and bruises in the healing process. In previous writing, I have discussed in detail how eroticised emotional pain *feels* and why it appeals to me, but to put it really simply, it feels and is appealing in the same way as (sad) literature (I usually go Russian), sad music (I usually go Urdu), brain-breaking paradoxes (I usually go Grelling-Nelson) and sad philosophical conditions (I usually go existential) feel appealing. The same way that physical masochism inherently makes the experience of pain appealing (for whatever reason), I have always found the experience of emotional turmoil alluring as well. I do not believe I would do this if I hadn’t already spent half my life seeking sad books to titillate myself. There were signs all along and while the sadness I feel is *real*, it is desirable and chosen, and in case of EM it has the association of pleasure (which I experience genitally, but different people may experience differently). The way in which it differs from physical masochism is that while I know many people who like to endure physical pain for their tops even though they do not like pain and are able to extract their gratification from the endurance of said-pain for someone else, I do not know many people who are able to keep up the endurance of emotional pain for their partners (even though they do not enjoy it) without it causing problems or the collapse of their relationships. I have known a lot of s-types who like *idea* of their owners/tops/masters being able to treat them however they want (without any care or consideration to their experience of those things), but very few of them are actually able to do that without the relationship imploding, their mental health suffering or the dynamic turning abusive (which is not on the s-types, it is to indicate that it is *very easy* to take advantage of these conditions if you have the intent to exploit or the lack of foresight to understand how this actually plays out). In that sense, the answer to the question—is BDSM about being sad all the time—is yes. I do like that it makes me sad, I like how I experience that sadness, I don’t want it to be *all the time*, and it’s not. How much sadness you want and experience is up to you, but remember that if you are not an emotional masochist, we may be fundamentally viewing sadness differently. I view a lot of mine as recreational sadness. I have a certain level of detachment from it too, it’s being *felt* in my heart, not in my head. 

In some ways, it is about being denied things that you need, but at least in my relationship, the *need* for those things has been created and curated by introducing circumstances that may not have naturally occurred. I don’t actually need them; the need has been created and accentuated specifically in order to make the denial as painful and harrowing as possible. As a *person*, I feel no desire for approval or eye-contact during sex, over-time, the performance of being denied those things has created the placebo of need for them. I do really want them, but my pleasure still lies in denial of those things. 

> How can I learn to not fall apart in that, so that more can be done to me? 

Ah, the eternal masochist-question: How do I take more pain? In terms of physical pain, I have actually addressed that question here, but I think it is very different for emotional pain. Personally, there is shit I find alluring and am able to bear, and shit I do not find alluring/am unable to bear that I am just not going to touch. The real conundrum is often about shit you find alluring but are unable to bear. Let me give you an example. A friend of mine is deeply into the idea of cuckqueaning, but whenever they have tried it, it has ended in emotional distress, negative impacts on their relationship/mental health and sometimes negative impacts on the cuckcake/bull (*I hate all these terms, it’s like dildo, surely there is a better way to say it*). In their place, I would not attempt cuckqueaning anymore. Instead, I would identify the emotions that cuckqueaning allows me to feel, remove the negative states it takes me to and attempt to create them a different (more palatable and bearable) way, even if they are less intense and I have to let go of a fantasy I have harboured for a long time. I believe people should explore their sexuality and desires as much as they want, but I also believe that ethical and responsible pursuit of sexuality means knowing your limits and not treating them like mountains you absolutely have to climb. We just have to learn to let go of things we are unable to enjoy or bear, there will still be many, many things left to enjoy.  As much as we say that tops should not breach limits, sometimes we treat our own limits as challenges as well, and often we believe that if we surmount them, there will be an unlocked realm of pleasure on the other side. I have not found that to be the case. I have found, sometimes, that there are fantasies whose time has not yet come for me, and sometimes it comes and sometimes it doesn’t. I have learnt to be fine with not forcing it, with stepping away from things I was experiencing as destructive and things I was doing just because it approached the intensity I enjoy. 

The other thing is—and in this regard there is some similarity between emotional and physical masochism—how much, how and what kind of pain you are able to bear depends on your body, the day of the week and how your life experiences with pain have played out. There is a baseline pain tolerance that differs for all of us and it also extends to emotional masochism, but it is impacted by things like extant injury, knowledge of your vulnerabilities, awareness of your health (physical and mental). You have to factor all of that in, realistically, when calculating your appetite for pain and suffering. You also have to have the maturity to know that more pain does not mean you are stronger, a better masochist, a more worthwhile slave etc (and if those conditions are part of your relationship, that is a different thing, but in mine, I still apply the same insight to them). The goal, at least mine, is to optimize my pleasure, not remove it from the equation because I can *bear* more discomfort than I enjoy. 

> Do you actually like it or is the point to not like it? To be always so fallen apart and if so, how does one keep being able to speak and live life and not be always a mess?

This is a very good question and I think the basis for why things like emotional masochism, CNC and TPE are so misunderstood. It’s because the word “like” is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here. Do I like being sad, feeling violated, being made to wallow in despair and being helpless? I abso-fucking-lutely do *like* it. It’s why I do it. The question really is: Do you enjoy it? Does it feel *good*? I don’t always *enjoy* it and it doesn’t always feel *good* as it is happening, it’s like eating a salad (if you don’t enjoy salad), it doesn’t feel enjoyable to chew, it may not feel good in my mouth, but it makes me feel good in my body, it enables certain forms of enjoyment that wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t establish the unenjoyable practise of eating salad, and my experience with salad doesn’t only extend to it being in my mouth. My entire body experiences the salad, I experience it as a concept in my brain and my mind has associations with the habit of eating salad that develop over time. It’s only unenjoyable in one realm, it doesn’t feel good in some realms, but the experience encompasses and can be viewed from many different perspectives, not all of which are as apparent when you think of the incident of being hurt as a single-point activity.

Does it make me feel fallen apart? I wouldn’t put it like that, but I understand why we do put it like that, often. A part of what enables emotional masochism for me is that I experience a lot of my emotions in recreational format. It’s part of my emotional make-up. I like all kinds of states of being and I often use them to fuel my day-to-day life, and honestly, my creative processes (which are a huge part of my day-to-day life). It’s not so simple as hurt me so I can write (or draw, cook, record, talk, fuck, which are all creative process that occur daily for me), not at all, it’s more like, suspend me into a unitary and pervasive state of emotional experience so I may consider all of life from this state of mind and see what may come of it. I’m not “fallen apart” but I am, let’s say, quirky. To the untrained observer, my behaviours are often strange, and the way I live my life, confusing. The question about being “fallen apart” is a question on functionality, I think, and if I were experiencing my emotional masochism in a way that rendered me incapable of performing daily functions, I would, perhaps, reconsider, that being said extreme “functionality” is an area of my life on which I am actively working because I am a bit pathological with it, I cannot sleep if I don’t do my *most* every day (and also, I think, functionality is defined differently for different people, and my definition of it for myself is a big part of my problem). 

As far as it relates to being able to play pain with my emotions, I have a good deal of detachment from my emotions in general. Detachment is a misunderstood concept as well, I think, it doesn’t mean that you don’t feel your feelings, it means you just let them happen, you sit in them, you experience them in their minutiae but you don’t act out of them, make decisions because of them, you aren’t so reactive (for example, a lot of times when we feel sadness or sorrow, we react by trying to make it go away, we react to happiness by attempting to prolong it, I prefer contemplation to reaction, it was last as long as it lasts, and I can accept that), let them overpower you, and that allows me to experience all of my emotions on equal footing. This is a big part of my spiritual path in life and it has permeated into my sexuality to a certain degree, but by no means is it the only (“good”) way to experience emotions or masochism. I am deeply invested in seeing who I am when I am subjected to different conditions, it’s my main thing in life (it is why I do the work I do, live and love the way I do, have relationships the way I do, make decisions about what I want to do etc), but being able to do it is about knowing (and actively informing myself based on past experience) about what I am able to handle, and what I am likely to be affected enough by that I need to make decisions and create conditions that allow me have the space to go through those things without letting being “fallen apart” impact my functionality. Basically, anticipate your reactions, if you want to be fallen apart, it’s fine, but know what that looks like for you, and create the space and time for you to be able to fall apart. 

> Maybe I’m just not an emotional masochist but the idea I’m being made to cry and hate myself on purpose turns me on?

In moments like these, I say, fuck the terminology. Are you or are you not an emotional masochist is a matter of self-identification, and if you don’t want to identify that way and would rather just explicitly explain the one thing you are into, that’s fine. Why not? It’s fine to say I am a masochist, it’s also fine to say I like being caned on my thighs on Thursday nights. For me, the part of this question that stands out is, unsurprisingly, two parts:

- Being made to cry.

- Self-loathing. 

Crying is an outcome and many things can get one there, do you enjoy the act of crying or do you specifically enjoy being made to cry by being put into a state of emotional hurt? If it’s the former, there are so many ways to make someone cry, you don’t have to fuck around with emotional sadism/masochism to get there.

The self-loathing is a bigger question. For me, emotional masochism is not about creating a (relatively safer) space to hate on myself, or being made to hate on myself. Can it be for other people and is that okay? I honestly, don’t know. It’s good to end on a question you don’t know how to answer, my mentor taught me that (not my BDSM mentor, I am my BDSM mentor, my journalism mentor). Ultimately, it comes down to how you view the act of hurting someone’s feelings, we are taught that hurting someone and their feelings is always a *bad thing* and part of the subversion of masochism/sadism, for me, is that I am fundamentally incapable of viewing the infliction of pain as a *bad thing*. It can be done badly, but in general, my view on pain itself, is very vast. When someone is hurting my feelings, I don’t see loathing, I see the power they have over me to truly impact me and the vulnerability that I am able to display in order to let them impact me, the fact that they *can* indicates my willingness (explicit) but also that I feel things for this person, that is what I see, so loathing never comes to mind. That is a desirable state of being to me and power/vulnerability are concepts that are deeply entrenched in my methods of experiencing and expressing love. Obviously, all of this is subject to consent, to detailed consideration of the nuances, a trusted partner and a commitment to self-awareness but despite all of that, I do not indulge feelings of self-loathing within my sexuality (anymore and since a while now), because ultimately that becomes detrimental to me and impacts my entire homeostatic emotional environment. When I feel self-loathing, I work on it, but I don’t *like* feeling it, so I don’t want to play with it. That makes sense to me, for me. 

…..

Note: My apologies for how long this essay is but if you did actually read it, it’s part of a textbook I am writing on masochism, and if you have any questions about emotional masochism itself that you would like addressed, please ask them, it will help me write a more considered book. This post will be up on Fetlife for only a day, it will be permanently available on my Patreon, and as part of The Masochism Sextbook in two months or so which will also be available in full to all my Patrons (except podcast-only subscribers), no extra charge.